Eloquent Images by Gary Hart
Insight, information, and inspiration for the inquisitive nature photographer
The Method To My Madness
Lush, Onomea Falls, Hawaii
Sony α1
Sony 16-35 GM
1 second
F/16
ISO 400
Last Saturday I did a Zoom presentation for a camera club in Texas. My topic was seeing the world the way your camera sees it, a frequently recurring theme for me, but preparing for and delivering this presentation put it in the front of my mind as I processed this image from my recent Hawaii Big Island workshop.
Most of us know the feeling of coming across a scene that moves us to photograph it. And now that we all carry around powerful, pocket-size cameras, never has it been easier to fulfill that urge. For some, it’s enough to merely snap a quick shot that saves the memory—even if you never look at that picture again (many won’t), there’s genuine comfort in the knowledge that you can revisit that memory any time you want to.
For others, professional and closet photographers alike (if you can’t help pausing to photograph something that excites you, and aren’t satisfied until that photo is just so, you might be a photographer and not even know it), it’s important to convey something of the experience of being there, or the specialness that moved you to stop and pull out your camera. But if your results matter that much, you also know the feeling of disappointment when revisiting or sharing an image of an especially beautiful scene, only to find that it somehow fails to generate the enthusiasm you felt being there.
Disappointing results usually happen when we fail to fully appreciate that the camera sees the world differently than we do, and therefore fail to take the camera’s (from smartphone to large format) unique vision into account when crafting our image. So I thought I’d share my process in creating this Onomea Falls image from my recently completed Hawaii workshop, and how I attempted to leverage my camera’s vision to get the most from the scene.
I’ve visited the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden dozens of times in the 15 or so years I’ve been photographing Hawaii’s Big Island. From our hotel in Hilo, it’s just a 20 minute drive that winds along an wonderfully lush road. How lush? When the property that was to become the garden was purchased by Dan and Pauline Lutkenhouse in 1977, they didn’t even know it had a waterfall.
For the next 7 years, Dan and one helper labored with nothing but hand tools to clear dense foliage and carve paths in the hard black basalt, toiling 7 days a week until the garden was ready to open. Of course the work wasn’t done then, and in fact managing the dense, fast growing plants remains a year round effort. Dan passed in 2007, but the love that guided his meticulous care lives on, and is clearly visible in the garden’s every square inch.
The crown jewel of HTBG is Onomea Falls. Originating on the slopes of Mauna Kea, Onomea Stream stair-steps its way through the garden, forming one of the most beautiful waterfalls on the entire island. I’ve always been drawn to the tumbling water and lush foliage of Onomea Falls, and every time I visit work hard to overcome the challenges of photographing it. Some visits I succeed more than others, often getting “nice” images (it’s hard to go wrong here), but rarely getting something that thrills me.
This year I vowed to change that.
First, I’ll say a few words about the differences between camera and human vision that applied to this scene:
- Dynamic range: The dynamic range of digital sensors improves each year, but has not yet gotten close to human vision. Often shadow detail clearly visible to our eyes is rendered black in an image exposed to spare brilliant highlights; or clearly visible highlight detail is rendered white when we expose for the shadows. The problem is especially difficult when a densely shaded scene contains splashes of brilliant sunlight. There are many ways to overcome dynamic range shortcomings, such as blending multiple images (which I never do) or neutral density filters (which I rarely use anymore, and are useless in a shaded scene with random sunlight anyway). Complete shade is the great dynamic range equalizer, and I always try to photograph flowing water like Onomea Falls in overcast or full shade to soften the light and significantly reduce the scene’s dynamic range.
- Missing dimension: Photography attempts to render a 3-dimensional world in a 2-dimensional medium. And while that’s impossible, what is possible is creating the illusion of depth by ensuring that my composition has elements that draw or guide the eye throughout. Onomea Falls’ descending stair-step layout, and abundant surrounding plants, provide ample opportunity to create the depth illusion I seek.
- Depth of field: The human eye quickly adjusts focus from near to far, allowing us to view every aspect of the world in sharp focus (virtually) at once. While the camera can often achieve front-to-back focus throughout an entire scene, there are limitations to this capability, and achieving it often requires great care. That’s especially true in a scene like this, where I have important visual elements from just a few feet away all the way to the top of the hill at the back of the scene.
- Constrained view: While the human experience of any scene is 360 degrees and multi-sensory, a still image is always constrained by a rectangular box. Using a wide angle lens will include more of the world, but also shrinks everything in the scene. There’s a lot going on at this Onomea Falls view, and deciding what to include and exclude is an important part of the creative process here.
- Motion: Like photography’s missing dimension, our world’s continuous motion is impossible to duplicate in a still photo. The best we can hope to do is convey a sense of motion with our shutter speed choice. Of course many landscape scenes are completely stationary, rendering the motion problem irrelevant, but that isn’t the case at Onomea Falls, where the water’s motion is the scene’s primary focal point.
The afternoon I brought my group to the botanical garden was a mixture of clouds and sunlight. Since it was fairly cloudy when we arrived, I actually started here and got in a few frames with nice light before the direct sunlight returned. But it wasn’t until I returned at the end of our visit, once the sun had gone behind the hill above the fall, that I got the complete shade I wanted.
But that first visit wasn’t a complete loss because it gave me the opportunity to spend quality time with the scene and identify an approach for when I returned later. First and foremost, I wanted to take advantage of all the beautiful visual elements throughout the scene. I’ve always loved the lush, verdant feel down here, and found myself especially drawn to the moss-covered rock (in hindsight, this also could be an old tree stump—I have to remember to check the next time I’m there—but for now I’m going with rock) smothered in a variety of tropical plants right on the other side of the vista’s railing.
