Eloquent Images by Gary Hart
Insight, information, and inspiration for the inquisitive nature photographer
Surf’s Up
Posted on October 9, 2022
Surf’s Up, Puna Coast, Hawaii
Sony 𝛂1
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
15 seconds
F/18
ISO 50
To prove that Hawaii Big Island photography isn’t all just magma, Milky Way, and macro, I’m sharing this image from last month’s workshop on my favorite Hawaiian island. With all due respect to Big Sur, the combination of shimmering tide pools and rugged black basalt hammered by violent surf makes Hawaii’s Puna Coast the most beautiful coastline I’ve ever seen. What especially thrills me here is the creative opportunities provided by the ocean’s motion on and around the rocks.
Of the many differences between our world and our camera’s world, few are more obvious than motion. Image stabilization or (better yet) a tripod will reduce or eliminate photographer-induced motion (camera shake), but photographers often make unnecessary compromises to stop motion in their scenes, sacrificing depth of field with a too large aperture, or introducing noise with a high ISO that shortens the shutter speed enough to freeze motion in the scene.
Understanding that it’s impossible in a static photo to duplicate the human experience of motion actually opens creative opportunities. Because a camera records every instant throughout the duration of an image’s capture, photographers who can control their exposure variables have the power to reveal motion in ways that are both visually appealing and completely different from the human experience. Whether it’s a lightning bolt frozen in place, stars streaked into parallel arcs by Earth’s rotation, a vortex of spinning autumn leaves, or violent surf blurred to silky white, your ability to convey the world’s motion with your images is an important skill that’s limited only by your imagination and ability to manage your exposures.
I’ve had a blast freezing lightning bolts with fast shutter speeds, not just for the undeniable thrill of the chase, but also for the opportunity to scrutinize the intricate detail of these explosive, ephemeral phenomena. But on the other end of the motion continuum are long exposures that reveal nature’s movement patterns—movement that’s either too slow for our eyes to register (such as stars or clouds), or too complex to mentally organize into something coherent (like surf).
Silky water images take a lot of flak for being overused and unnatural, but there really are only two ways to capture moving water in a still photo: frozen in place, or blurred. Each has its place, but because the world unfolds to humans like a seamless movie of continuous instants, while a camera accumulates light throughout its exposure to conflate those instants into a single frame, neither is “natural” from the human perspective.
Fortunately, your options for expressing water motion in a still frame aren’t truly binary (frozen or blurred)—they’re a continuum of choices ranging from discrete airborne droplets to blur completely devoid of detail. And there’s a big difference between slight blur that expresses a wave’s movement while retaining its overall size and shape, and extreme blur that purees every detail into a homogenized soup.
For this image from last month’s Hawaii Big Island photo workshop, I wanted to convey both the intensity and the extent of the pounding surf. Not only were the waves exploding on the young basalt, many were surging far onshore.
It was it still quite dark when I pulled my group up to this sunrise spot. Dark isn’t a problem, but the pounding rain was. So we waited in the cars until the rain slowed to something more manageable and the sky had brightened to a dull gray. I gave my group a brief orientation on the location and set them free. Since this was toward the end of the workshop, everyone scattered pretty quickly in search of their own inspiration, and I was left to my own devices.
Along with a couple of others in the group, I made my way down the shoreline a bit, carefully picking my way over the slick volcanic rocks. Stopping occasionally to survey the options, I ended up playing with several compositions before landing on this one. I especially liked the way the large waves climbed the rocks here, then followed a curved channel to a large pool at my feet. The biggest waves replenished the pool, leaving swirling patches of foam in their wake and creating motion that was ideal for a long exposure.
Using my Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM lens on my Sony 𝛂1 camera, I set up my composition so the channel moved across the scene’s left foreground—at 16mm, I found I could fill the rest of my frame with the wave action lining the receding coastline. I minimized the homogenous gray sky to maximize the far more interesting rocks and wave action below. The final compositional consideration was finding the left/right position that avoided any white surf or spray from leaking out of the frame.
After a little trial and error, I found the composition that worked. But where surf is involved, framing is only half of the composition equation, because each wave completely alters the scene. With help from my Breakthrough 6-stop Dark Polarizer, I tried shutter speeds up to 15 seconds, timing the start of each exposure for different points in the wave. I ended up with 16 versions of this composition that ranged from a completely still foreground pool, to the pool overflowing with frothing white. I chose this image because the motion was in the middle of that range, with foam covering most of the pool, but not so much that it lost all definition.
Though I was set up on a rock ledge a couple of feet above the pool, the largest wave actually reached my elevated perch. After this year’s experience in Iceland, I was extremely careful not to take my eye off the ocean, so I saw this big wave coming all the way. I was actually in the middle of an exposure, but seeing that the wave would lose its power by the time it reached me (fingers crossed), and since I was wearing shorts and sandals, I just held my ground and let it sweep over the rocks and wash up around my ankles. Quite refreshing, actually.
Playing With Motion
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Intimate Beauty
Posted on October 2, 2022
Raindrops, Indian Rhododendron, Lava Tree State Park, Hawaii
Sony α1
Sony 100-400 GM
ISO 400
f/5.6
1/100 second
One of my favorite things about Hawaii’s Big Island is the diversity of the photo opportunities—not just its variety of beautiful subjects, but also the opportunities to apply many different types of nature photography. Between Kilauea, the Milky Way, black sand beaches, rugged coastline, numerous waterfalls, and an entire nursery-worth of exotic flowers, I have no problem employing every lens in my bag on subjects near and far.
For example, while I can’t be much farther from my subject than I was for the Milky Way image in my last post, I can’t be much closer to my subject than I was to this raindrop laden flower in Lava Tree State Park near the Puna Coast. Ironically, to photograph the distant Milky Way, I used an extreme wide lens (Sony 14mm f/1.8 GM) that shrinks everything even more, while this pink Indian rhododendron, though only a few feet away, I photographed using my Sony 100-400 GM lens at 400mm, to get even closer.
Lava Tree State Park is a lush, peaceful 1/2 mile loop liberally decorated with a variety of exotic subjects. Though not necessarily spectacular, the trail’s colorful flowers, dense foliage, and ghostlike lava-encrusted trees, make it a workshop favorite. Better still, my groups are often the only people there.
Lava Tree’s abundant greenery sprinkled with vivid blooms create intimate scenes that I especially love photographing in Hawaii’s (frequent) overcast and rain. This year’s visit came on a very wet morning that had already caused my workshop group to sit in the cars for 30 minutes at our sunrise location, waiting for a downpour to ease (it did).
Lava Tree was the morning’s second stop, and it was obvious the rain that had delayed our sunrise shoot had only recently ended here. Rather than guide the group to a specific spot, I gave an orientation summarizing what to expect and offering suggestions for how to approach it, then set them free to wander (the best way to photograph here). Giving everyone a head-start, I slowly made my way along the trail, checking on each person as I encountered them. At each stop I found every exposed surface festooned with sparkling jewels of rain, creating a seemingly infinite number of compositions.
The pink flower (that I now believe to be a malabar melastome, also known as Indian rhododendron—correct me if I’m wrong) in this image caught my attention for the the way it stood out from its verdant surroundings. When I paused to look closer, I found that positioning myself just right let me frame the flower with a V of delicate fern fronds.
Working with my Sony α1, I went strait to my 100-400 GM and added a 15mm extension tube. Being able to zoom tight and focus close allowed me to eliminate nearby distractions, either banishing them to the world outside my frame, or blurring them until they softened into the background.
For me the world looks a lot different in a telephoto close-up, particularly using when extension tubes shrink my focus distance even more. Unlike larger landscapes, I often don’t have a clear idea of what my composition will look like until I actually see these close scenes in my viewfinder. Every image becomes a process of capture, refine, capture, repeat until I’m satisfied (or give up)—an approach that’s especially important in close-focus photography, when even the slightest shift of composition, focal length, or focus can completely change an image.
