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The life of an amateur photographer in Hawaii must be depressing — some of the best photo ops are underwater.  Without a crazy-expensive setup consisting of an underwater housing and lights, there’s practically zero probability that you’ll take home a great photograph.  Every store has an 800-speed disposable camera at the checkout line, but you’ll be lucky to get a few pictures for the photo album with those.  There’s no real use in blowing up one of those dark and grainy images.

What can be done?  Take your camera to the Maui Ocean Center!

Oksana and I decided to spend half a day wandering around the aquarium.  Initially I was skeptical, but it turned out to be money well spent.  There’s hammerhead shark tanks and green sea turtle pens.  There’s a massive pool with all manner of sharks and rays and a transparent tube you could walk through as you marvel at them.  One never-ending series of darkened rooms held small, well-lit tanks containing all sorts of rarities you’d probably never see while snorkeling:   shrimp and lobster, octopi, anemones, seahorses, glowing jellyfish, sand worms, and the like.  We both had fun trading off the camera for the camcorder.

Shooting in an aquarium has its own problems, though.  With a tripod (which I didn’t have, anyway), one would be forced into using slow shutter speeds.  For fish that just sit there, that’d be fine, but most underwater life tends to move around… and blur.  You can always shoot handheld with a flash, though… and get a nice bright reflection in the glass.

So how did I manage to get this picture?  Just lucky, I guess.  I was snapping pictures of Oksana posing in front of the glass, getting bright flash spots or blurry fish in every one.  It wasn’t really bothering me, though, because we weren’t going for high art, just some “I been there” photos for the inevitable Hawaii photo album.  Oksana stepped away and I lowered my camera… and suddenly the tranquil aquarium burst into action.  Within maybe three seconds, colorful fish appeared out of nowhere, darted left and right, all flashes of color and motion.  I never saw what riled them up — feeding time or maybe a predator — but I did manage to bring the camera back up and snap a few pictures.  There had been no time to think about flash, aperture, and shutter speed, I just went with the previous settings on the camera.  Seconds later, the aquarium was back to normal.

EXIF data reveals that my camera’s iris was wide open and the shutter speed was set for 1/100th of a second.  That’s darn near the perfect setting for this situation.  Any faster and the exposure would have been too dark, any slower and the fish would have blurred (via their movements or the movements of my hand), and a flash would have reflected in the glass.  Lucky.

Canon Digital Rebel XT
Date: 11 August 2005
Focal Length: 25mm
Shutter: 1/100 second
Aperture: F/4
ISO: 1600
Photoshop: Auto color, Minor blurring of red and blue channels to reduce ISO noise

Continue reading to see some examples of what didn’t work…

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Twice now, I’ve visited Cuba, and twice I’ve spent some time in Trinidad.  It’s a beautiful colonial town in central Cuba, just a couple miles from the coast.  There’s a church on the hill, cobblestones on the streets, and picturesque landscapes and architecture around every corner.

On my first visit, I spent a lot of time moving around the central plaza with my 35mm camera.  There’s a wonderful bell and clock tower at one corner and I was continually trying to find the best angle on it.  I eventually found one; it’s now framed and hanging on the wall in my home office.

Four years later, my camera had changed, but the view in Trinidad was mostly the same.  I amused myself by trying to find the exact spot where I’d taken the first picture, then set out to frame something new.

There’s a museum in the base of the bell tower — something I’m not sure I was aware of on the first trip.  My companions and I paid a few dollars to go inside, hoping we’d get a chance to climb the tower.  Despite the rickety stairs and often a lack of handrails, tourists are, indeed allowed up.  Not all the way, though; the top room with the clock was barred with a trapdoor and a hefty padlock.

We stepped out onto the museum roof and paced around the edges.  From there we had a wonderful view of the terra cotta tile rooftops and the lush green countryside.  (Not to mention an ancient, rusty air raid siren.)  Walking back down the stairs, I stopped at the oval window we’d skipped on the way up.  I had to climb half into the cement ring to take an unobstructed picture of the courtyard below.  When I climbed back out, I took another picture to remember what the window was like.

