Sunday in the Park with George ... Lepp

The flowers are a composite of three handheld shots merged together.

George Lepp, the nature photographer extrordinaire, is demonstrating his panoramic technique.

At the South Coast Botanical Gardens

I'm taking a weekend workshop with the photographer George D. Lepp at the gardens. Today is the "shoot" day. Yesterday, Mr. Lepp shared his techniques on panoramas, composite panaramas (using GigaPan), HDR, and many other tips for getting an image that the eye sees. He makes amazing (in focus) composites of fields of flowers (sunflowers in Kansas, tulips in Amsterdam) by refocusing each image and overlapping 20 to 50%, or for close-ups, keeping the camera in the same place and changing the focus only for 6 to 10 images and making a composite with Helicon Focus Lite software.
I tied to do a HDR with the photo above (bracketed 1 stop each way) but it proved unnecessary (especially since I broke the 1st rule and did not use a tripod so the photos did not align just right). Mr. Lepp uses HDR for landscapes to obtain an image the eye sees with the correct exposure from the foreground to the sky. For panoramas and managing photos, he prefers Adobe Lightroom software (recommends getting it for a 30-day free download). He backs up his work on 2 external hard drives & he gets rid of the bad shots or those that he'll never use. (My husband would be very happy with that recommendation.)
To all the dads today, Happy Father's Day.