Tag: Hawaii

11-05-16 Another World

Can you feel your shirt touching your shoulder right now? (read and see more)

By Scott Shephard

If you drove by these plumeria flowers every day as you entered your driveway, you probably wouldn’t see them. Like so many things that we see, feel, hear or smell all of the time, even beautiful flowers become white noise. To get you to consider white noise, here are two tests:

1) List 5 features of the street side of your neighbor-to-the-left’s house. If you’ve lived in your neighborhood for a year or for decades, you’ve probably seen your neighbor’s house hundreds or even thousands of times. My guess is that while you’ve seen your neighbors house, you’ve never really looked at it. The features of the house are likely examples of white noise to you.

2)If you are wearing a shirt right now, what does it feel like? The skin is a profoundly sensitive organ but because it is in constant contact with something all of the time, the sensations become white noise.

So here’s my point: if you take your camera outside and, with your neighbor’s permission, take 10 photos of various features of the front of their house, those features cease to be white noise. They might even become essential and even fascinating. They might also become something you notice every time you drive by the house. The same could be said for your shirt. Can you feel it touching your shoulders and back? What does it feel like?

So back to these beautiful plumeria . . . Because I had my camera in hand when I walked by them, because I had only been in this neighborhood for a day and because they were new and foreign to my experience, I couldn’t help but notice them. And now you see them too.

Such is the power of photography. As for feeling your shirt, I hope the sensations they cause generally remain as white noise. Otherwise, it will drive you crazy . . . .

How about a view of the neighborhood and a couple other takes on these flowers?:

 

Canon 5DIII 1/750s f/2.8 ISO400 100mm

11-04-16 Present at the Creation

My blog title today is figurative, of course. And literal.

By Scott Shephard

I’m not old enough to have been present at The Creation, which happened eons ago. But I can finally say that I did witness the slow and geologic creation of a little more earth – in this case the Big Island of Hawaii.

I have seen videos of lava flows on Hawaii before and while the lava seems dangerous, it also seems deceptively sedate – it has an amazingly warm glow and it seems to move languorously. But when you witness molten lava flowing into the ocean from as close as 50 feet away, it is anything but benign.

The sound of the boiling sea water, the whiff of sulfurous gas and the crash of the waves against the new-formed earth are both fascinating and scary.

The boat ride to this amazing place wasn’t exactly easy as we were pounding into 7 foot swells most of the way. And it wasn’t cheap, either. But it was certainly worth it.

A few more from our outing . . .

And a short video . . . 

[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAotLMTzZBk&w=854&h=480]

04-23-16 Genesis

“In the beginning. . . ” (read more)

By Scott Shephard

When I think of the “Book of Genesis” in the Old Testament, I don’t think of God willing coconut trees to grow out of volcanic rock on a place like the Big Island of Hawaii. But why not?

There is certainly something elemental about a fledgling tree growing out of some of Earth’s newest land – in this case near (or over) what was once the community of Kalapana. The black volcanic rock looks impossibly barren and hard but it is neither – it is brittle and rich in nutrients. Soon, there will be rich soil here and maybe even earth worms. But the word “soon” has a different meaning here and can’t easily be understood in human years.

Come back in a few thousand years and you won’t know the place. I’m thinking God’s watch doesn’t measure days or minutes or seconds. Probably not not months or years, either. . . .

Canon 5DIII 1/125s f/6.7 ISO100 47mm

01-12-16 Photographer At Work

What shoes do you wear when you go out to take photos? (read more)

By Scott Shephard

You may know our youngest son Jon as the captain of the Un-Cruise Adventures ship Wilderness Adventurer. But when he is on hiatus, as he is this winter, he spends some of his time in Hawaii. This year it gave Deb and me a good reason to go to Hawaii, too.

Here Jon is setting up for a photo at the Hawaiian Tropical Botanical Garden, where the orchid photo I posted a couple of days ago was taken. Like many good photographers in Hawaii, he is properly equipped: good camera and lens, solid tripod and fashionable flip flops.

Canon 5DIII 1/30s f/4.0 ISO400 55mm

01-11-16 Big Island Morning

Do you visit the Photo A Day blog once and a while? Thanks is you do. (read more)

By Scott Shephard

First, if you subscribe to this blog via email, thanks. It turns out that I have been sending the daily posts to the wrong group so I think I am welcoming some of you back. I hope you stay. Of course, if un-cluttering your life is a 2016 resolution, you can easily unsubscribe to this blog. But how about attacking that bloated junk drawer in your kitchen first? Or your sock and underwear drawer? Or you car’s glove compartment.