I like the cement window frame better than the original.  It gives the viewer an interesting perspective, and in combination with the other photo I took years before, tells an interesting story.  Looking back and forth between them, I can identify the exact location where I took each picture!

Canon Powershot s30
Date: 27 December 2003
Focal Length: 8.6mm
Shutter: 1/1000 second
Aperture: F/3.2
Photoshop: Adjusted levels slightly to deepen the black edging

My grandparents have a cottage on the beach in Nags Head, North Carolina.  It’s one of the places I think of as “home,” and I try to get back there as often as possible.  Nags Head has grown up a lot in my lifetime — it’s actually quite crowded in the summer now — but photogenic scenes still abound.

As a kid, I was always given a downstairs or back room in the cottage.  On the last couple visits, however, I was given what I still consider to be an “adult” bedroom.  (Not because I was all grown up; I’m still in the third generation down on the totem pole!  I was simply the oldest family member visiting at the time.)  Other than my grandparents’ room, this is the only room facing the ocean.  At night you can open the windows and let the salt air and surf lull you to sleep.  Early in the morning, the sunlight pours into the room as the sun climbs up out of the ocean.

I’m not a morning person.  Given the choice, I’ll take my camera out of its bag for the latter golden hour.  I spent most of my last Nags Head vacation reading in the hammock.  I never built up the motivation to go out picture hunting.  But on my last morning there, that warm, bright sunlight came streaming in the windows and pulled me out of bed.  One last walk in the sand before heading off to the airport.

The Nags Head pier is only about a half mile down the beach from the cottage.  On a morning with a calm, featureless ocean and an empty expanse of sand, it was the only obvious photography subject.  I walked up to it, under it, right beside it, trying to find the best way to fit both it and the morning sun into frame.  I took about a dozen photos, varying the exposure and switching between portrait and landscape shots.  This was my favorite.

I like that the guy casting his pole creates a little bit of action for the scene (in the 8 MegaPixel original, you can just barely make out the fishing line.)  I like the small details, like the seagulls waiting on the rail, and the guy on the end of the pier with his pole pointed straight down.  Often, digital cameras add weird color gradients to pictures of the sun.  I love how the red and yellow rings came through on this one.

There was only one thing I didn’t like, and it was easily removed.  There used a small smudge in the sky above the cast fishing line.  I’m almost positive it couldn’t have been a fingerprint on the lens — the photos taken before and after this one are clean.  Perhaps it was a small bug, passing in front of my camera, I don’t know.  At any rate, Photoshop’s healing brush made quick work of it.  I also used Photoshop’s Level tools to darken the shadows just a tad.  It gives the photo just a little bit more of that silhouette feel.

Canon Digital Rebel XT
Date: 30 June 2006; 6:20am
Focal Length: 55mm
Shutter: 1/800 second
Aperture: F/5.6
Photoshop:  Levels adjustment, removed small, blurry smudge in sky

Jeez, I just realized that all the photos I’ve posted so far have some sort of body of water in them!  Well, except Moscow Thunderstorms, but even in that one you could argue that rain was in the background.  I gotta find a dry picture next week.

The day my Canon XT was scheduled to arrive was the day we planned to leave for a 3-day weekend up Taku River.  UPS opted not to leave the package at our door that afternoon, so our only recourse was to try to pick it up sometime after the truck returned to the warehouse.  I managed to get my hands on it with barely an hour left before we had to leave.  The XT’s proprietary batteries were the same ones used in the Canon s-series, so I borrowed a charger from a friend who owned an s70 just so I could begin charging all three batteries.  Within 45 minutes I had at least a partial charge on each.  I had no idea if they’d last through the weekend and the cabin we were going to had no electricity.

