Up High

If you look closely you’ll see a little dot in the upper right of the picture near the top edge.  The hang glider is over 2000 feet high.

 

A Challenge

Outdoor photography can be challenging more so when subjects aren’t static.  You’ll find plenty of advice for landscape photography.  It assumes you’re deciding where and when you point your lens at a subject.  You also have the luxury of manually setting your aperture and shutter.  Even some outdoor activities operate in a “controlled” environment.  Activities like baseball and soccer take place within a defined area where the light doesn’t change to a significant degree over the course of a game. Then there are activities like hang gliding and paragliding where the conditions can change as the wings move across a sky that is rarely static.  Ideally a blue sky with some puffy white clouds is the best condition.  That’s when the automatic focus works to perfection and noise is nonexistent. The less than ideal is when you really have to work at it.  This image is an example of that.  The paraglider has landed with me looking into the sun. That is a problem under these conditions because the ridge is in deep shadow Since I’m  on shutter priority my aperture sets itself in kind. But the aperture on my zoom lens opens only so wide.  Fortunately, the sun over the wing gives a nice sunburst effect along with the lens flare which leads the eye down to the paraglider pilot.  I could have cropped out hang glider wing at the bottom but I like the added dimension and context it gives the scene.  The image out of the camera had a much darker foreground because my aperture could only open so much.  However with the help of Lightroom and the Graduated Filter Tool I could lighten the foreground as you see it without noise becoming an issue.   

Molokai Channel Rainbow

 

Fishing at Cockroach Bay

 

Wide View

No Parking-1

Whale watching spot

Hawaii is over half way thru Whale Watching season.  A prime spot to see whales on Oahu is Makapuu Point.  Here’s a panorama I took standing on the lookout directly above Makapuu Lighthouse and facing mauka. To the right is the Windward side of Oahu.

 

Makapuu Panorama

                                                                               A panorama of Makapuu looking across the Molokai Channel to Molokai and West Maui

When only a panorama will do

Last August waiting for my hang gliding friends to land at the Kaupo Beach LZ there were some great cloud formations to the north of us.  However, it just couldn’t be captured in one shot.

 

Surfer Memorial

Vertical Panorama 2

On Wednesday of this week (9/16) I assisted a couple of my Hang Gliding friends launch from Kamehame Ridge above Waimanalo.  Being a beautiful clear morning I decided to walk to a higher point along the ridge known as “Three Poles”.  On days like this you’re rewarded for your effort with a view of the eastern most point of Oahu looking towards Molokai across the Molokai Channel.

Capturing this view in one shot is beyond the capability of my photo gear.  Instead, using my wide angle lens 17-35 (effectively 25-52 on my Sony A700) I made a series of vertical shots.  After importing the 23 shots into Lightroom for processing the individual exposures I ran them in the Photoshop CS4 merge to Panorama action.