Second, those who are my friends on Facebook will have seen this photo already. Sorry to repeat myself. 

But what about the photo? Well, it’s really 5 photos layered and processed as an HDR. And you’d never know it, but the sun was about 20 minutes from coming up. I shot this in twilight and needed a flashlight to see the camera settings! The longest exposure was 30 seconds and it looks almost like mid-day. There I go bending reality again. 🙂

I will also mention that the waves were crashing onto the rocks but the long exposure makes the water look relatively flat. The only evidence of the waves is the spray, which looks like low fog in this picture. More bent reality!

Finally, look closely and you will see two people in this photo sitting on the far shore by the palm trees. They are waiting for the sunrise, not for me to finish the 1 minute photo sequence. Because they are pretty sharply focused, they obviously sat very still for those 60 seconds.

Hawaiian sunrises will do that to you.

Canon 5DIII f/16.0 ISO200 40mm (5 shot HDR sequence)

01-08-16 Life Returns. Slowly.

After the volcano erupts, life returns. (read more)

Scott Shephard

One of the things that is striking about the so-called Big Island of Hawaii is that it is the “youngest” of all of the Hawaiian islands. What that means is that it is only 500,000 years old. On a human scale, that is really old, of course. But compare that number with the age of the rocks in the Black Hills in my home state of South Dakota – geologists say that they are around 2 billion years old. On a human scale that’s almost unimaginable.

But compare either the age of the Black Hills or that of Hawaii with the fact that the moss covered rocks you are looking at bubbled out of the depths of the earth in 1960. And a few miles from where I took this photo, you can walk on parts of the earth that were formed an hour ago. (The walk is imaginary given that the stones would melt your shoes.)

For me, the paradox of Hawaii is the lushness of so many parts of the island juxtaposed with the seeming bareness of places pictured here. But in the 55 years since the eruption that formed this ground, if you look closely, you will see that life is abundant. Give this area another half million years and watch out! It will be a jungle. Maybe.

Isn’t it odd that the “maybe” in that last statement is up to us and the choices we make today about preserving our planet? What took billions of years to form might be destroyed by 200 years of human inattention.

Canon 5DIII 1/15s f/16.0 ISO200 100mm

01-07-16 Into the Woods

Dark and mysterious? That’s how I saw it. You may have seen something else. (read more)

By Scott Shephard

Not too far from the place I captured in yesterday’s photo, I found this location. And, like many things I see in Hawaii, it is amazingly photogenic. This road is called Pohoiki Road and runs for a few miles though trees that arch over and shade the road.

I am fascinated by this place and suspect that the locals who drive this road every day don’t even notice its mystery and beauty. That leaves me wondering what we in the Northern Plains see every day that a person born and raised on the Big Island would be impressed with? Miles of flatland, covered in wheat, corn and sunflowers? Frozen lakes that you can walk on? Thunder and lightning? Lingering twilight that seems to last for hours in midsummer? All of these and many more are bound to impress.

Canon 5DIII 2s f/16.0 ISO400 24mm

01-06-6 So Many Textures

Can you call yourself a photographer when you don’t take your camera out of the bag? (read more)

By Scott Shephard

The most important part of getting a decent photo is getting the camera out of the bag. For me, believe it or not, that hasn’t been a regular thing for the two weeks we’ve been on the Big Island in Hawaii.

And so this morning just before sunrise I told Deb I was going out to look for photos. She asked, “Where?” and I said, “I don’t know. Maybe the lava fields nearby.” But the lava fields didn’t call me. Instead, I ended up at a place called Isaac Hale Park. I got out of the car (without my camera) walked out onto the rocky shore and watched the surf roll in.

I was actually back in the car with the motor running when my inner photographer voice, which I had put on mute weeks ago, asked, “Really?! You’re too lazy to take a photo of this?” I ended up taking many more here but this is the first one I processed.

There’s a lot going on in this photo – maybe too much. But at least I took my camera out of the bag . . . 

Canon 5DIII f/16.0 ISO100 28mm (3 bracketed exposures combined in HDR Efex 2)