I decided to go for a wide composition using my 16-35 f/2.8 lens, putting the foreground plants front and center while shrinking Onomea Falls enough that the plants became the scene’s focal point. As I said earlier, there’s a lot going on in this scene, so even after my general decision to feature the nearby plants and shrink the fall, I still needed to determine what else to include and eliminate.
This is where the camera’s constrained view helps. I briefly considered a horizontal frame, but opted for a vertical frame that allowed me to excise lots of superfluous foliage around the perimeter, and minimize the relatively bland pool at the base of the fall, in favor of the scene’s most important elements: the foreground plant-covered rock and cascading Onomea Falls.
I knew that the lower and closer I got to the foreground plants, the more of my frame they would occupy. Getting my camera as low as possible required significant tripod contortions. I ended up with all three tripod legs splayed fairly wide—one on the pavement, one on the low wall (upon which the short rail was mounted), and one just out of sight among the plants. This put the closest plants about less than 3 feet from my lens.
I stopped down to f/16, framed up a general idea of what I was going for, and clicked. Each time I’d stand back to evaluate the latest result on my camera’s LCD, make small adjustments to my position and composition, and click again. My position relative to the various elements in my frame is key to the illusion of depth that’s so important, so my decision to reposition was solely based on the relationships the new position created, with special care taken to avoid merging elements at different distances (to the extent that was possible).
I ultimately ended up with this position because I liked the way the lowest section of the fall was framed with two fairly prominent bunches of leaves. I chose this camera height because any lower would have merged the fall with the foreground foliage, while higher created an unnecessary empty zone between the foliage and fall. (In a perfect world that small fern frond wouldn’t jut up into the bottom of the fall, but the world is rarely perfect.)
Through this click, evaluate, refine process, I took half dozen or so “draft” frames before I was satisfied with the overall relationships. Next I zeroed in on the important micro-elements in my frame, identifying how the various elements move the eye, and checking my borders to minimize potential distractions that might invite the viewer’s eye out of the frame. For example, I took great care not to cut off either of the framing leaf groups with the frame’s border. And at the bottom of the frame, while I knew I’d be cutting off something, I chose a spot that allowed me to include some of the nicely textured moss and a couple of red ferns, without cutting of the most prominent leaves.
The longer I worked the scene, I more I became aware that just above the fall, the foliage opened up and brightened quite a bit. Rather than hinting at the world beyond my scene, I chose to put the top of my frame just below the point where the foliage thinned out, creating the illusion that this lush world might continue for miles up the mountainside.
With my composition worked out, the next piece of the puzzle was ensuring front-to-back sharpness. My focal length was around 24mm, making my hyperfocal distance at f/16 around 4 feet (I verified this on my DOF app). But the hyperfocal point is an approximation based on “acceptable” sharpness (a notoriously fickle target based on an arbitrary definition of “acceptable”). In this case, I focused on the farthest of the foreground leaves (atop the rock), which I guessed were about 5 feet away. I chose to focus beyond the hyperfocal point to ensure more sharpness at the back of the scene, and because focusing closer would have given me foreground sharpness I didn’t need.
And finally, I needed to decide on the motion effect I wanted. With the sun behind the mountain, this always inherently shady scene was especially dark. Adding to that was the fact that I needed f/16 for depth of field, so at any reasonable ISO, my choice was how much motion blur rather sharply frozen splashing water drops. At ISO 100, a multi-second exposure was no problem, but by increasing my ISO up to around 1600, in 1 stop increments, I gave myself a range of shutter speeds up to 1/4 second. All created some amount of blur, but after closely scrutinizing all my frames on my computer, I chose this one that used 1 second at ISO 400, because it retained very subtle texture in the rushing water. Much faster than 1 second created a little bit of scratchiness in the water that I didn’t like; longer than 1 second completely smoothed out the water’s texture.
I should also add that polarizing this scene was an essential component of the final result. Scenes like this are filled with reflective sheen on the water, leaves, and wet rock. Polarizing it significantly reduces that sheen, greatly enhancing the rich green.
This picture doesn’t reproduce exactly what my eyes saw, nor does it attempt to. But by staying true to what my camera saw, I was able to more clearly convey the scene’s lushness.
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Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 
This is very helpful—-going through all the thinking and adjustments. Thanks.
My pleasure, happy to help.
I always enjoy your blog, Gary. I depart for a month
Thanks for reading, Cathy. Safe travels!
I read this post with great interest because I tried (and failed) to guess how you would deal with depth of field. It seemed to me that one would get max DOF by focus stacking. (Does your camera do focus stacking?) Alternatively simply blending images in Photoshop, perhaps as few as 2, putting the “seam” horizontally across the picture about 2/3 of the way up, where it is solid leaves all the way across therefore unlikely to show the seam connecting the two exposures, would work. That would permit using a wider f stop to avoid diffraction at f 16. (Do you believe in avoiding f 16 because of diffraction?)
Finally, I wonder why are your images not looking sharp with modest zooming in on my usual viewing device, Safari on an iPod air. If I view them with the browser, does your server send me enough MB to have crystal clarity? Do I have the iPod settings wrong? I’m confident your are tack sharp and can’t understand why they are not when I view them.
Thanks for your inspiring postings!
Thanks for your kind words.
I don’t focus stack, so I just have to be careful with my hyperfocal technique. I do try to avoid f/16 unless the scene calls for it, but don’t hesitate to use it when necessary because missing focus is a bigger problem than minor diffraction.
I never share anything larger than 1200 pixels on the long side, which limits the amount of screen enlargement you can do. Larger images take longer to load, and (worse still) invite theft—many photographers won’t even share images that large. And of course most sites do additional compression to save on storage and to speed upload, which also significantly reduces quality.