It took a handful of frames to land on this composition, but when I did, I knew I’d found something worth working on. Needing to keep track of my group, I didn’t spend as much time at this spot as I ordinarily would have, but I moved on pretty happy with what I had.
One thing I did try before leaving was a horizontal composition, but I didn’t like the way making the composition tight enough to eliminate background distractions (bright spots and dead ferns), also cut off the top of the framing ferns’ graceful arc—a dealbreaker.
Fortunately, just one pink flower in the background saved the day for my vertical composition. Without it, the top half of my frame would have been too empty. By simply including that little splash of color, even though the flower is very soft, was enough balance the frame.
The lesson of this image (and the gallery below, I should add), is that beauty is everywhere if we slow down and take the time to see it. As much as I like this little scene (I do), on this short walk I no doubt walked right past thousands of others that were just as beautiful. Next time…
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Intimate Beauty
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Near and Far, Now and Then
Posted on September 25, 2022
Glow, Milky Way Above Kilauea, HawaiiSony a7SIII
Sony 14mm f/1.8 GM
ISO 6400
f/1.8
15 seconds
So what’s happening here? (I thought you’d never ask.)
The orange glow at the bottom of this frame is light from 1,800° F lava bubbling in Halemaʻumaʻu Crater atop Hawaii’s Kilauea, the world’s most active volcano. It’s also a beautiful example of the final act of our planet’s auto-recycling process.
Propelled by the mantle’s inexorable convection engine, Earth’s tectonic plates endlessly jostle about, sometimes sliding past each other, often colliding. When the lighter of the colliding plates is pushed upward, mountains form. While this is happening, the denser plate is forced downward, beneath the uplifting plate, a process called subduction. As the downward force persists, the subjected crust continues downward into the mantle, where intense heat melts the rock until it’s absorbed into the mantle.
Around the globe subduction is constantly, albeit very slowly (on the human scale), adding new material to the mantle. To make room for this new material, magma somewhere else is forced out at weak points in Earth’s crust and volcanoes are born. Sometimes these volcanoes push up above the land in front of the subducting plate—that’s what’s happening in the Cascade Range of the the Pacific Northwest.
A hot spot can also form in the middle of a tectonic plate. For the last 40 million years the Pacific Plate has drifted slowly northwest above a hot spot, leaving a string of 80 or so volcanoes in its wake. Most of these have since eroded away, or never made it to the surface at all. The Hawaiian Islands as the youngest in this island chain, haven’t had time to erode into their eventual oblivion. The Big Island of Hawaii is the youngest of the islands, and the only one still volcanically active, though it’s believed that Maui isn’t completely finished.
Another island, Kamaehuakanaloa Seamount, is building up south of Hawaii and should make its appearance sometime in the next 100,000 years (could be much sooner). But until that happens, we get to enjoy Kilauea—and eventually (inevitably) Mauna Loa (last eruption, 1984), Hualalai (last eruption, 1801), and maybe even Kohala (last eruption, 120,000 years ago) and Mauna Kea (last eruption 4 million years ago) could come back to life.
The vertical white band above the crater represents world building on an entirely different scale. You no doubt recognize it as light cast by billions of stars at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. So dense and distant are the stars in the Milky Way’s core, their individual points are lost to the surrounding glow. The dark patches partially obscuring the Milky Way core’s glow are large swaths of interstellar gas and dust, the leftovers of stellar explosions—and the stuff of future stars. Completing the scene are pinpoint stars in our own neighborhood of the Milky Way, stars close enough that we see them as discrete points of light that humans imagine into mythical shapes: the constellations.
The Milky Way galaxy is home to every single star we see when we look up at night, and 300 billion (-ish) more we can’t see—that’s nearly 50 stars for every man, woman, and child on Earth in our galaxy alone. And recent estimates put the total number of galaxies in the Universe at 2 trillion—a number too large to comprehend.
Our Sun, the central cog in the Solar System, is an insignificant outpost in the Milky Way suburbs. It resides in a spiral arm, a little more than halfway between the urban congestion at the galaxy’s core and the empty wilderness of open space.
Everything we see is made possible by light—light created by the object itself (like the stars and lava), or created elsewhere and reflected (like the planets, or Halemaʻumaʻu’s walls). Light travels incredibly fast, fast enough that it can span even the two most distant points on Earth faster than humans can perceive, fast enough that we consider its arrival from any terrestrial origin instantaneous. But distances in space are so great that we don’t measure them in terrestrial units of distance like miles or kilometers. Instead, we measure interstellar distance by the time it takes a photon of light to travel between two objects: one light-year is the distance light travels in one year—nearly 5.9 trillion miles.
The ramifications of cosmic distances are mind-bending. While the caldera’s proximity makes its glow about as “right now” as anything in our Universe can be—for all intents and purposes, the caldera and its viewers are sharing the same instant in time. On the other hand, the light from the stars above the caldera is tens, hundreds, or thousands of years old—it’s new to me, but to the stars it’s old history.
Imagine Proxima d, a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, a mere four light-years distant and the star closest to our solar system. If we had a telescope with enough resolving power to see all the way down to Proxima d’s surface, we’d be watching what was happening there four years ago. Likewise, if someone on Proxima d today (2022) were peering at us, they’d be viewing a pre-Covid world and learn that Dunkin’ Donuts was dropping “Donuts” from their name (how did I miss that?). Halemaʻumaʻu Crater, which paused its activity in August 2018, would be black. (Anything you regret doing in the last 4 years? Take heart in the knowledge that everywhere in the Universe outside our Solar System, it hasn’t happened yet.)
So what’s the point of all this mind bending? Perspective, I guess. To me, the best landscape images don’t just tip the “that’s beautiful” scale, they also activate deeper insights into our relationship with the natural world. And few things do that better for me than combining, in one frame, light that’s 25,000 years old with light caused by the formation of Earth’s newest rock.
About this image
Glow, Milky Way Above Kilauea, Hawaii
In 2018, after years of reliable activity, Halemaʻumaʻu Crater went out in a blaze of glory. This renewed vigor included fountaining lava, daily earthquakes, and the complete collapse of the crater as I’d known it.
Even more impactful, lava draining from the summit flowed into the Pacific to create nearly 900 acres of brand new land, on the way overrunning nearly 14 square miles of land and destroying more than 500 homes. The spectacle ended in August, one month before that year’s Big Island workshop.
Kilauea’s current eruption started in September 2021, just two weeks after that year’s workshop ended. Between sporadic eruptions and Covid, I haven’t been able to enjoy one of my favorite sights, the Milky Way above an active Kilauea, since 2017. Needless to say, in the weeks leading up to this year’s trip I kept my fingers crossed that Kilauea would keep going. It didn’t disappoint.
Given the caldera’s collapse and the new eruption, I knew things on Kilauea were completely different from any previous visit. So on my first evening back on the Big Island (I always fly in 3 days before the workshop to check all my locations), I made the 40 minute drive up from Hilo to get my eyes on it.
At the vista that once housed the now closed Jagger Volcano Museum, and that used to be the primary place to view the eruption, I started chatting with a photographer who was set up with a long telephoto, waiting for the full moon to rise. It turned out that she volunteers at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and does a lot of photography for the park. She very generously provided me with great information that saved me a lot of scouting time, including the best places to view the new eruption, and how to avoid the crowds I’d heard so much about.
Based on her input, after sunset I parked at the Kilauea Visitor Center and took a 1/2 mile walk along the Crater Rim Trail to the point where my new friend had promised the lava would be visible. I chose this spot over the closer view that most people seemed to prefer for a couple of reasons: fewer people (and easier parking), it would be an easier walk for my group (you can only go as far, or as fast, as the slowest person), and (especially) because I thought it would align better with the Milky Way.
To say that I was thrilled with the new view would be an understatement. Though clouds obscured the Milky Way that evening, I was pretty confident the alignment would be fine—not the perfect alignment I got from the spot I’d always used before, but definitely close enough that it would be no problem getting the eruption and Milky Way in the same frame.
