Botanical gardens are my favourite. This is Los Angeles too! I find it hard to imagine there’s anything beyond DownTown Los Angeles but there is. LA is HUGE. With mountains, beaches, tall buildings, too many people and also very few people. Art and history and architecture and botanical gardens.
I spent a day at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens and the Desert Garden was my favourite part. The space opens for the public at 10 a.m. and closes at 5 p.m. If you are local, you can also buy a membership, which allows you to skip queues etc. If you are a visitor like me, you should buy a ticket online because the online ticket counter has a separate queue. I stood in that queue and purchased a ticket online. The other queue was longer.
There are more than a few places to eat and drink, so you won’t go hungry. For the Red Car Cafe, you don’t even need to buy a ticket. You can just get an Uber and sit in the courtyard all day.
Obviously, I was not able to see everything at the location. Once I’d done a cursory walk around, I decided that I wanted to be at the Desert Garden when the sun was about to set. This image was made around sunset time, which was approximately 1650 hours on that day.
ABOUT THIS IMAGE
This is a 150 frame panorama. Which means that I photographed 150 RAW .NEF files on my Nikon D810 using the 85mm f1.4 lens. Then put a low resolution version together in Adobe Photoshop. The enhanced depth of field effect and the large size of the image mean that one could compare it to a traditional large format photograph.
I then painted over some parts of the image in Adobe Fresco for iPad. I’ve always wanted to be able to do this without having to load up Photoshop on my laptop and then drag out the Wacom Intuos tablet and its pen and then do it. Doing it on the iPad is so much easier and lighter and less time consuming. However, if I do end up wanting to produce a print of this images, I will be able to accomplish that task, up to my satisfaction, only on the laptop.
The image has been shared on all my social media channels but the blog, right here, is the best place to see large format images. Ideally, seeing a print of this in-person, would be perfect, but that takes a lot more time and investment. The blog is the best substitute till there’s an exhibit.
For more of my experiences and photographs from Los Angeles, see the #EyesForLA tag on this blog.
