One of the great opportunities on Kauai is to see the sunset. Sure, you can get great sunsets in a whole bunch of places but somehow it seems better when you are in a tropical paradise! This year we didn’t make the trip to the beach at Ke’e which is a popular sunset spot. Of course, sunset isn’t the only opportunity.
The sun comes up in some pretty ways to and where we stayed provides a good view of proceeding. We did get a few opportunities to see the sun come up (the time change makes for early rising) and light up the sky. However, the weather wasn’t always cooperative on this trip so it was the luck of the draw some times. However, I think we did okay!
I had a plan to meet up with my friend Joel to catch up recently. We were looking for a place to meet and went with the Holiday Inn by the Merchandize Mart. It has a bar that is a comfortable place to talk and has the added benefit of a great view over the city. I wasn’t there to shoot anything but, knowing the view was good, I took along some gear just in case.
Joel and I chatted for ages and didn’t get around to taking pictures for a while. As the sun was setting, the sky was getting very interesting and I finally had to apologize and grab the camera. I got a few shots and then set it up by the window next to me to shoot a time lapse.
This required no input from me so we could continue to talk without interruption but it should provide something interesting to check out later. However, I hadn’t planned as well as I hoped. As the light dropped, the shutter speeds were getting perilously close to the delay between each shot as I had set the ISO a little lower than I thought. Changing it is not a problem but I was using a lighter tripod which was not as well locked off as I thought. I managed to move the head a little. I corrected but knew the alignment would be off a bit.
Fortunately, while I couldn’t completely remove the effect, when I processed the time lapse using Lightroom and LRTimelapse, I was able to find the frames where the jump takes place, set them as keyframes, adjust the cropping of the second of those two frames to almost perfectly align and the resulting video is a lot better than it would have been.
Thanks Joel for a fun time. It was good to catch up and I appreciate the stuff you gave me. Here is the video that resulted!
The trip to Hawaii was focused on Kauai but also included some of Oahu. This provides ample opportunity to get some interesting photos. Needless to say, I took a lot of pictures while we were there. One of the sights that we were treated to almost every day was a great sunset. Not only was the sun usually clearly visible as it set but the likelihood of some medium level cloud to catch the last light was high.
Therefore, I was totally predictable and took a bunch of sunset shots while we were away. I know, what more obvious and formulaic a topic could there be? How cheesy? Absolutely right. However, I am happy to defend myself because a) they were gorgeous and b) I was there and there was no way I wasn’t going to shoot them!
The sun dropping down was always a great sight but the impact on the clouds around us was equally impressive. I must have spent a ton of time just shooting various cloud formations as their colors changed and dusk came upon us. I thank goodness for digital as you can experiment to your hearts content.
I have had my Mum visiting . We try and find some fun things to do while she is staying and maybe even tie them in to things I have been meaning to do. One of these things was a trip to the Botanic Gardens. The thing that made this different is that, during the summer they have been having a late opening until 9pm. The evening light should provide some good opportunities with the camera.
It certainly is a good time to visit. The crowds are not there as they would be normally (although there are still a fair number of people around) so you have less of a feeling of being rushed by people around you. Also, having a tripod is not a problem! As the evening draws in, the light gets lovely and then, once the sunset passes, you can play around with some night photography.
You do have to pay attention to which areas will get the nice light since the terrain will block certain parts of the gardens but, apart from that, you can really have a nice time wandering around and looking for nice shots.
One gift I got for my birthday was an intervalometer. I have been interested in time lapse photography for years but never got around to trying it out properly. The intervalometer I got was a third party device which is a fraction of the price of the official Canon version! A couple of posts ago I included some time lapse video in Chicago. Here are a few more videos that I have put together in the recent months.
One of the great opportunities on Kauai is to see the sunset. Sure, you can get great sunsets in a whole bunch of places but somehow it seems better when you are in a tropical paradise! This year we didn’t make the trip to the beach at Ke’e which is a popular sunset spot. Of course, sunset isn’t the only opportunity.
The sun comes up in some pretty ways to and where we stayed provides a good view of proceeding. We did get a few opportunities to see the sun come up (the time change makes for early rising) and light up the sky. However, the weather wasn’t always cooperative on this trip so it was the luck of the draw some times. However, I think we did okay!