The thing that excited me most was that I could actually see the lava. In my 12 years visiting Kilauea, I’ve only been able to see lava at the summit once (check the gallery below)—in the other visits we could clearly see the lava’s beautiful orange glow, but the lava lake was too low to be visible from the rim. But now not only was the lava visible, the perspective was close enough to actually see it bubbling and splattering on the lake’s surface. I hadn’t brought my camera, but I took a quick snap with my iPhone, then walked back to the car in the dark, pretty stoked by what I’d be able to share with my group.
I returned to the volcano the next night to check out more locations, especially interested in my old viewing spot. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could still see the glow at least as well as I could with the earlier eruption, and that it still aligned perfectly with the Milky Way.
I took my workshop group up to Kilauea on our second night—since it’s a real highlight, I like to do the volcano early in the workshop so we can come back if clouds shut us out. After a few other stops waiting for darkness, we started the short (and easy) hike out to the new lava viewing sight shortly after sunset.
Fog hovering over the caldera obscured the sky at the vista, but no one cared because for most (all?), it was the first time they’d seen lava. Without stars, this was a total telephoto shot—since everyone in the group was shooting mirrorless, we could all magnify our viewfinder and get an up-close, live look at the bubbling lava. It appeared to be bursting from a vent near the caldera wall, like a massive waterfall springing from a mountainside. In addition to the constant rolling and popping on the lake’s surface, every minute or so we could see a much bigger explosion that sent lava careening about the crater—pretty cool for all of us.
I spent most of my time working with people in the group and didn’t photograph too much. Eventually I did manage a few telephoto frames and was pretty happy with how things were going in general—not so much for my images, but mostly because everyone seemed as excited as I’d hoped they’d be.
About the time I was thinking of heading over to my other spot, the fog suddenly thinned and the Milky Way appeared. Everyone immediately switched to wide angle lenses and started working on completely different images. For the next 20 minutes or so we alternated between clicking and waiting as the fog came and went. Again I spent much of that time working with my group, but I managed to get in a few Milky Way frames, including this one.
I’ve got my Milky Way exposure down, and focus for this image was actually easier than most Milky Way scenes because of the brightness in the caldera. Since the Milky Way requires an exposure too long to freeze most motion, all detail in the lava was lost, but I still think it’s pretty cool to know what that glow really is. (Full disclosure: I used Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill tool to fill in a tiny blown-out white patch where the hottest lava was too bright for my night exposure.) The biggest problem I had to deal with is the guy standing next to me (not in my group), who insisted on using a red light (great for telescope or naked eye view, but absolutely the worst light source for night photography). So I had to time my clicks for the times he turned it off, then hope he kept if off until my exposure complete.
Eventually the clouds thickened and showed no sign of leaving. Since everyone was pretty happy with what they had, we packed up and headed back. But it turns out we weren’t done, because by the time we made it backto the cars, the stars were back out—so I took everyone over to my other view. There was no fog at this spot and the Milky Way remained out the entire time we were there. We had another great shoot, despite a crazy wind that hadn’t bothered us at all at our first spot. But that’s a story for another day…
Near and Far
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Paradise Found (Again)
Posted on September 18, 2022
Lily Reflection, Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden, Hawaii
Sony a7RIV
Sony 100-400 GM
ISO 400
f/5.6
1/15 second
On Friday morning I said goodbye to Hawaii until next year. Leaving Hawaii, I always make sure to reserve a seat on the left side of the plane so I can plaster my eyes to the glass on takeoff for a farewell look as we parallel the shoreline. There’s Onomea Bay and the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden, Akaka Fall, Umauma Falls, Laupahoehoe Point….
It’s pretty cool, the special connection I feel to these places I only visit once a year. In Hilo, every time I pull my rental car out of the airport and point it toward the Hilo Hawaiian Hotel that will be my home for the next week, it feels like I’m coming home to a place I left just yesterday.
From the Milky Way, to magma, to macro, the Big Island may have the widest variety of quality photography of any place I visit. Throw in rugged black sand beaches, exploding surf, frequent rainbows, and temperatures warm enough to photograph sunrise in flip-flops and shorts, and it’s easy to fantasize about selling my house and moving here fulltime.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of this year’s images. In fact, I was so busy with the workshop that I didn’t even have time to load them onto my computer until my flight home. But I didn’t need to check my captures to know that this year’s trip was pretty special. On my group’s first shoot, we enjoyed a rainbow segment (not a full arc) beautifully positioned above our beach scene, then got another partial rainbow at the next morning’s sunrise shoot. By the time the workshop ended, we’d hit all the other Hawaii highlights I cross my fingers for: Kilauea’s eruption (for the first time since 2017), the Milky Way, rainbows, and perfect light for creative focus photography at each of our rainforest stops.
It’s hard to know where to begin, but since it’s the only image I’ve processed so far, I’ve chosen this little scene from the incomparable Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden. This year I used every lens in my bag there, but with soft, overcast light (that turned to a warm downpour just as we were leaving), I spent most of my time photographing flowers and leaves with my Sony 100-400.
One of the points I try to impress on my workshop students is that, whether near or far, a landscape image isn’t just a click, it’s an iterative process that starts with an idea—a plan for the best way to organize and emphasize the scene’s significant elements, then improves with each subsequent click. The first click is like a writer’s rough draft, and subsequent clicks are revisions on the way to perfection. After each click, the photographer should stand back and evaluate the image on the LCD (I love the large, bright viewfinders and LCDs on today’s mirrorless cameras), refine (exposure, composition, depth of field, focus point), then click again. Repeat as necessary.
This approach is particularly valuable in macro and close-focus images of intimate scenes where even the slightest adjustment to composition, depth of field, and focus point can dramatically alter the result. It’s a prime reason I’m such a strong tripod advocate (evangelist)—when I’m done evaluating, the shot I just evaluated is sitting right there on my tripod, waiting for me to apply whatever adjustments I deem necessary.
Whether it’s fall color or colorful flowers, I try to find a subject to isolate from the rest of the scene. This afternoon at the botanical garden I was drawn to floating lilies and their reflection, and ended up working this one little scene for at least 30 minutes.
Starting with my Sony 100-400 GM lens on my Sony a7RIV, I added a 25mm extension tube so I could focus closer. A neutral polarizer reduced the floating leaves’ waxy sheen, which helped emphasize their deep green. Of course this also reduced the flowers’ reflection, but I found that they were bright enough to still stand out against the darkened water. Exposure was pretty straightforward in the shadowless light. Though the air was fairly still, I used ISO 400 to ensure a shutter speed fast enough to control for slight undulations on the pond’s surface.
At 250mm and f/5.6 (wide open for the 100-400 GM), I shot through foliage lining the shore between me and the flowers. The extremely narrow depth of field allowed me to use this nearby foliage to frame my subjects with soft shades of green. After two or three click/evaluate/refine cycles, I had the framework of my composition in place.
Following a few minutes of shooting that saw me try a variety of f-stops, horizontal/vertical framing variations, and a range of polarizer orientations (minimum to maximum reflection, as well as points in between), I shifted about four feet to my right, to a spot that I thought provided even better foliage framing.
I played with this new composition even longer, running all the variations I’d tried at the previous spot, and adding some focal length changes as well. One thing that became especially obvious the longer I worked the scene was how much the polarizer helped me achieve the effect I was going for. Eliminating the reflection darkened the water to the point that the lilies appear to be floating on air. When I dialed up the reflection with my polarizer to brighten the flower reflection, I lost the contrast between the water and reflection, which made the flowers less prominent—the exact opposite of my objective.
With all my composition variations, I ended up with enough choices that I’ll probably find one or two more versions to process, but this version of the simple composition that first drew me seemed like a good place to start. And while I know these intimate images don’t generate the attention that the more in-your-face images do, photographing and viewing them makes me really happy, and that’s all that matters.
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A Creative Selective Focus Gallery
2021 Highlights: Looking Back, Looking Forward
Posted on January 2, 2022
Last week I shared a brief summary of the year just passed; this week I offer the fruits of all that labor.
