Four-Wheel Drive is a Necessity!

For many of the places I love to go, a vehicle with high clearance and four-wheel drive is a necessity. This is a composite shot showing the interior of my new Ford F-150 FX4 pickup truck and the landscape near Florence Lake in the high Sierra (taken a week earlier).

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My original plan for this event was to combine photography with a mid-week camping trip with my wife. I hoped to either shoot a Native American site (Indian Grinding Rock) and describe the very minimal necessities of the first Californians, or a giant Sequoia grove (Calaveras Big Trees) with speculation on the strangely limited and discontinuous range of this famous species. But I came down with a surprisingly bad cold and the camping trip didn't happen.

Fallback plan - shoot something at home. So I photographed the truck interior, used Photoshop to cut holes through the image for the windows, and pasted it on top of an existing panorama. Voila - my new truck magically transported to the mountains. Just for fun I also made composites for others of my favorite places (redwoods, desert), anticipating where I will eventually take my new truck.

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USA-Canada / USA-California

Lat: 37° 56' 3.48" N
Long: 123° 18' 56.04" W

Elevation: 600 m

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Photographed with a Canon 5D Mark II digital SLR with a 15mm Canon fisheye lens, on a Nodal Ninja VR mount, Really Right Stuff ballhead, and Gitzo carbon-fiber tripod. Stitched with PTGui Pro 9.1.3 on a Macintosh Intel Core 2 Duo iMac, retouched and composited using Photoshop CS3.