Most of the sunsets I shoot fizzle out pretty quickly after the sun disappears below the horizon. Very few have just lingered and turned the clouds different shades of red and orange after the sun was long gone.
I've only seen two in my life that seemed to go on forever. One was in Fiji several years ago, and the other was last night, at Makena Cove.
I didn't think it was going to end. The colors kept deepening as the light faded, enabling me to make longer and longer exposures to catch the ethereal, wispy feel of the waves crashing over the lava rocks.
Here's a series of 3 shots, taken about 5 minutes apart. Notice how the light changes.
There were two weddings going on simultaneously at the cove, so this shoot was a little nerve-wracking with people running back and forth in front of my lens. I was there with Meliezza Walker, who kept moving around, trying to get a better (clear) angle. I decided to just camp out in one spot and hope for the best.
Last week, I went on a photowalk with a new friend and fellow photographer Meliezza Walker, who is on vacation in Maui with her family. We decided to do another one before she left, but this one turned out to be more of a sunset portrait shoot.
As photographers, we don't often get to be on the business end of the lens and it can be an unsettling experience. It's well worth doing every so often, because we can get so wrapped up in shooting session after session, that we forget what it's like for our clients.
For me, it's always fun having another photographer in front of the camera (or vice versa), because we both know the craft and can exchange ideas and thoughts about our individual styles while we shoot. Doing this kind of thing once in a while can make you a better photographer.
When was the last time you were in front of the lens instead of behind it?
Okay, so it was more like a photo "drive" with walking happening at various intervals, but I like to call these trips photowalks nevertheless.
I'm not the kind of guy who makes a big deal out of birthdays. In fact, I tend to shy away from the usual attention that brings and just go off on my own, doing whatever I feel like and nothing I don't feel like (the latter being what I consider special about the day).
I usually strap on a tank and get wet, but there was a south swell, which would have made for mediocre diving and crappy photography, so I packed a couple of bodies (to minimize lens changes in the field), a few lenses, my ND grads, an Expodisc and a tripod, and took off down the highway toward Hana—something I don't do often.
I don't usually shoot in the meat of the day, preferring to catch the magic of the first dawn and sunset light, but I told myself today wasn't serious... I was just out to have some fun (meaning it was permissible not to set off in the o'dark to catch first light). It's a good challenge anyway, shooting out in the harsh light, and the weather changes quickly on that side of the island, so never really know what the light will be like.
Our Moosh departed for the Rainbow Bridge at around noon today, after bringing immense joy to our lives for 11 years.
Her IBD had progressed to the point where trips to the litter box were so painful, she would throw up in reaction, making it almost impossible to keep any nutrients in her frail body.
We had a glimmer of hope a few days ago, when we discovered that she could (and would) eat raw marlin (her favorite besides ahi). For several days before that, she was eating maybe a tablespoon of prescription cat food per day, then throwing it all up. Our hopes were dashed day before yesterday, when she threw up the fish and stopped eating altogether.
IBD often progresses into lymphoma, and we suspect that's where she was with this, but it's hard to know for sure without a biopsy, and there was no way she could withstand that at this stage. The most we could do was to help her manage the pain and try to keep her as comfortable as possible.
Sometime last week, she let out a shrill yowl out of nowhere in the middle of the night after a trip to the litter box, and it became obvious she was in pain most, if not all of the time. We couldn't let her live in constant pain, and we couldn't let her starve herself to death. It was time.
Right to the end, she was constantly looking for ways to ignore the illness and just have things be normal. This morning, we woke to find her on our bathroom counter waiting for us to turn on the faucet for her, then she went down the stairs into the family room and looked out the window with Truffle, part of her normal morning routine.
It wasn't long however, before she retired to the futon, and finally underneath the guest room bed, where she'd been hiding from the world the last few weeks. Neither Kathy nor I could get her the least bit interested in food.
After losing Widgit, Moosh was the last real tie we had to our life in California. Our world will never be the same without her. Truffle, for her part, kept trying to get Moosh to play with her, as if playing would make everything okay. As we learned from Widgit's passing, when you can't play anymore, it's simply time to go to the Rainbow Bridge.
Aloha, dear loved one. Thank you for the cherished memories. You'll always be our sweet baby Moosh. A hui hou...
Day before yesterday, I went on a sunset photowalk in Makena with my new friend and fellow photographer Meliezza Walker, who is on her yearly visit to Maui with her family.
We scouted out a few possible sites to use for her family portrait and took a few test shots, then stopped to photograph the sunset at one of my favorite spots.
In this shot, the sun had just disappeared behind Lana'i, and you have a clear view of Molokini straight ahead in the distance. The clouds are usually too moisture-laden to flare at all, but on this particular day, they turned a nice shade of orange-red for us.
Last week, this photo I made in Kona, Hawai'i won the Monterey Bay Aquarium's World Ocean Day Photo Contest on Flickr, themed "One Ocean, One Climate, One Future".
This endangered Green Sea Turtle is being cleaned by Yellow Tangs and Gold-ring Surgeonfish. This symbiotic behavior keeps the turtles free of algae and parasites while providing a food source for the fish.
It's a delicate balance, easily upset by something as seemingly innocuous as feeding the fish while snorkeling. This disrupts their normal behavior by making the fish more dependent on humans than the turtles or some other natural food source.
The turtles face threats such as the harvest of their eggs, and being tangled in nets and other fishing gear, causing them to drown.
