Signs From Earth

Earth Scene: Lake Tahoe iPhone Panorama

Lake Tahoe, Sierra Nevada Range, Nevada and California, June 23, 2014. Photo by Dennis Dimick

While flying from Portland to Los Angeles early this summer, I happened to be sitting by a window with a clear view of Lake Tahoe from the east looking west into California. Only having the camera in my iPhone 5s handy, I imagined what might I do that captures this blue jewel in a way that does dignity to the scene before me.

I held the phone to the window, not moving it for the five minutes or so that it took for the plane to fly from right to left – North to South – across the scene. As the plane moved I took a picture about every 15 seconds. 

A couple of weeks later, I assembled 20 images from the sequence into a panoramic image using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw, and the Image Merge and Perspective Correction tools in Photoshop CC. In the picture, Nevada state capital Carson City can be seen in the right foreground and Washoe Lake is in far right foreground..

It's amazing to think how far we have come since the days of film photography, and how a tiny phone combined with new software tools can now create images we could only dream of imagining a few years ago. 

Earth Signs: If Droughts Were Hurricanes Edition

Walker Lake, Nevada, historically fed by runoff from the Sierra Nevada. Photo by Dennis Dimick

My piece on drought in California and the Western United States was published Tuesday July 15 at National Geographic News. "Drought a Devastating Game-Changer." 

"If droughts were hurricanes, people might pay more attention to them. Droughts can creep up on us with their prolonged absence of rain, and their effects often are seen as not much more than cracked ground in dry lake bottoms. Devastating storms can be sudden and meteorologically exciting, and they make great television. Droughts are deliberate—a relatively slow evolution in which it can be difficult to capture the devastation in any one moment..." more here.