Leading photo workshops for a living, I spend a lot of time in places I’ve visited many times, but it seems each spot feels more a part of me with each visit. This year in particular, I sought opportunities to add the Milky Way, a moonrise, fresh snowfall, an electrical storm, or some other transient natural phenomenon to my scene to further elevate these familiar landscapes.
But thrilling images notwithstanding, for me, and I suspect (hope?) for many, the true joy of nature photography isn’t the image itself, it’s the chase—all the planning and physical sacrifice that made it possible—as well as the humbling awe of being there. Last year, despite its difficulties, was chock-full of those experiences.
As you may have guessed, many of the scenes in the gallery above were shared with workshop participants. It took losing more than a dozen workshops to the pandemic to fully appreciate how much it lifts me to experience Nature’s best displays with people who are as awestruck as I am, and I felt blessed to get that back in 2021.
On the other hand, I feel similarly blessed for those rare opportunities to commune with Nature in meditative solitude. With 16 workshops last year (and all the planning and organization they required), I had precious few truly private photo moments in 2021. But the opportunities I did have still resonate clearly.
Looking forward
Another thing that happens when I review images from the year just ended is a reminder of the visual treats in store for the coming year. I have no idea what I’ll see in 2022, but I’ve been doing this long enough to know that I’ll create more images that thrill me, and more memories to sustain me.
Thanks to each of you for your support, in whatever form that takes. Whether you’re a workshop student, an avid follower, or just a casual browser, I’m so happy you’ve joined me on this amazing ride.
See more in my…
2021 Highlights Gallery
Confessions of a Happy Photographer
Posted on September 19, 2021
Stairway to Heaven, Milky Way Over the Puna Coast, Hawaii
Sony a7SIII
Sony 14mm f/1.8 GM
ISO 6400
f/1.8
20 seconds
More than anything else, photography needs to make you happy. When photography was my hobby, that wasn’t really a problem—I photographed what I wanted, where I wanted, when I wanted, with no pressure to please anyone else. Pretty nice. But, as I mulled turning photography into my livelihood (nearly 20 years ago!), I couldn’t help thinking about the photographers who had become unhappy after turning their passion into their profession. Suddenly their choices were fueled not by their own creative juices, but rather by their need to pay the bills.
So one of the promises I made to myself when I decided to pursue photography as a career was that I’d only photograph what I want to photograph. Over the years that approach has evolved to cover more than just subject choices—it also applies to my overall approach to photography, from capture through processing, all the way to what I share and how I share it. So I think a more accurate way of expressing my personal key to photography happiness would be that I photograph to please no one but myself.
It’s personal
When you look at one of my images, you’re viewing a subject that resonates with me personally (while I don’t think every photographer can say that, I also don’t think this makes me unique). That personal connection is why most of my images feature some version of the natural processes that have always fascinated me, camera or not: weather and its many manifestations (such as clouds, rainbows, lightning, and snow), geology (like mountains, volcanism, and the other natural processes of landscape building), and of course all things celestial. Communicating that connection is also why I virtually never share an image without writing something about it and/or the natural processes at play.
This need for connection to my subjects also influences my personal photography rules—not the same “rules” that guide and constrain aspiring photographers, but my own rules for what and how I photograph. Rules like natural light only (no light painting, flash, or any other artificial light), and no arranging of subjects in my scene, and so on.
One and done
A big personal rule for me is one-click capture. Though I never really felt much nostalgia for the color transparencies I shot for over 25 years, I’m still driven by a film photographer’s mindset. That doesn’t mean I don’t process my images, or that I don’t appreciate the power of digital processing to convey my subjects at their very best. But I do (among other things) like knowing that each image represents the photons that struck my sensor in the span of a single shutter click. In other words, I am a one-click photographer who gets no pleasure from merging, blending, combining multiple images into a single image.
Preemptive disclaimer
It seems that every time I try to explain these personal motivations and guiding principles, I get a few defensive responses from people who believe I’m saying that everyone should follow my rules, or that I’m somehow superior to photographers who don’t do things the way I do them. Nope. I’m simply saying that my images need to please me and no one else, and hope your own images, however they’re achieved, make you just as happy as mine make me.
Which brings me to…
I’m thinking about all this because today I’m sharing a Milky Way image from my recently concluded Hawaii Big Island photo workshop. And nothing underscores the difference between my own (dinosaur?) approach than today’s computer-enabled (and beautiful) astro images.
For most of my photography life, I was frustrated by the camera’s low light limitations. In my pre-digital days, using my medium of choice (color slides) to photograph the Milky Way above a landscape was just a dream. And my first digital cameras, while perhaps better than slides in darkness, were still not up to the night photography task.
But over the last fifteen or so years, I watched technology improve to the point that one-shot, night-landscape photography became possible—and it keeps getting better. In my first digital attempts, I found that while I could capture the Milky Way, there was not enough light for the camera to pull in discernible landscape detail to go with it. Instead, in those early digital days I settled for moonlight night images—no Milky Way, but plenty of stars above a beautifully moonlit scene.
As I became hooked on moonlight photography, I watched other photographers start having Milky Way success by blending two (and sometimes more) images—one for the Milky Way, and another much longer exposure for the landscape. I actually tried this approach myself, had enough success to appreciate the technique, but soon realized that I derived absolutely no pleasure from these manufactured images and stopped doing it without ever sharing a blended creation with another soul.
My first real Milky Way success came at Kilauea, about ten years ago. Here the orange glow from the churning lava lake provided enough light to illuminate the surrounding caldera, and sometimes even painting the clouds with its volcanic glow. I was hooked.
The next major Milky Way milestone came when I switched to Sony and started using the Sony a7S. Suddenly, not only could I include lots of foreground detail in my one-click Milky Way images, I could see the scene in my viewfinder well enough to compose and focus quickly, without guessing.
And while my night cameras been evolving—from the a7S, then the Sony a7SII, and now the a7SIII—Sony has slipped the final piece of the night photography jigsaw into place with a great selection of fast, wide, and sharp lenses that seem made for the Milky Way.
Waxing nostalgic
For many years I looked forward to my Hawaii workshop more than any other workshop, in no small part because of the opportunity to return to Kilauea, the location of my first Milky Way success and still one of my very favorite Milky Way locations. Then, in August 2018, the Kilauea eruption went out in a blaze of glory—suddenly, I had to scramble for Milky Way locations on the Big Island.
With many locations lost to the recent eruption, in September 2018 I took my group to the Mauna Kea summit, nearly 14,000 above the Pacific. We had a great shoot among the array of telescopes at the summit, but the only thing more brutal than the wind and cold at the top was drive up there. My rental car started losing power and flashing an engine warning light, and a couple of other drivers were (understandably) less than thrilled about violating their rental car agreements. We also had to send a couple of people back down the mountain when they started feeling altitude sickness. (I’d still recommend the experience to anyone—it’s just not something I’m comfortable doing with a group.)
In 2019 scouted the Puna Coast for a good spot, but found much of the access still limited by the 2018 lava flow. I finally settled for section of brand new lava above the ocean, but clouds and moisture-thickened air hindered visibility, and the moonless darkness made it very difficult to safely get close enough to include much crashing surf. The Milky Way made enough of an appearance that were were able to photograph it, but the overall experience was less than ideal.
Given all the obstacles Mother Nature had thrown at me—not just locations and access lost to lava flows, but recent hurricane and flood damage to other locations too—I decided to take 2020 off from Hawaii. (Turns out I’d have had to cancel anyway.) But I missed Hawaii and realized, eruption and Milky Way or not, it’s a pretty great place to photograph. So the Big Island went back on my schedule in 2021.
Despite the aborted eruption and the prior night location difficulties, I was determined to give the Milky Way another shot in 2021. Thinking it might be easier to photograph away from the coast, I found a nice elevated view on Chain of Craters Road in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. It was about three miles from the coast, but had a great view of the ocean and recent lava flows, and a few striking trees for the foreground.