That weekend, I mostly shot on auto as I learned how to use the new camera.  Two of the days were grey and overcast, but Saturday was beautiful.  I woke up at 5:30am for some reason, and looked out the window.  The sun was just rising over the mountains behind the cabin, and only a few wisps of clouds painted the sky.  The air was still and the river was so flat that the reflections in it were almost mirror quality.  I crept downstairs and out the door, hoping that I could catch a few “golden hour” photos.

While everyone else slept, I stood on the banks of the Taku and experimented with my new camera’s settings.  I also peed behind a tree.

Often, when I’m looking through my photos, I pass by pictures like this with barely a second thought.  I think it’s because landscapes like this are common where I live (at least when it’s not raining), and I don’t appreciate them as much as the exotic (to me) landscapes I see while on vacation.  I’m thinking about my reaction to the HAVO Lights picture I posted last week.  Do I enjoy that photo because it’s a good photo, or do my memories of the evening tint my appreciation of it?  The opposite may be true here.  Does this picture capture something special or is it just another blasé Southeast Alaska composition?  I don’t know if I can trust own opinion.

Who cares?  I can enjoy this picture for its instructional merits.  This was one of the first photos I took that pushed the XT’s exposure latitude to its extremes.  I like that the snow on the mountains maintains almost all of its color information, while the deep dark tree line just barely has any detail left.  In the original, the log jutting from the river was inky, too, but in my Photoshop experimentations, I decided to apply a curves-based gradient from the bottom edge of the image to the shoreline.  In effect, this lightened the lower half of the image — pulling out some detail in that log — without overexposing the snowy highlights above.

I also applied warming filter (85) after the fact.  It added just a hint of color that I (romantically, perhaps) think was there at sunrise, anyway.  Besides, with the exception of the sunlit trees on the left, the domination of blue and whites made for a chilly photograph.  It seemed an injustice to such a warm, Memorial Day weekend. 

Oh, and those batteries?  I shouldn’t have worried.  Since the XT is an SLR, it hardly uses any juice.  Compared to the point-and-shoot s30, which uses its LCD screen for practically everything, it seems like I hardly ever have to recharge.

Canon Digital Rebel XT
Date: 28 May 2005; 5:31am
Focal Length: 55mm
Shutter: 1/400 second
Aperture: F/14
ISO: 400
Photoshop: Applied Warming Filter #85, brightened lower half of image.

Click “more” for a comparison of the final image to the original.

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The great tourist myth of Hawaii, perpetrated by all the television travel documentaries, is that you’ll see rivers of flowing lava.  Indeed you will, if you go to any of the museums with video display terminals.  Apparently, the really fantastic displays occur, oh, every ten or twenty years.  And when they do, cars are piled up for miles and miles as even the locals cram closer for a look.

That’s not to say that you won’t get a chance to see some geothermal activity if you visit.  A heli-tour over Kilauea might give you a peek down into its active crater.  Sulfur steam vents abound in Hawaii’s Volcano National park.  And if it’s the frozen black lava you’re after…  Well!  The Big Island’s got more of that than you can imagine.

One of my favorite nights on Kona was spent watching lava spill into the sea.  The active craters of Kilauea are miles inland, but underground lava tubes transport a steady stream of molten rock to the sea.  Where it meets the water, a huge cloud of steam billows upward.  Due to a terrible parking space, we had to hurry to get out onto the lava field before dark.

Canon Digital Rebel XT
Date: 16 August 2005
Focal Length: 48mm
Shutter: 30 seconds
Aperture: F/4.5
Photoshop: Cropped, minor cloning away of lens artifacts,
somewhat extensive use of burn/dodge tools (never exceeding 30%)

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Just after I managed to sell a framed print of one of my panoramas, I seriously thought about upgrading my digital camera.  By that point, I’d left hand-stitching in Photoshop behind because Autostich made assembling panoramas so much easier.  If I could iron out the work-flow, I deluded myself, I might be able to crank out salable photography on a regular basis!   I’d been shooting for years on a Canon PowerShot s30, and it was great for what it was: a tiny point-and-shoot with a tiny lens.  I longed for the days of SLR focusyness, but definitely didn’t want to go back to the 35mm work-flow.

