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Looking North
15 August 2023
We roused ourselves for a late afternoon walk yesterday. It's been hard to get a walk in this year. Most of them have been through big box stores or malls looking for things that used to be for sale there.
Looking North. Four stitched images captured at 95mm (142.5mm equivalent), f11, 1/250 second and ISO 200. Processed in Photoshop and Camera Raw.
One such thing was a replacement locking valve or chuck for an air pump. We walked everywhere looking for that. Hardware store, big box store, auto supply store, Target. We gave up and had it delivered next day from Amazon.
We got the bright idea of pumping air into our bike tires. We haven't been back in the saddle since the pandemic primarily because we don't want to ride up the hills here wearing a mask. We need unfiltered air flow for that.
So in the years since the bike has been gathering dust, the air in its tires has migrated to Mars. Which horrified us into action. Except the plastic chuck on the air pump broke. And so we were on a crusade to replace it with a metal one.
Which we did yesterday morning in about five minutes. Five minutes after that we had air in our tires again. But we didn't have time to take the bike out.
And then the day got away from us until late in the afternoon when we packed the Nikon D300 and our repaired 18-200 Nikkor and took a walk.
It was sunny and warm for a change. The sort of weather than persuades you to let sleeping dogs lie. And cameras sit in their bags.
But when we decided to climb a short hill for the view north over the Miraloma reservoir, our plans changed.
There on the horizon off toward the west was a single tree. We rather admired it. How had it managed to stay upright through all the atmospheric torrents of the past winter?
And off toward the right, there was Tamalpais unobscured by the intervening landscape.
That would make an interesting panorama, we thought.
So we lined up four handheld shots. We didn't traverse an obtuse enough angle to bother fixing the exposure beyond picking the aperture.
Back at the bunker, we made quick work of it in Photoshop, merging the four images in Photomerge and opening the DNG in Camera Raw to bring out the sky and salvage detail in the shadows.
We probably wouldn't have noticed it if we were head down, pumping up the hill on the bike, of course.