I gave the group some Milky Way training on our second afternoon, then drove out to the chosen spot after that evening’s sunset shoot. While the view was indeed magnificent, the wind was so strong that we couldn’t even consider setting up tripods. But since we were there anyway, I kept everyone out long enough for everyone to see the Milky Way emerge from the darkness. While that was more of a consolation prize for people with their hearts set on Milky Way images, it was pretty cool, especially for the folks who have never really seen the Milky Way’s core in a truly dark sky.
Some groups are more excited than others about the chance to photograph the Milky Way, and I could tell that this group was pretty disappointed that our shoot didn’t work out. So I decided to give it one more shot, on the workshop’s final night—no guarantees, but we’d at least go down trying.
Since our final sunset would be on the Puna Coast, I decided that we’d just find a spot out there for the Milky Way. A check of the map confirmed that the galactic core would align nicely with the rocky coast from MacKenzie Point, my planned sunset spot, we just stayed put there and waited for the Milky Way to come to us.
The downside of this location is that it’s rather precariously perched above quite violent surf. But since we were already out there for sunset, I knew everyone would be able to get situated and set up for the Milky Way early enough to avoid moving around much (or at all) in the dark.
The biggest unknown in this plan was the clouds that always seem to lurk along the Puna Coast. But after a day of sky mostly obscured by clouds, a little opening appeared in the south around sunset, and I crossed my fingers. We ended enjoying the most colorful sunset/sunrise of the workshop, then crossed our fingers that the sky would remain open until darkness was complete.
For this shoot I used my Sony a7SIII and Sony 14 f/1.8 GM exclusively. Usually my Milky Way compositions favor the sky over the foreground. But here, long exposures of the waves exploding against jagged volcanic rock created ethereal motion blur that nicely complimented the Milky Way, so I wanted to include as much surf as sky. Not only did I want more foreground than usual, the lower the latitude, the higher in the sky the Milky Way’s core is—having such a wide lens allowed me to include lots of surf and sky.
I only managed to capture seven frames while I “bounced” (tiptoed gingerly) in near total darkness, hyper-conscious of the consequences of a misstep, between people to provide assistance. The southern sky was virtually clear in my first two captures, but each subsequent click revealed an ominous cloud bank encroaching on our sky. Knowing how quickly the rain can strike in Hawaii, and wanting to avoid anything that might cause people to move suddenly in the dark, I called the shoot after about 30 minutes. This is my final image of the night.
Since this was the workshop’s last night and there were no more image reviews, I can’t say that everyone finished that shoot with a great Milky Way image. But I do know that everyone did at least capture the Milky Way, and gained enough insight to do it better the next time. I also know that everyone was happy with the entire experience—which is really what it’s all about.
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Milky Way One Click Wonders
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Return to Paradise
Posted on September 12, 2021
Surf on the Rocks, Puna Coast, Hawaii
Sony a7RIV
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
4 seconds
F/11
ISO 50
I’m still working my way through my Grand Canyon images, but because life goes on, I “had to” spend the last week leading a workshop on my favorite Hawaiian island, Hawaii. (It’s a tough job, but…)
Until last year, I’ve spent a week each year since 2010 on Hawaii’s Big Island. And while I’d love to blame COVID for the missed year, it just so happened that I’d decided to take a break from Hawaii way back in 2019, well before COVID was even a twinkle in some Asian pangolin’s eye.
Just to be clear, it wasn’t that I’d fallen out of love with the Big Island. It was more that in recent years, on each Hawaii trip I had to work around wind, flood, or lava damage that closed or altered some of my locations. (That’s just the way things go for a volcanic island in the middle of an ocean.)
After dealing with those problems, the final straw came in August of 2018, with the cessation of Kilauea’s eruption, and I decided to remove the Hawaii workshop from my schedule. But during that one-year Hawaii hiatus, I realized that I’d come to believe that the eruption, and especially photographing the Milky Way over the eruption, was the main reason for my Hawaii workshop. It took missing a year to realize how much I missed everything else on the Big Island.
I scheduled my 2021 Hawaii Big Island workshop more than a year ago, never thinking at the time that we’d still be dealing with a global pandemic. Nevertheless, people signed up, and I can say now that we were able to pull it off without any trouble—not from COVID, or Mother Nature. The Hawaii COVID protocols are strict but reasonable, and more seriously enforced than I’ve observed on the Mainland, which actually helped everyone feel safer. And all my locations were open, albeit with a few detours around freshly poured lava (from 2018).
I’ve spent quality time on each of the primary Hawaiian islands except Oahu, and while I love them all, I’m especially drawn to the Big Island. When most people think of Hawaii, they think of palm trees, ukuleles, luaus, and sandy beaches. That’s not my Hawaii: I can get my palm tree fix in California, have never been to a luau, don’t really care for Hawaiian music (sorry), and generally prefer the mountains to the beach. But I love clouds, waterfalls, rainbows, lush (and colorful!) foliage, and all things volcanic—all prominent features that the Big Island, especially the Hilo side, has in spades.
My favorite scenery in Hawaii is probably the Puna Coast, a stretch of rugged volcanic coastline south of Hilo. Immediately downhill from Kilauea, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, virtually none of the Puna real estate is older than 200 years—some of it is much younger.
Every square inch of Hawaii is a lava flow, a fact that’s never more obvious than along the Puna Coast, where the basalt is so young that it has had little time to weather and erode. Paralleling the coast on Highway 130, the relative age of the land at any given location is obvious if you know what to look for. The youngest lava is exposed for the world to examine, empty black plains of jagged aa (pronounced ah-ah) and ropey pahoehoe (pronounce every vowel: puh-ho-e-ho-e) that achieved their distinguishing characteristics not by virtue of different chemical compositions (they’re identical), but by their temperature at the time they cooled and hardened.
Side note: I used to struggle remembering which lava was which until I realized that “Ah! Ah!” is the sound I’d make if I were to walk on aa barefoot. (Aa is also an essential Scrabble word, BTW.)
With humidity off the charts, and rain a virtual daily event, it doesn’t take long for foliage to establish a foothold in Puna’s fresh lava. And the more the lava ages, the more it’s smothered with green—overwhelmed by trees and shrubs that advance at a somewhat slower, but seeming just as relentless, pace as lava.
On every visit to Hawaii, I make at least one drive down Highway 130 all the way to the end (and back), stopping randomly (and frequently) to walk out to the ocean in search of fresh views to photograph. At each stop I find some version of rugged cliffs, tide pools, or an occasional black sand beach under constant attack by water that seems to fluctuate between blue-green and green-blue, depending on the water’s depth and the cloud cover overhead.
A few years ago I found the view in this image while exploring one of the densest stretches of foliage (oldest lava) on the entire coast. Somehow this spot has managed to dodge Pele’s fire long enough for a tree tunnel to canopy the road, and for the surrounding trees to become so crowded that they appear ready to leap into the Pacific.
Another feature I love at this spot is the large chunks of lava shed by the nearby cliff, then rounded by collisions with the pounding surf and their boulder brothers. The waves here are especially violent, sometimes leaping higher than the surrounding 20-foot cliffs, that with each wave you can hear the rocks knock together.
All this persistent, violent surf makes managing the explosive wave motion an essential part of photographing here.
I digress
A still image can’t display actual motion, but it can convey the illusion of motion. While nothing like our own experience of a world in motion, a well framed and exposed still image can freeze the extreme chaos of a single instant, or accumulate a series of instants into a blur that conveys a pattern of motion. A still image’s rendering of motion can establish the scene’s mood and stimulate the viewer’s imagination into a greater sense of being there.
Combining creative vision and technical skill, a photographer chooses where on the freeze-blur continuum an image falls: The sudden drama of a wave caught mid-crash, or the soothing calm of soft surf. Or perhaps someplace in the midrange of the motion continuum, stopping the waves enough that discrete elements stand out, but not so much that a sense of flow is lost.
