FROMHEREONIN.com :: BLOG

These images are the result of one morning’s shoot.
I went to a new location by the Honokohau Harbor Beach, also known as Dog Sh!$ Beach, because I was told there was a bird sanctuary. While walking in I could hear all the birds waking up for the sunrise, but I couldn’t see them or find them without a great struggle. Instead I decided to look for a good place to set up my tripod before the sun came up to shoot the landscape. At first I couldn’t find anything inspiring, just the same old shots I keep running into… lava and water, but then I settled down amongst these large rounded lava stones. While the magic of the sunrise began, my inspiration grew.
I set out for a completely different purpose and ended up with some shots that I am proud of. Enjoy,
chris

These three images are representative of many faces and image possibilities of one location. I stood on some large rocks for two reasons this morning. One so I could capture the reflections of the pink sky in the small pools of water and to keep my feet dry. Ordinarily I would be in the water allowing for edge to edge movement as the water rushes past me. Of course, when going this close to the waves, I get wet when one rogue wave arrives unannounced, but that is all part of the enjoyment.

With water I am always trying to capture movement and this morning was nothing different. Unfortunately that when I fall into a system of shooting I continue to shoot the same way, which causes me to miss a lot of opportunities. This morning was no exception. I aligned myself in a spot where the water was washing over the rocks toward me with the intention of capturing a silky flow of water, like a lot of my other images. After a few images I reviewed the LCD screen and felt like I didn’t have the shot. I began to review the scene for what I wanted out of this shot and then realized something magical, something I wasn’t even noticing, something that originally drew me up on top of the rocks in the first place. The reflections from the pools of water. Duh!
With the water violently cascading over these pools I was eliminating the possibility of adding color to the foreground of my image. My focus and timing changed. Instead of shooting during a wave break I was waiting for water to calm. Now I felt I had the shot I wanted. I contemplated moving to another location, however, with the sun rising the pink tones were rapidly fading. By the time I moved and set up, the awesomeness would be over. Instead I decided on using a different lens. A telephoto lens for a different approach. This way I was able to focus more on the pools of color with more detail of the rocks and sea life without moving. 

The moral of my morning adventure would be to keep an open eye for new possibilities around you and use all the available tools. Every location has many faces to capture.

 

I thought I would handle this image as a panoramic image instead of the normal framing in-order to capture the magnificence of the plumes the lava creates as it meets the ocean.
As we were heading down toward Kalapana, I new we were getting close when I saw these plumes of smoke rising into the air. My heart began to race with excitement. The last time I was able to view the lava flow was 8 years ago from inside the Volcano National Park from five miles away. This time I would maybe be a mile from the action. I heard stories of people being able to stand next to the lava as it flowed by them, however, that was not the case for me this time. We stood at a distance behind a barrier because the ground, or I guess older lava, was beginning to become unstable. I would have liked to be closer, but deep down I did feel uneasy about being in the path of a potential future lava flow. It could happen at any moment I’ve been told. Needless to say, I worked with what I had.
Creating panoramic images with a 35mm format camera is a technique I love to accomplish, however, the plumes created a challenge for me. With the momentary changing shapes of the clouds I needed to act fast. Usually when shooting in preparation for a panoramic image I need some consistency with the subject to allow for metering to obtain balanced exposures and continual tone and for deciding my splice points. However, this was not the case in this situation. The plumes move so fast that my shots had to be simultaneously taken to minimize movement between shots. This task was daunting, but in the end rewarding.
With my 150mm lens and circular polarizer I framed up for what would be the first image and immediately panned left across the ocean horizon as a test run, quickly visualizing the final image. I was ready and began shooting. With a few runs I was sure I had some images to work with, so I continued to move on to photograph my family and other scenes.
Back at the computer I knew I had the shot when I saw the three consistent images ready for splicing together. I initially used the photomerge software with Photoshop, however, I wasn’t impressed with the final output. Instead I merged the images together myself.
The final image is my view of this powerful scene on the Big Island of Hawaii and… yes, I will be back. Hopefully to view the actual lava flow.

