A small pod of dolphins in the beautiful blue ocean of Hawaii

Around 1000 ft off of the Honokohau harbor coastline I saw 4 boats clustered together and the passengers quickly jumping into the water to swim around a very large pod of dolphins. I hadn’t flown the drone out that far and was extremely surprised when there were no problems with signal. I totally expected the drone controller to notify me that I had reached my distance limit and to fly closer, but instead I saw these beautiful dolphins swimming in the beautiful blue ocean on my iPad screen. There must have been 30-40 dolphins along with 20 snorkelers in black wet suits all scattered around in the water. I lowered the drone to around 30 ft above a small pod dolphins which were swimming around very quickly. I was only able to capture this one shot before they swam out of view.

Super cool!

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Check out my Humpback Whale post for more.

An aerial perspective of one of my favorite locations.

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This large hole in the coastline rocks makes for a very interesting landscape shot. The ocean water surges into the opening forcing the turquoise water to pillow up and spill over the seaweed and cracks in the lava. Then the water drains back into the hole and seemingly disappears. This is when I would typically take a 1 sec exposure in order to blur the water into a silky stream as it falls into the hole while the remaining curls of sea foam fizzle out where they wrapped themselves in the rocks. I have done this exercise for over five years at this and other locations along this coastline with many different compositions and views, however, I have never captured aerial photographs of this coastline.

I often wondered what it would look like from above and would envision building a scaffold over the large hole to shoot from that angle. Never once did I think of using a drone until I got the DJI Spark drone for a birthday gift. I flew it around a few other locations I had photographed before and was amazed at how much fun it was to create at this new angle. They it dawned on me to photograph these locations. This is the first of the 6 blowholes I want to capture from the air.

Check out “Golden Hour” to see a sunset shot from the ground.

© Christopher Johnson