Those were the thoughts in the back my head when we took a trip to Ketchikan.  Oksana and I made a point of getting out on a sunny day and hitting some photogenic spots.  We did Creek Street and Totem Bight, of course, but later I realized something.  My first panorama of the Mendenhall Glacier was an anomaly; it’s actually pretty damn hard to find a good panorama subject!  Creek street bowed out toward the camera (artifacts of perspective; I was too close to my subject) and the only position where I could fit the whole of Totem Bight’s park into frame ended up with the lodge dominating the shot.

At least cruise season hadn’t yet begun.  The docks downtown were completely empty.  We walked out to the end of one and I snapped off a row of pictures facing toward iconic Deer Mountain and Thomas Basin.  It was a great day for photographs.  The sun was at my back and even the normally gray Ketchikan sky decided to cooperate by sending up some puffy white clouds to fill in that expansive blue void.

When I first saw the completed picture, I worried about that radio tower in front of the mountain.  I thought about cloning it out, but anyone from Ketchikan would be quick to notice.  I see a few other imperfections (snow’s a bit overexposed, I’m not sold on the building in the left foreground, and I wish there were at least one more cloud to fill the upper right), but overall I really like this photo.

You know, tourists are rewarded with this exact view when they step off the cruise ships.  I’ll bet one or two might consider buying a print.  Some gallery owner in Ketchikan should hook me up.

Canon Powershot s30
Date: 17 April 2005
Focal Length: 10mm
Shutter: 1/318 second
Aperture: F/6.3
Photoshop:  Stitching of 9 images, Minor color correction

This is one of the last panoramas I shot on my s30 before I convinced Oksana that we should upgrade to a Canon XT.

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Six months ago, I took my fancy-schmacy 8 MegaPixel digital SLR out to take pictures of the Independence Day fireworks show.  Except for leaving my cable release at home, I was completely prepared.  The weather was clear, I had a tripod, and thanks to a friend, we established ourselves in the perfect vantage point: The top floor balcony of the Juneau Public Library.  We had an unhindered view of the channel and I had more than enough time before the show to test out different exposure settings. The above picture is not from that night.  The half-assed snapshots I took in 2004 came out far better. After looking at them, I think it’s because I was exposing for what I saw that night rather than exposing for an aesthetically pleasing fireworks photograph.  It never gets truly dark during the summer in Alaska, so the sky was still bright when the fireworks started at midnight.  I thought the cold blue of the sky was great and exposed my pictures to keep it intact.  Unfortunately, the fireworks were brighter and when the blue of the background sky was kept, the fireworks themselves couldn’t avoid being overexposed. The photo above was taken with a 3-MegaPixel point-and-shoot.  Of course, I didn’t just point and shoot with it; I know how to use the PowerShot s30’s manual controls.  But the shooting conditions were less than ideal, that night.  It was a drizzly and my “tripod” was a staircase railing up on the hillside.  My pivot head was a quarter.  And yet… so many of the pictures turned out that it was difficult to choose a favorite from a directory full of 4th of July photos. Because of the rain, it was dark enough that night that I didn’t even notice the tree on the left until after the first picture was displayed on the LCD screen.  Even choosing my focus point was difficult — I had to wait for the light from the next explosion before my camera could auto-focus again.   Despite all that I got good pictures!  The sky is nice and dark (but still with a tinge of blue), which accentuates the colors of the fireworks.  The silhouette of the tree definitely adds to the composition.  Even the smoke trails seem to align within the rule of thirds.  Lucky, I guess. Canon Powershot s30 Date: 4 July 2002 Focal Length: 12.3mm Shutter: 6 seconds Aperture: F/3.5 Photoshop: Cropped from 4:3 to 3:2, Minor color correction