Spring Wildflowers - Part V

After visiting the Carrizo Plain, we headed over to Death Valley National Park where they were reporting a better than average wildflower bloom.

The weather was overcast and threatening when we arrived in Furnace Creek.  The Furnace Creek Inn appeared to be the "treasure" at the end of the rainbow.

This little plant is found only in Death Valley, only in certain areas, and only in wet years.
Goldcarpet

(Gilmania luteola)

Gravel Ghost or Parachute Plant

(Atrichoseris platyphylla)

Desert Gold or Desert Sunflower

(Geraea canescens)

Lots of Desert Gold at the southern end of the park.

Desert Sand Verbena

(Abronia villosa)

Desert Five-Spot

(Eremalche rotundifolia)

Mix of Desert Gold and Desert Sand Verbena.

Spring Wildflowers - Part IV

Another place that is known for spring wildflowers is the Carrizo Plain National Monument in California.  After visiting Cottonwood Canyon, we drove into the Carrizo Plains and camped for two nights.

Large areas of the floor of the valley were veritable "seas" of flowers.

There are relics of past farming and ranching left behind.

To really see everything, it helps to get off the main roads and explore the dirt back roads.

The Temblor Range viewed from Hurricane Road looked like a gigantic artist's palette.

Spring Wildflowers - Part III

Cottonwood Canyon off of California Highway 166 in the Cuyama Valley is known for often having good spring wildflowers displays.  This spring Cottonwood canyon put on an especially great display.  We were able to stop and visit on March 28th.

Here is a stitched panorama from Cottonwood Canyon.

(warning: fairly large!)

This hillside was just covered in large patches of different flowers.

This path was very inviting.

Spring Wildflowers - Part II

On Friday March 26th, we traveled with a small group back up to Figueroa Mountain.  Below are a few of the images taken during that visit.

Lupine with a few Poppies in the background

Blue Dicks or Wild Hyacinth

(Dichelostemma capitatum)

California Four O'clock or Wishbone Bush

(Mirabilis californica)

The mountains were incredibly  green this spring.

Globe Gilia

(Gilia capitata)

Chocolate Lily

(Fritillaria biflora)

California Poppy

(Eschscholzia californica)

Another Lupine.

Our favorite hillside near the Catway Road turnoff was again beautifully covered with a mass of Poppies and Lupines.

More Lupines.

More  California Poppies.

Yet another Lupine.

Blue Eyed Grass

(Sisyrinchium bellum)

 

Vail Lake Resort

Our Lazy Daze motor home group held our March gathering this year at the Vail Lake Resort a few miles east of Temecula, California.  Here are a few images taken at that time.

This Great Horned Owl didn't seem to mind being out in the open, sitting in the morning sun.  It was definitely awake, turning its head to watch as people and other birds moved about.

There were lots of Acorn Woodpeckers in the trees.

Here is the handiwork of the woodpeckers.  It almost looks like it was sprayed by an acorn machine-gun!

There was a nice collection of wildflowers in the area, including this patch of Baby Blue Eyes.

(Nemophila menziesii)

This little Oak Titmouse kept trying to fly through the closed window of one of the motor homes.

This rare miniature "panther" (felis dunham) was spotted showing interesting behavior in the morning sun.

Spring Wildflowers - Part I

We've been off traveling in our RV for much of the past month.  Most of that traveling was to see some of the spring wildflowers brought by this El Niño winter.  I now have a backlog of images taken over this period.  I plan to make several posts to this blog over the next several days, each with a number of these images.

On March 14th, we took an early scouting trip to a favorite  local wildflower area, Figueroa Mountain.  Figueroa Mountain is well known for its yearly wildflower displays.  Even though we knew it was early in the local mountains, we did find several species already blooming.

Johnny Jump Up, California Golden Violet or Yellow Pansy

(Viola pedunculata)

California Poppy

(Eschscholzia californica)

 

Padre's Shootingstar

(Dodecatheon clevelandii)

Yellow Pincushion

(Chaenactis glabriuscula) 

Wild Onion

(Allium fimbriatum) 

Blue Dicks or Wild Hyacynth

(Dichelostemma capitatum)

Many of the hillsides had nice patches of Lupines,

and many of the oaks were putting out new leaves.

 

Focus Stacking

One of the problems doing macro or close-up photography with a DSLR is a very shallow Depth-of-Field (DOF).  Depth-of-Field is the range of distances from the camera that the image has an acceptable sharpness of focus.  One way to increase the DOF is to close the aperture of the lens (stop down) significantly.  There are a few problems with small apertures though.  First, all lenses have a minimum aperture that they can be set to.  Second, very small apertures require significantly longer exposure times.  Third, very small apertures can suffer from a loss of sharpness because of a property of light called diffraction.

With digital images and computer processing, there is now another option called "Focus Stacking".  This involves taking a series of images, with the camera focused at different distances from the camera.  Each image will then contain a version of the scene, with a part at a different depth in sharp focus.  These images are then submitted to a computer program that isolates the part of each image that is in sharp focus and then merges these together into a single image which is all (or mostly) in sharp focus.  There are a number of such programs available, from free to commercially sold.

Here is a small experiment that I did with a free program called CombineZP.

First I took a series of images at different focus depths.  Below are five images out of that series.

These files I used in the program CombineZP, which generated this resulting file.

 

Finally, I took the above image into Photoshop and cleaned up the background to yield this final image.