I still have lots of birds and scenery (and a few other critters) left from Viera Wetlands and Merritt Island taken during my January trip to the Space Coast Birding and Nature Festival in Florida, but this Sunday morning we will return to real time and home for a 4 shot handheld panorama of the marsh, dune, and beach in late winter (taken yesterday morning). Of course the clouds are as much the subject as the beach.

This was not an easy panorama. The light was changing rapidly as the clouds moved and the variation in exposure from the marsh to the sea (the sun is just beyond the left edge of the frame) was extreme. And then the ocean is always in motion, making wave and even shore lines a problem in a pano. The four files were matched (by eye) for exposure and color temperature in PhotoShop Elements and then stitched into a pano using the PhotoMerge tool. I then took the file into Dynamic Photo HDR and tone mapped it, backing way off on the auto settings for a more natural look. Then I reimported it into Lightroom where I did some final tone matching using Graduated Filters and the Local Adjustment brush. Not perfect, but pretty satisfying. Click on the image to open it in my gallery lightbox. It will automatically display as wide as your monitor will allow.

And for the Sunday thought: I am blessed in my work to travel extensively to really great places with interesting scenery and great birds (I visit mainly birding festivals, as the Birding and Observation Product Specialist for Carl Zeiss Sports Optics, so the birds are pretty much a given). I came back from Florida with over 3000 images on my hard-drive from two cameras and close to 400 keepers uploaded to my WideEyedInWonder gallery, and I have been posting from that stock for most of a month now. And for most of that month I have been here in Kennebunk, working in my home office, and enduring the tag end of pretty blah winter. Maine, along with most of New England, got very little snow this winter, and we have had unseasonably warm temperatures. Precipitation fell, when we got any, as freezing rain…or mostly as just plain old rain. We happen to have patches of snow still on the ground (now pretty much solid white ice) right here in my neighborhood, left over from a storm in late January that seems to have been very selective in its dump, but go 2 miles in any direction and the ground is bare. So are the trees. The bushes and grasses are winter brown. Dull. Blah.

All of which is my excuse, along with the press of work, for not getting out to do any local photography. Until yesterday. And, wouldn’t you know, there were Eiders in Back Creek, and Grebes, and a couple of loons…gulls on the beach…and great clouds stretching away to the south and west. The light was our New England late winter/early spring light…nothing like the winter light of Florida…thin, so to speak, still lightly touching the ground without a lot of warmth…but with much clarity and a growing promise. The marsh and the beach and sky were beautiful. Worthy of my attention. Worthy of my admiration. Worthy of sharing.

It is so easy to just stay inside and miss it. Even yesterday I was not out long. The wind was bitter. My nose began to run, and I could feel my sinuses filling by the second. But I am very happy to have gotten out, to have seen and recorded, to have something of it to share today.

Now there is a spiritual message, to my way of thinking in all this. I am wondering this morning how much I have missed in my inward focus this last month while I lived off the stock of images and experiences from warm bright Florida. And I am not speaking of photography now, but of the heart and soul. My camera is often the tool God has given me to turn me outward…to open the eyes of my heart, to wake me to what the spirit is doing in me, in the world around me, and in those around me. I can’t afford, in the spirit, to live off my stock of images of anywhere, anytime. I need to keep current. I need to keep my focus outward.

It would have been a shame, in so many ways, to have missed what was happening down on the marsh and dune and beach, right here at home, yesterday.