California Wildflowers

With record rainfall in the Winter of 2004-2005, California had a bumper crop of wildflowers in the Spring of 2005. Our assignment was to shoot video and stills of rolling green hills with some wildflowers for use in audio-visual therapy programs for hospitals.

After spending two days driving around the Paso Robles area, a local said he had heard that Shell Creek Road was the mother lode this year. He was right! As we understand it, Shell Creek Road has large blooms every 5 to 7 years. This panorama was shot on March 31, 2005 at 11:45 am, at the intersection of Carrisa Highway 58 and Shell Creek Road, just east of Paso Robles.

Here are some wildflower tips: 1. Getting there first thing in the morning is useless. Flowers need a couple of hours of sun to warm-up enough to want to open. 2. Late afternoon shots are also useless, since as soon as the sun STARTS to go down, they close up. 3. Even though mid-day light is crappy, that's the best time to shoot wildflowers. 4. This isn't as much a tip as an observation: Touchy little bastards...

USA-Canada / USA-California

Lat: 35° 27' 36" N
Long: 121° 21' 11" W

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: Unknown / Undeclared.

Shot with a Panoscan MKI digital panoramic camera with a Nikon 16mm full-frame fisheye lens. Post production was done with PanoPost for cropping and blending, Adobe Photoshop CS for adjustments, and finished with CubicConvertor 2.1.