Well it has been warm for us today, or should I say warm for someone from Seattle. However, we have had lots of gray clouds hanging around for most of the day. It is nice when the sun breaks out from the clouds for a few minutes to give us some bright sunshine. We went to the north side of the island and found lots of great shops, beaches and forest to explore. During one of those sunbreaks, I was able to get my classic Hawaii beach shot that I wanted of a slow approaching wave. I know that I have seen this a ton but I always wanted to have one of my own.
I have become somewhat obsessive about the great patterns in the various plants. I spent a good deal of the day trying to play off the texture, patterns and bright backlighting of the plants. The radial look of this tree really caught my attention. I think that the black and white contrast really enhances the spiral effect. This is also an example of an image where you can fight the time of day and lighting or just run with it. There was no way to get a full detail shot of this tree. The exposure was just too hot and blowing out about half the sky to pure white. Rather than try to get the sky detail into the image and way underexpose the tree I went the other way. I forced the entire sky completely white. This allowed for some additional details into the palm’s trunk and made the black and white conversion all that much easier.
A great fruit stand in the back of a smoothie stand full of baskets, fruit and color. I love the red and green contrast, as well as the couple of yellow ripe bananas in among the green ones.
We ened our afternoon with an amazing walk thru the Limahuli Gardens. The gardens are absolutely amazing. What the natives Hawaiians did centuries ago to build such a place is a testament to the knowledge of people who understand that we are connected to the earth and when we find ways to work in our environment rather than above our environment, we can build very sustainable ways of living.
All images were captured on a Nikon D700 with Lexar UDMA compact flash media.