It was a lovely trip, and gave me a chance to shoot things I probably otherwise wouldn’t. I tend to do more “people” shots but this was (of course) a big opportunity for landscapes (and seascapes!), nature stuff, and baby photos. And skimboarding!
Enjoy.
I posted a few weeks ago with links and instructions for figuring out where the sun will go down. While in Hawaii I wanted to take some moonrise shots, so did some research on how to do the same sort of thing for the moon.
One major difference here is that while the sun moves (in relation to the horizon, and in relation to time) very little from one day to another, the moon comes up about an hour later each day. That seemed wierd to me at first, but when you think about it, a lunar month is 28 days, and there are 24 hours in the day, so I guess it makes sense. Unless I completely don’t get it at all and that’s a coincidence, which is possible.
In any case:
If you plan to do this repeatedly, it might be handy to have a table of moonrise/set times for an entire year, which you can get here.
The map part is harder–that map is for a solar calculator and therefore doesn’t play automatically populate moon azimuths (azimi?). But, it can be approximated by fudging the numbers, and the rest of the instructions (related to using a compass) work the same way.
One of the coolest things I did in Hawaii (this time) was stumble upon the Hawaii Amateur Skimboarding League’s Victoria Skimboards Dangerous Shorebreak competition at Sandy Beach. If you’re unfamiliar with skimboarding, or specifically with dangerous break skimboarding, this video shows some of last year’s competition.
I was shooting into the sun (which was high in the sky), so the waves were lit from behind; there was plenty of light, so a fast shutter speed was no problem; and the competitors were close to the shore, so it was easy to get lots of detail. After having some success with my Sigma 70-300 last week with the kitesurfers, I grabbed it again to get in close. Same technique–burst shooting and AI Servo mode. I’m SO happy with the lot of these!
A couple of favorites:
And the whole album:
Four things united only by their presence in this post. Well, that, and the fact that I’ve photographed them in the last couple of days.
My…uh…neice-in-law?
The infamous Shrimp Truck (Giovanni’s, of course):
The beach at Kaena point - at this point my polarizing filter was covered in mist, but I actually quite like the effect:
And, my brother’s pistol. California people, please don’t be offended by the gun…I’m not making a political statement, just practicing my product photography.
It was windy as can be today, but I HAD to get to the beach. Adam and I went down there to check it out and the water was FULL of kitesurfers. So awesome!
I used my 70-300mm craptastic Sigma lens for this. This is the first lens I ever bought, when I was in London and thought I might not be back for awhile and wanted to get some different shots, and when the only criteria were mm and price. This lens is disappointing because the contrast suuuuuucks. BUT, 300mm isn’t bad so it’s still nice to have–and the autofocus is fairly quick. I set this up on AI Servo with burst shooting. That meant boring framing and planning to crop–which was fine because I knew I’d want to zoom in more anyway. Getting around the lousy contrast required some tweaking, but since these are RAW files, I think they’re still acceptable–if I was serious about this kind of photography I’d invest in something else, but for zero extra dollars, it’s not bad.
Regardless of all the lens business, kitesurfing is dramatic and fantastic, and this was a great opportunity to watch and practice my action shots.
