Pico Canyon

One of the perks of being an engineer at the district is one gets to go out and visit places.  This one was shot while inspecting an oil and gas production plant up in Newhall.  It takes one up on the remote hills that resemble the landscape of the old west.  [Insert Rawhide song here: Rolling, rolling, rolling ....] I was told that the area has been used in shooting the television series CSI and Lost.  The place may have been visited by the Manson Family.  Yikes.

The wildlife activity or inactivity looks deceiving.  Apparently at this time of the year there are rattle snakes, coyotes and who knows.  The whole time we were making noises with our shoes to ward off the snakes.  By the time I got back to the office my brown shoes turned ashen gray.  So was the bottom half of my jeans.  Once we saw a jack rabbit and a squirrel.  Our host said that those were good signs because they would mean that we were safe from coyotes.  Next time I'm bringing a gun.  Okay, I'm kidding on the gun part but not on the critters.

Techie Notes:  The picture was stitched from three images taken with the Fujifilm Finepix X100.  If you pretend to draw vertical lines and divide the picture into three sections and look closely.  You'll notice that there is darkening on the blue sky where the imaginary lines fall.  This is because the individual shots have vignette cause by the camera lens.  Vignette is apparent in all lenses but some are more obvious.  I tried to lighten those parts but since I was doing this just for fun I didn't spend much time on them.  Now if this was something I'll submit to a photo contest, then I might work at them more.   

This is one of the few ones I didn't do much processing. Tweak the contrast on the details of the hills and applied neutral density gradient on the sky to darken it a bit.

Hope you enjoy.