Payette Lake, McCall, Idaho

This week I traveled to McCall, Idaho to spend time visiting with the faculty and staff of the McCall Outdoor Science School (MOSS).  MOSS is an immersive, residential science school for middle and high school students affiliated with the University of Idaho, and is the program that we bench-marked when we started our UA Sky School program 4 short years ago.  It has been a great visit with our colleagues and we are returning home with some great ideas to improve our program and also to begin some longer term collaborations with MOSS.

This is a beautiful part of the country-  we flew into Boise and drove north along the North Fork of the Payette River to Cascade and then up to McCall.  (Along the way, the stretch or river between Smith's Ferry and Banks is an amazing stretch of whitewater with nearly continuous class V rapids.)   The MOSS campus is situated on the shores of Lake Payette and the lake is just beginning to thaw from its winter freeze.

Yesterday morning we had a break in our meeting schedule and drove around to the south shore of the lake where the thaw is most obvious and were treated to a beautiful view of the mountains reflected in the water.  The image below represents a field of view of about 120-140 degrees.  Unfortunately, Google limits the size of images on the blog , and the picture below is about 25% of original size!  Click to enlarge!!

I took this image with my new Sony a6000 mirrorless camera and a Sigma 30mm f/2.8 lens.  This is my first outing with the camera and I am still learning how to use it.  One of the neat features is the in-camera panoramic mode, as seen above.  The camera takes several still images while one pans the camera and then they are stitched into a panoramic image in-camera.  The resulting file is a jpeg, not raw, which does limit the ability to post-process.  Yet, it is a fun and effective way to capture scenes as above.  If one wanted a higher quality panorama, one would simply take single images in raw format for processing and then stitching together using software.