The view from Kaaawa
We were on our daily walk down to the beach here in Kaaawa to watch the sunrise, and ran into a family we know setting up for a birthday party for their two-year old.At first, I worried about the way this photo cuts off the background, then decided I like the way it only hints at what’s happening back there. And the early light on the main subjects happened to be just right. That part was pure luck.
This is one of a series of photos of the banyan standing between the Hawaii State Capitol and Iolani Palace and next to the archives building.
During much of the day, it’s just a big unkempt tree sitting between two parts of an out of the way parking lot, littered with typical urban debris and giving off the occasional smell of urine, an obstacle to get past or around on your way to or from the adjacent buildings.
But I’ve noticed that in the late afternoon, when the sun is lower in the sky and light begins to filter through its many trunks and branches, this tree takes on a whole new aspect. I’ve tried several times to capture those special afternoon moments without a whole lot of success.
This week I tried again, and ended up with a decent run of photos. Click on the photo for the full series. In the first shot, a couple can be seen walking away on the far left, adding a bit of movement to the otherwise static image. Through the tree, over towards the right, you can just make out a bit of Iolani Palace, mimicking the vertical lines of the tree. In this light, and with the B&W tones, the tree takes on almost human forms and texture.
I got up close to the initials left by a couple in the year before Hawaii became a state, just one of thousands of anonymous inscriptions left on its many trunks.
The last three photos remain in color, although their color is restricted to elements that seem to leap out of the otherwise neutral backgrounds.
All photos were taken with my new Canon G9, captured in raw format, with B&W conversions in Adobe Lightroom and final resizing and tweaking in Adobe Photoshop CS3 running on a MacBook Pro.
It’s often the unexpected that ends up making a good photo.
I’ve started on another four-month odyssey on the staff of a state representative during the year’s legislative session. Yesterday afternoon about 4 p.m., as the sunlight mellowed, I walked down the stairs and took my G9 next door to Iolani Palace to see what I could see.
I quickly got immersed in the huge banyan tree behind the palace, where generations of visitors have carved the names and initials of loved ones or just their marks behind for posterity. I assumed one of those end up being the photo of the day.
I had gotten up the stairs of the capitol and all the way to the elevator when a passing image caught up with me, so I turned around and retraced my steps. There it was, an interesting image with a touch of ambiguity. The unfortunate thing is that the placement of the message on the stairs made it impossible to frame a symetrical image. Perhaps I doesn’t really matter. I hope not.
I tried this image in both color and B&W, eventually deciding that the B&W conversion was the best.
Canon G9
f/3.2
1/250 second
ISO 200
Focal length 7.4mm (35mm equivalent)