One question I’m quite frequently asked is, “How do I blur water?” And while there’s no magic formula, no shutter speed threshold beyond which all water blurs, blurring water isn’t that hard (as long as you use a tripod). In fact, when you photograph in the full shade or cloudy sky conditions I prefer, it’s usually more difficult to freeze moving water than it is to blur it.
The amount of water motion blur you get depends on several variables:
- The water’s speed—the faster the water, and (especially) the more whitewater (green water, no matter how fast it’s moving, doesn’t usually display a lot of motion blur), the greater the blur
- Your focal length—the longer the focal length, the greater the blur
- Your distance from the water—the closer the water, the greater the blur
- And of course, the shutter speed—the longer your shutter is open, the greater the blur
Of these variables, it’s shutter speed that gets the most attention because focal length and subject distance are compositional considerations, and we usually don’t start thinking about blurring the water until after we have our composition.
Since motion blur increases with the duration your shutter is open, blurring water means reducing the non-shutter light reaching your sensor. Here are the tools at your disposal:
- Reduce the ISO: The lower the ISO, the less sensitive to light the sensor is, requiring a longer shutter speed to achiever proper exposure.
- Smaller aperture (larger f-stop value): The aperture is the opening that allows light to enter, so it makes sense that the smaller the opening, the less light will enter for any given length of time, also requiring a longer shutter speed to compensate.
- Polarizing filter: In addition to reducing reflections, a polarizer will subtract 1 to 2 stops of light (depending on its orientation). When using a polarizer you need to be vigilant about orienting it each time you recompose (especially if you change your camera’s horizontal/vertical orientation), and monitoring its effect on the rest of your scene.
- Neutral density filter: A neutral density filter is, as its name implies, both neutral and dense. Neutral in that it doesn’t alter the color of your image; dense in that it cuts the amount of light reaching your sensor. While a dark enough ND filter might allow you to blur water on even the brightest of days, it does nothing for the other problems inherent to midday, full sunlight shooting. ND filters come in variable and fixed-stop versions—the flexibility of variable NDs (the ability to dial the amount of light up and down) means living with the vignetting they add to my wide angle images.
- Tripod: Don’t even think about any kind of subject blur without a sturdy tripod. For help selecting the right tripod, read the Tripod Selection article in my Photo Tips section.
Back to Puna
There’s only one obvious composition at this spot, but it’s such nice composition that I’ve added this spot to my Hawaii workshop “don’t miss” list. This year, that shoot came on the workshop’s final afternoon, on our way to the day’s sunset location.
The best vantage point here is atop a small prominence that juts into the surf; it offers just enough room for a group of a dozen or so photographers to set up tripods and capture their version of the scene without anyone feeling crowded (or, more importantly, without plummeting into the churn below).
With the group safely engaged, I pulled out my Sony a7RIV and 16-35 GM lens and set about photographing this scene using a variety of shutter speeds. I started with fast shutter speeds that froze the waves mid-crash, then added my Breakthrough Dark CPL (a 6-stop neutral density filter that is also a circular polarizer) to blur the water to a gauzy haze. But I quickly realized that getting the blur effect I wanted wasn’t quite as simple as attaching a neutral density filter and going for the longest possible shutter speed.
I love the rounded boulders in the foreground, but found that when I went with a really long shutter speed, the boulders disappeared beneath the accumulated foam of multiple waves. Because the sun was low, and the scene was further darkened by clouds, I figured I could still get decent blur without the neutral density filter, and replaced it with a standard Breakthrough polarizer.
After a little bit of playing, I found that a properly timed four-second exposure gave me the blur effect I was looking for, without obliterating the boulders. Of course each wave is different, both in size and angle of attack, so once I found the shutter speed that worked, I captured at least a dozen frames, picking the one I liked best when I could view my images on a bigger screen.
This day ended with a nice sunset a couple of miles up the road, followed by an even nicer Milky Way shoot. But that’s a story for a different day.
Just scheduled: 2022 Hawaii Big Island Waterfalls and Volcanos
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It’s All a Blur
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Something new
Posted on May 31, 2020
For many years my website has featured my workshops, while my social media pages (WordPress blog, Instagram, and Facebook) have been where I’ve shared my latest photography. While I originally kept galleries on my Eloquent Images website, I rarely updated them and after a while the website galleries ceased being a reliable reflection of my current work.
About three years ago I redesigned my website, completely changing the interface and removed the galleries entirely, doubling-down on my blog galleries. But when I started hearing from people that they couldn’t find my latest images online, I realized that, even though they’re really easy to find in the galleries right here on my blog, many people don’t take the trouble to look for them—if they don’t see a Galleries option on the website, they just move on. I made a mental note that I need to bring my website galleries back, but between workshops and travel, I never found the time.
Well guess what—suddenly I have time! So a few weeks ago I asked my webmaster to add galleries to my website, and I’ve spent the last couple of weeks populating them, and having far more fun than I could have imagined. My webmaster labeled my six galleries Gallery 1, Gallery 2, …, Gallery 6. Hmmm, surely I can do better than that. I thought long and hard about more descriptive names, trying on locations and other similarly prosaic labels, before deciding I need themes to describe my motivations for clicking my shutter.
Backstory
You may or may not know that when I decided to make photography my profession, I promised myself that I’d only photograph what I want to photograph, that I would never take a picture just because I thought it would earn me money. I’d just seen too many miserable photographers earning a living but hating what they do. But since all I want to photograph is nature (which, while universally loved, is not universally purchased), I needed to come up with a way to earn money. I landed on photo workshops, which perfectly leveraged my prior career in technical communications (tech writing, training, and support) and my love for both photography and nature. Not only did this enable me to photograph only what I love, my images turned out to be the perfect intro and marketing tools for my workshops: if you like my images, you’ll probably like my workshops; if you don’t like my images, you probably won’t be happy with my workshops. (Of course I do sell images too, but image sales isn’t an essential part of my business and never motivates me to take a picture.)
Rabbit hole
So I guess it should have been no surprise that thinking about what my gallery themes should be would lead me down this rabbit hole of introspection. Many photographers create spectacular images that reveal the damage humans are doing to our natural world, but I seem to simply be driven to share nature’s beauty, both the obvious and the overlooked. Rather than a conscious choice, this is more an organic outcome of a life spent seeking and finding happiness in the natural world, combined with regular old human nature that causes most of us to find pleasure sharing the things we love most: “Here’s something that makes me happy—I hope it makes you happy too.” Here’s where the rabbit hole led me—I can’t think of a clearer distillation of the things in nature that move me:
- Four Seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall
- Color and Light: Sunlight’s interplay with air, land, and water
- Water Like Glass: A Time for Reflection
- It Came from the Sky: Unexpected gifts from above
- In the Flow: Water on the move: Waves, waterfalls, and whitewater
- Celestial Carousel: Sun, Moon, and Stars
These galleries are a work in progress. Assembling them, I quickly realized that many of my images would work in more than one gallery, but I decided not to duplicate any image. Rather than a comprehensive retrospective, my new galleries are more of a summary of my own favorites. But I’m still adding to them, so feel free to suggest additions you think I’ve overlooked. Or simply browse and enjoy.
Gallery Highlights
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The Motion of the Ocean
Posted on November 24, 2019
Golden Sunrise, Puna Coast, Hawaii Big Island
Sony a7RIV
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
13 seconds
F/16
ISO 100
Silky water images take a lot of flak for being overused and unnatural. Sure, long exposures that blur a rushing creek into a white stripe, or smooth crashing surf into to a gauzy haze, can be trite (no judgement—these effects can also be beautiful). But the argument that motion blur in a water image is always invalid because it’s not “natural” just doesn’t hold wat…, uhhh…, up to scrutiny.
Think about it—there really are only two ways to capture moving water in a still photo: you can freeze water in place, or blur it. And a water droplet suspended in midair is no more representative of the human experience of that scene than silky water. That’s because the world unfolds to us like a seamless movie of continuous instants, while a camera accumulates light throughout its exposure to conflate those instants into a single frame.