Have you ever seen something that you just had to take a picture of but never did because of what ever reason? I can tell you that this has happened to me too many times. What is stupid is that most of the time I end up talking myself out of taking the picture. “You are going to look stupid getting that picture.” or “Everyone is watching.” or “Why would you waste your time.” or the best one is… “I’ll get it next time.”
…Next time? When will that be? I’ll tell you that sometimes ‘next time’ never comes, so my advise is to “get it while you can.” Here is a perfect example.
I was out on the beach with my family and I continued to look over at the enormous tree leaning over the water thinking that I should photograph it. The lighting condition wasn’t the best and there was a family sitting near the location I would be photographing from. I began to explain to myself that the family doesn’t want some guy interfering with their time of relaxation. Maybe I’ll get it next time. Time went on and I still found myself drawn to that tree until I remembered what my photography teacher told me. “Whenever you see something that you just have to photograph, whether it be a work of art or just a snapshot… take the time and get the shot. There might not be a next time.”
With that in mind I wandered over next to the family and began composing the scene I wanted to shoot and ‘zing pop shabango!’ My shot was complete.
“OK, so now you got your shot… what?”
Well the next time I went back to that beach to see the tree relaxing over the ocean, the tree had died. It was no longer as grand as I saw it when I was inspired. Now it just lays waste over the rocks. In this case, and in most cases, there is no next time… Get it while you can.

“I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing… it’s been too long.” I told my wife.
So there I was in the midst of a beautiful sunset and I didn’t know how to handle it. It has been two years since I last went to shoot the landscape and now I have almost forgotten how to address the technical situations of shooting the sunset against a dark foreground. I had several attempts, but they turned out unsuccessful, so instead of accepting defeat, I decided to turn to a different subject.
In hopes of seeing the moon rise, and potentially capturing it, I put my back to the sunset. Previously I tried to photograph this hill with the hiking trail imbedded on it with no success. This time appeared to be the same. I was beginning to feel another defeated moment with the mundane compositions I was achieving when I noticed the two warning signs.
Leaning because of the wind and illuminated by the sunset I grabbed a nice foreground focus to offset the darkness of the background. I especially like the way the posts gradually disappear into the dark and together make another diagonal line to help draw the eyes around the image. I got a nice shot, at least I think I did.

With my success… I think I will go to the lava flow next weekend.

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man,” said Albert Einstein.

I didn’t even know that Albert Einstein had any involvement in the bees way of life until I went to see ‘The Happening’. Alarmingly enough there is something to this bee thing. Just this morning my family and I went to the beach and while my youngest was playing in the sand she got stung by a dead bee. When I notified my wife she mentioned that my oldest got stung by a dead bee yesterday on a different beach and that there were handfuls of dead bees everywhere along the beach. I didn’t really know what to make of this. First my main concern was that my daughter was alright, but then it got me thinking.

What could be causing this? 

I am only going to speculate… our desire to manipulate the natural process of this world is leading us to disaster. We need to stop.

“According to Hans-Hinrich Kaatz, a professor at the University of Halle in eastern Germany and the director of the study, the bacterial toxin in the genetically modified corn may have altered the surface of the bee’s intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry — or perhaps it was the other way around. We don’t know.”

Kaatz was desperate to continue his studies but funding was cut off.

It doesn’t surprise me that funding was cut off because of the enormity of the agriculture business, especially with regard to the GMO seeds. You can’t interfere with a billionaire’s wallet. How will we ever get to the bottom of anything when industry gets in the way and our politician won’t stand for our best interests? 

 

Visible Earth

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Carl Sagan, May 11, 1996

Seems like something we should all ponder before we begin tripping over one another.

Image Credit NASA JP:
This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’, is a part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager’s great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters — violet, blue and green — and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.

Mauna Kea, meaning White Mountain in the Hawaiian language, rests at 13,796 feet which makes it the tallest mountain in the world when measuring from the base to the summit. On top of this peak is the Mauna Kea Observatories. The climate is prime for astrological studies, so top researchers from all over the world come to Mauna Kea to study the stars through their state-of-the-art telescopes.
Then there was me with my 200mm telescope, capable of seeing… well their telescopes. I believe I put up some competition.
It was strange to, at one instant, be at sea level on a beach in the sun to being almost 14,000 feet on top of a mountain in the cold looking down at the beach I was on. Of course I was a little loopy from the lack of oxygen, and even through the next day, but being up there was amazing. We sat through the sunset and waited long enough to see the stars begin to pierce the darkening sky. Millions and millions of stars. It really makes you feel small. We are just one piece in a large puzzle.

Of course I didn’t have my tripod, but at least I had my camera. To take these shots I rested my camera on my bag and I had to lie on my stomach. I don’t recommend using your bag as a tripod because there is no way of stopping camera shake, but if you do be sure to use the timer. This will give your camera enough time to steady itself before it takes the shot. There still is a small amount of camera shake in these images, but I don’t intend on enlarging them. I am planning another trip for some better images.