I have put up a new gallery of panoramic photos from my trip earlier this year to Botswana (with short stays in South Africa and Zimbabwe.) There are some interesting animal and scenic shots, and also some technically difficult shots such as Victoria Falls from a helicopter. (I also have some new shots of Niagara falls from a fixed wing plane which is even harder.)

In the case of the helicopter, which is still moving as it was just a regular tour helicopter, the challenge is to shoot very fast and still not make mistakes in coverage. I took several panos but only a few turned out. Victoria Falls can really only be viewed from the air -- on the ground the viewing spots during high water season are in so much mist that it's actually raining hard all around you, and in any event you can't see the whole falls. One lesson is to try not to be greedy and get a 200m pano. Stick to 50 to 100mm at most.

On this trip I took along a 100-400mm lens, and it was my first time shooting with such a long lens routinely. I knew intellectually about the much smaller depth of field at 400mm, but in spite of this I still screwed up a number of panoramas, since I normally set focus at one fixed distance for the whole pano. Stopping down 400mm only helps a little bit. Wildlife will not sit still for you, creating extra challenges. I already showed you this elephant shot but I am also quite fond of this sunset on the Okavango delta. While this shot may not appear to have wildlife, the sun is beaming through giant spiderwebs which are the work of "social spiders" which live in nests, all building the same web. I recommend zooming in on the scene in the center. I also have some nice regular photos of this which will be up later.

I am still a bit torn about the gallery of ordinary aspect ratio photos. I could put them up on my photo site easily enough, but I've noticed photos get a lot more commentary and possibly viewing when done on Google+/Picasa. This is a sign of a disturbing trend away from the distributed web, where people and companies had their own web sites and got pagerank and subscribers, to the centralized AOL style model of one big site (be it Facebook or Google Plus) which is attractive because of its social synergies.