This is a two shot panorama from the viewing platform on Branch Brook at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Wells Maine. Around the second bend you see in the middle distance there Branch Brook and the Merriland River join to form the Little River for its short winding run to the sea. The tide is full in, so Branch Brook does not look very brook-like.

This is actually two in-camera HDR images stitched together in PhotoShop Elements’ PhotoMerge tool, and then final processed in Lightroom. I used a handy post on the platform and simply rotated the camera between images. I am increasingly pleased with the ease and the quality of the Canon SX50HS’s in-camera HDR. It is not obvious at all, yet produces a very nice extended range image. The clouds, in particular are very natural, and yet the shadows are open and the greens of the evergreens are indeed green, not black. It gives me just enough extra to work with in Lightroom to produce some of the most natural images I have ever done.

For the full panoramic effect you really need to click on the image and view it full screen in the lightbox.

Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill.  Two 24mm equivalent field of view exposures. f4 @ 1/500th @ ISO 80.

And for the Sunday Thought. It is, sometimes, about taking the wide view. I love the small intricate details of life in this world, and if you flip back through my posts, you will see that I spend a lot of time celebrating them. I also love the big wide angle vista, which landscape under a dramatic sky. The last 3 cameras I have owned have had zooms that reach 24mm equivalent, and I doubt I will ever buy another camera that is limited to 28mm, or (shudder) 35mm at the wide end (yet, of course, I used to think of both 35mm and 28mm as wide angle.) And beginning about 2 years ago I have taken the occasional Panorama…where more than one image is stitched to create a view that stretches our perception of the reality around us…though oddly it does so by presenting a swath that more closely corresponds to our natural naked-eye view of the world. Part of my move to Panorama has undoubtedly been facilitated by the availability of software, in-camera, and in post processing, that makes it easy to stitch images together. But part of it has been a new appreciation for the wide view, even though those intricate details I love are diminished…submerged in the stretch of imagery across full width of my computer screen. I have come to appreciate the sweep of the landscape that overloads my senses and touches a bit of a different kind of awe in me.

And I am thinking of this in the context of the coming election. For me, elections are a very spiritual matter, and I really want to be sure that my spiritual self is fully engaged in my choices. In fact, I want to make sure that any decision I make that has the kind of consequences a national election has is made in the spirit and not in the flesh. And I find that what is required, by my spirit, is the panoramic view.

Sometimes it seems the election is all about the intricate detail of issues…with the hot issues…those that raise the most emotional heat…being the focus of all the attention. We are tempted, in fact we are encouraged by ad after ad and article after article and news story after news story, to make our decision based on the candidate’s position on those issues…on this issue or that issue…often on a single issue among all the others…one issue alone.

Among my people, my fellow Christians, this approach is particularly prevalent…and there are issues which have deep, undeniable and unavoidable, spiritual ramifications. Of course those issues and the candidate’s position on them are important…but they are not what my spirit craves when facing a decision of this magnitude. I find myself pulling back for the wide…the panoramic…view, where all such intricate detail is submerged in the sweep of the candidate’s life…what I can see or sense of the candidate’s spirit. I feel much more comfortable deciding based on who I perceive a the person behind the politics to be (difficult as that is to determine sometimes) than I do based on what the person thinks and promises about the hot issues.

Because I will be traveling to Texas next Tuesday, I have, in fact, already cast my vote. I am not going to tell you who I voted for (and certainly I am not going to tell you who you should vote for). But I will tell you that I voted on the wider view…I voted on the panorama of the person…I voted on what I could sense of the sweep of the spirit behind the politics.

Sometimes you have to take the wider view.