Your options for expressing motion in a still frame aren’t binary—either frozen or blurred—they’re a continuum of choices ranging from discrete airborne droplets to blur completely devoid of detail. The key to capturing flowing water in a still photograph is conveying a sense of motion—how you do it is your creative choice (and blurring water simply because you can, and it looks “cool,” maybe isn’t the best approach).
Not only does your choice for handling water’s motion determine the effect’s visual appeal, it also affects the image’s mood. I find stopped water action in an image to be more stimulating, and blurred water more soothing.
And all motion blurs aren’t alike. There’s a big difference between slight blur that expresses a wave’s movement while retaining its overall size and shape, and extreme blur that purees every detail into a homogenized soup. Whether your goal is to freeze in midair the airborne droplets of a waterfall, smooth wind-whipped chop in a mountain lake, or reveal flow patterns in waves washing over a rocky shore, the key to controlling your point on the water motion continuum is understanding the reciprocal relationship between ISO, f-stop, and shutter speed.
I usually start with a general idea of the amount of blur I want, and try to determine the shutter speed that will get me there. Unfortunately, there is no one-to-one relationship between shutter speed and blur because shutter speed isn’t the only variable. You also need to consider the speed of the water, its distance, your focal length, and whether it’s moving toward/away from you, or across your frame. So I start by guessing the shutter speed (the more you do it, the better you’ll get), then figuring out the ISO/f-stop combination that gets me there. And if I can’t do it with ISO and f-stop, I reach for my neutral density filter.
After my first click I evaluate my blur effect on my in my mirrorless view finder or on my LCD screen and adjust accordingly. I usually take a range of frames at a variety of shutter speeds to have more options later, when I’m viewing my images on my big screen. This is especially true with crashing surf—often I’ll take multiple frames at the same shutter speed because there’s so much variation from wave to wave.
Golden Sunrise, Puna Coast, Hawaii Big Island (September, 2019)
My flight to Hawaii departed on a Friday, and my new Sony a7RIV was scheduled to arrive Monday. But the arrival of a new camera is to a photographer what Christmas morning is to a 5-year-old (do you know any 5-year-olds who would delay Christmas by a week?)—so I had Sony ship the camera to my hotel in Hawaii. So far so good—until Hawaiian Airlines lost my suitcase. In addition to having no change of clothes or toiletry items, I was suddenly without a tripod. The clothing and toiletry essentials were handled with a trip to the Hilo Target, but a camera with no tripod? In my world that’s not much different than that 5-year-old unwrapping the remote-control helicopter he asked for and learning Santa didn’t think to include batteries. Fortunately, after lots of hand wringing and panicked pleas for help, the good folks at Breakthrough Filters overnighted one of their new carbon fiber tripods and I was whole again (Hawaiian got the bill for the $178 FedEx overnight charge as well).
Or so I thought. But using a tripod requires a way to mount the camera to the tripod, and my tripods require a camera-specific mount plate (for the photographers in the audience, that would be an Arca-Swiss-compatible L-Plate from Really Right Stuff). But the a7RIV was so new, RRS didn’t have its L-plate ready. Damn. Just about the time my internal 5-year-old was about to melt down in line at the grocery store, I figured that with a little creative engineering, my Sony a7RIII L-plate could (kind of) attach to my a7RIV—not an ideal arrangement, but enough to get by. I was in business.
A couple of days into the workshop I took the group out to one of my favorite Puna Coast spots for sunrise. As you can see from this picture, the Puna beaches aren’t great for swimming, but its rugged volcanic rock and black sand, along with very violent surf, make the photography here off the charts. I’ve photographed the California Coast from Big Sur to Mendocino, and the Oregon Coast from Bandon to Cannon Beach, but I like the Puna Coast south of Hilo just as much.
Every rock down here is lava. And being just down the mountain from Kilauea (one of the most active volcanoes in the world), all of the Puna lava is relatively new. In fact, the age of most of the Puna rock is measured in decades—during this workshop we did a Milky Way shoot on lava flows that were just one year old.
You’ll primarily find only two kinds of lava on Hawaii: aa and pahoehoe. Both are actually basalt, so the difference between aa and pahoehoe isn’t their composition, it the way the lava flows and cools. Rapidly flowing aa hardens into a jagged jumble, while slower flowing pahoehoe is a smoother, and often ropy, rock. (Pro Tip: I could never remember which lava type was which until I realized that “ah! ah!” is what I’d say if I were to walk barefoot on aa.) In this image, you can see both aa and pahoehoe: pahoehoe in the foreground and on the left (you can even see a little ropiness), and aa in the background on the right.
At any ocean scene, if you stand and watch the surf and rock interaction long enough, you become aware of patterns in the water’s flow. This scene in particular had some wonderful wave action that I very much wanted to convey. When we arrived it was so dark that motion blur impossible to avoid, but that changed as the sun approached the horizon (it always surprises me how quickly the light comes up at the lower latitudes).
By sunrise I’d become pretty familiar with the scene and knew I wanted to start my exposure as a wave large enough to sweep through the foreground was about to break, and that a shutter speed between 10 and 15 seconds would capture all of a single wave’s motion.
With the sun up, achieving a 10-15 second shutter speed is only possible with a neutral density filter. But there was a distracting sheen on the rocks that I wanted to minimize with a polarizer. In these situations in the past, I had to decide between an ND filter or a polarizer, or live with significant vignetting by stacking the two (or by using a Singh-Ray Vari-N-Duo filter). But my Breakthrough 6-stop Dark CPL works as a polarizer, but it also cuts 6 stops of light. And because it’s no thicker than a standard polarizer, it does this without vignetting. (As you can see, I didn’t get rid of all the sheen on the rocks, but I was definitely able to reduce it to a manageable level.)
Since I’m not a big fan of Sony’s wired remote (an understatement), since switching to Sony I’ve almost exclusively used the 2-second timer, making timing waves kind of a pain. But my new Sony Bluetooth Wireless Remote Commander made timing the waves a piece of cake. Though I shot a number of frames with this composition, the action of the water made each frame different. I chose this image because it was the best combination of sunrise light and wave motion.
Epilogue
After a couple of days on the lamb, my suitcase eventually turned up—but it waited until after I’d purchased an entirely new Hawaii wardrobe, plus all the other essentials. Since I always pack my suitcase to within a couple of ounces of the maximum weight allowed anyway, all this extra stuff, not to mention the addition of a new camera and tripod, created a bit of a weight problem. I was able to get back under airline’s weight limit by filling a USPS large flat-rate box with all of my heaviest (non-camera) stuff and mailing it home. And to Hawaiian Airline’s credit, they reimbursed every penny of my extra expenses without blinking.
Read more about photographing motion
Fern Cascade, Russian Gulch Fall, Mendocino
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World in Motion
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A Maui Memory
Posted on September 14, 2018
West Maui Tide Pool Sunset, Hawaii
Sony a7R III
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
Breakthrough 6-stop ND filter
20 seconds
F/16
ISO 50
March 2018
Each year I do back-to-back workshops in Hawaii, one on the Big Island and one on Maui (it’s a tough job, but…, well, you know…). This year’s Big Island workshop was complicated first by the recent Kilauea eruption, and then by Hurricane Lane, which deposited 50 inches of rain on our host city Hilo just days before the workshop.
To get my eyes on the damage wrought by Mother Nature, and to scout more alternate locations, I flew to the Big Island five days early (see “tough job” reference above). Despite the complications, the workshop turned out great, with a fantastic group and a few new locations (including a beautiful sunset and Milky Way shoot atop Mauna Kea) added to my tried and true favorites, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
But my dreams of a stress-free Maui workshop were dashed when Hurricane Olivia took laser aim at Maui. Each day I’d check the forecast hoping to see that she had changed course, and each day I was disappointed. Finally, with just a couple days to go, I completely overhauled the workshop, switching lodging and itinerary to avoid the worst of the storm and get the most the island had to offer. I’m happy to say that despite Olivia, we only missed one morning of the workshop and managed to get our Haleakala sunrise in, plus spend a nice day on the Hana road.
