Lake Hennessey

Napa Valley is world famous for its wines & cuisine - but there is another side to Napa Valley that most visitors (and many locals) do not experience.

One such place...

Lake Hennessey, approximately 40 miles north of San Francisco (as the eagle flies), is a reservoir for the city of Napa. The lake is on the "Pacific Flyway" and offers a seasonal sanctuary for a large number of bird species: Coot, Grebe, Canadian Geese, Bald Eagle, Golden Eagle, Osprey, Great Blue Heron, White Egret... along with a plethora of songbirds & hawks.

It is also a little-visited sanctuary for humans (on a busy day you might see 6 people); a serene environment where the slower rhythms of our planet are manifest. I have been visiting the knoll, featured in the QTVR above, several times each season for almost 25 years (it is a short journey from my home). In Springtime these hillsides are strewn with a panoply of wildflowers, an invitation to a beautiful afternoon idyll or kef, whose melody lingers long after you have left the hilltop.

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On the Shoot - December 18th: Winter closing in fast (lol) - Shade temp: 66 degrees F (19C approx) under electric blue skies. What an exquisite day!

FYI: The "standard" pano has hotspots that provide directional info only ("Looking North", etc.), they do not link to anything.The fullscreen version has in addition (2) interactive hotspots linked to still images, and a wired sprite that displays a location map (the VR will still drag-rotate when this map is visible). These still images & map will begin pixelating at display sizes in excess of the authored dimensions of the pano (1024 x 600 pixels).

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In gratitude to Don, Landis, & Markus for putting all this together...great work!

Thank you Elizabeth for your thoughtful input.

And thanks to all contributors to this December 2004 WWP. What a different world this would be if everyone on our planet engaged in this kind of creativity instead of pointless hate & destruction. 5000 years of "civilization" & we still seem to be stuck in the 1st grade.

USA-Canada / USA-California

Lat: 38° 30' 0" N
Long: 123° 23' 0" W

Elevation: 350 feet

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: Unknown / Undeclared.

Nikon D70 w/10.5mm lens. Kaidan QP IV panohead. Shooting Schedule: 6-around, 1 up, 2 down.

Macintosh OS X 10.3.7 workflow...

Pre-stitch work: PhotoShop CS w/Lensfix & defishing w/Panotools & Optipix "Refocus" plug-in. Stitched with Stitcher 4.0.2. Pano conversions done with CubicConverter 2.0. "Standard" pano: Hotspots laid in with CubicConnector 2.0. "Full Screen" Pano: Hotspot creation & interactive wiring w/LiveStage Pro 4.5 (QuickTime based authoring).

Napa Valley "location map" (in full-screen version) is based on downloaded digital 15' .DEM files from the USGS Web site (your tax dollars at work); rendered in Bryce 4.0; hand-tinted in PhotoShop.

Cigar during shoot: Hoya de Monterrey "Excaliber" - delicious.