With the landscape looking like it does, I decided to concentrate on the birds this morning. I struck out, the birds just wouldn’t settle on the perch, nothing I can do about it. But to my great surprise, the squirrel turned up. I mean, this is me standing in full view without any camouflage, and still the squirrel came down to eat. Must’ve been really hungry! It even allowed me to change the camera orientation from horizontal to vertical and shift my position a little bit, never happened before. But then I started moving more and more, checking the limits of the squirrel’s tolerance, and it finally had enough and fled.

While I was waiting for the birds, I looked behind me to check the sun’s position. I saw that the distant hills were layered nicely in the morning light, so I turned the camera around and did some landscape photography with the 300mm lens, and wished that it would been even longer so I could’ve gotten a tight horizontal composition on the hill.

I liked the way the sky changed colour from orange to blue, so I went for a vertical stitch. When it was time to put the pictures together, I just couldn’t make the transition from orange to blue work properly (not an issue with the stitch itself, but just the way the natural gradient came out) so in the end I sampled both the blue and orange colours and used an artificial gradient instead. Since the colour is an exact match, almost the only difference between the original sky and the fake one is that the muddy transition part in the original is now clean. Would you miss the muddy transition if you didn’t know it was removed?