My first location adjustment was switching one of my favorite Maui sunset locations, usually a second day destination, to the workshop’s first night because I wasn’t sure we’d be able to get out there the rest of the week. Between dense rainforest and steep, uneven lava, even the walk down here is a bit harrowing, so when I told the group that a few years ago I tried to drive down to this spot, they couldn’t quite believe it. Returning to this spot made me think that it might be time to share the story of my self-inflicted misadventure again. So I dusted off a blog post from five years ago (can’t believe it’s been that long!):
March 2013
On my September scouting trip for my upcoming Maui workshop I hiked cross-country down the rugged flank of West Maui, searching for lava-rock tide pools I’d read about. Scrambling down a steep hill and over sharp rocks, I found the beach I was looking for but decided it was too dangerous for a group. Rather than return the way I came, I continued picking my way along the shore and eventually found another spot I liked better. At first I thought this wouldn’t be suitable for a group either, but climbing out I found an overgrown dirt road/trail leading back to the highway (“highway” in this case is the one-and-a-half lane, mostly-paved, rental-agreement-voiding Highway 340 circling West Maui). But fearing I’d miss this obscure spur from the main road, I saved the trailhead on my GPS.
Last Sunday, the day before my Maui workshop started, I picked up Don Smith (Don assisted this workshop; I’ll return the favor in one of Don’s workshops) at the airport and was excited to share with him the spot I’d “discovered” (it’s not as if I’m the Lewis and Clark of landscape photography—there’s enough debris down there to indicate the spot is known to locals) and off we went. The steady rain that had been falling for most of the afternoon increased with the road’s remoteness and soon we were slaloming around boulders dislodged from the surrounding cliffs by the downpour—at one point we passed a car waylaid by a grapefruit-size rock embedded in its windshield.
Undeterred, we soldiered on through the intensifying rain. This was Don’s first Maui visit, so I narrated the tour with vigor, enthusiastically pointing out the island’s scenic highlights as we passed them, pausing only occasionally to reassure Don that the highway was navigable despite increasing evidence to the contrary, punctuating my confidence with, “And just wait until you see the scene at the end of this ‘secret’ road I discovered.”
Closely monitoring my GPS, at the prescribed location and without hesitation (for dramatic effect) I veered left into a barely distinguishable gap in the trees almost as if I had a brain. The narrow track unfolded between rapidly oscillating wipers, immediately plummeting the steep hill and twisting right. Dense foliage brushed both sides of the car, which by now was clearly losing purchase in the mud. Don hadn’t quite finished a sentence that started, “Are you sure…,” when it began to dawn on me that I’d never intended to actually drive this road, that my plan when I marked it six months earlier was to park at the top and walk down. Oops.
Propelled by momentum and without the benefit of traction put us completely at gravity’s mercy, careening downward (picture the jungle mudslide scene from “Romancing the Stone”). Steering seemed to have more influence on the direction the car faced than it did on its direction of travel and I quickly gave that up. Were it not for the deep ruts that occasionally nudged us back on course, I’m sure we’d have bounced into the jungle. I held my breath as we approached a boulder jutting from the roadbed and exhaled when the undercarriage passed above unscathed. Shortly thereafter the slope moderated somewhat and we slid to a stop, miraculously still on the “road” (more or less).
After a few seconds of cathartic expletives, I scanned our surroundings. Backing up the slippery road was out of the question, but a little farther down the slope we spotted a flat, clear space with a small Y-spur that might enable us to at least turn around. I scrutinized the dash for the switch that would engage the 4-wheel drive (I swear) the guy at rental agency promised my SUV had. When we didn’t find it Don dug the manual from the glovebox—apparently 4WD is an option the powers-that-be at Alamo deem unnecessary on Maui. Uh-oh.
With crossed fingers I gave the car some gas and felt the wheels spin with no effect. More expletives. Don and I exited into the rain to survey our predicament: the road was fast graduating to creek status, and where rubber tires were supposed to be, instead were four mud disks. Scraping the tires clean had little value because the next revolution simply reapplied a fresh layer.
Back in the car I found that cranking the steering wheel hard in both directions gained just enough traction to un-mire the tires and I gingerly rolled the car downhill, away from safety, but at least into a relatively flat, open space. Yay! Once on level ground, and with only a little bit of slip/slide drama, I gingerly pivoted the car into the adjacent spur and nudged back around to face the direction we’d just come. Progress!
Now for the hard part. Looking for the first time toward freedom, we came to grips with the chute that had deposited us: Not only was it steep, at the steepest (and muddiest) point it curved hard-left, but banked hard-right—not exactly an arrangement that would be embraced at Daytona.
I inhaled and goosed the gas and we shot upward, fishtailing like a hooked marlin before losing momentum before coming to a stop a mere fifty feet closer to freedom. This maneuver had also managed to skew the car at a 45-degree angle to the road, its left-front fender in the jungle on one side, its right-rear fender in the jungle on the other. When I gave the car gas the tires spun hopelessly.
Facing defeat we started strategizing Plan B: With an hour of daylight remaining and no cell service, we’d need to walk up to the highway and hope to flag down, in the rain, a good samaritan willing to drive two disheveled, mud-caked strangers back to civilization (about 45 minutes away), then hope to summon a tow truck that would extricate us.
While Don trudged through the rain up to the main road to get help, I stayed with the car, licking my wounds and feeling pretty foolish. It occurred to me that since the road was too narrow for a tow truck, and the distance and tight curve would make winching difficult, even a tow truck wouldn’t guarantee freedom.
Watching Don head back up the hill to seek help, I decided to give extraction one more shot. I shifted the car into reverse, gave it some gas, and cranked the steering wheel back and forth violently until the tires broke free and the car rolled out of the jungle and back onto the muddy trail and back down to the clearing below. So far so good. Once there, I gave the pedal a gentle nudge and reversed slowly all the way to the clearing’s back side (another 20 feet), where I hoped there might be a little more gravel and less mud—and most importantly, a little more room to gather momentum.
With a small prayer I slipped the transmission into in first and floored the accelerator, rocketing ahead with enough forward speed to avoid much of the fishtailing I’d experienced earlier. Peering through flailing wipers I aimed for the small opening that had deposited us, shooting past crumpled shrubs and protruding rocks until the road steepened. With the steepened incline the energy of my forward momentum was replaced by spinning wheels that spewed mud like a dirty firehose, but I just kept my foot to the floor.
Approaching the curve I felt the car start to tilt right and slow almost to 0, but somehow the tires maintained just enough grip to avoid a complete stop. The fishtailing had returned, now exceeded the forward motion but I didn’t care as long as I still had forward motion. I rounded the curve and surprised Don, who dove into the jungle just up the road and turned to cheer me forward. Just as my forward motion was about to to hopelessly be completely transformed into spinning wheels the road leveled, my rear tires grabbed something solid, and I shot forward. Not wanting to slow until the tires kissed pavement I lowered my window and high-fived Don as I flew past and onto the highway. At the top we just couldn’t stop laughing, both at the foolish predicament I’d created, and our utter disbelief that we’d made it out.
March 2018
This year’s visit was far less eventful. We parked at the top and entire group made it down to the water on foot, without incident. After receiving a brief summary of the scene and a return time, the group quickly scattered in search of one of the seemingly infinite number of great photos here. I kept my camera in the bag as I moved around to work with everyone, eventually finding myself atop a jagged rock ridge about 20 feet above pounding surf.
When I saw the sunset color reflecting in the water, I pulled out my Sony a7RIII and added my Breakthrough 6-stop neutral density filter to my Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM lens. Carefully monitoring my histogram, I dialed in a long exposure that smoothed the surf and blurred the streaking clouds. In my Canon days I’d have needed a graduated neutral density filter (or multiple images) to capture the entire dynamic range in this scene, but the a7RIII has about 3-stops more dynamic range (an entire GND worth!) than my Canon DSLRs did, enabling me to capture this scene’s entire range of light with one click.
A Hawaii Gallery
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Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 