Sister Bay, WI on a cloudy autumn afternoon in between rain showers.

Back Story

This photo is actually a remake from a series of shots I took in Door County back in October, 2009. It was a raining just about the entire weekend, but I did manage to get a few shots in between showers.

This has been one of my favorite images in my Door County portfolio, so why did I decide to remake it? Well, here’s the original version that I published in 2009:

Sister Bay – Original Version

Your Take?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so what do you think? The original – more monochromatic version – has it’s own autumn feel to it, while the remake captures more of the colorful beauty that is Door County in autumn.

Leave your comments below and let me know what you think.

– Kris

Haleakala Crater lit just after sunrise.

Back Story

This image was captured last month during the 3rd Annual Maui Photo Festival as part of their Haleakala Sunrise excursion. It is actually an HDR image created from 3 exposures and using Photomatix Pro. At first glance, it might not strike someone as the type of image people think of when they hear the term HDR. But here, I used multiple exposures to capture detail in the clouds as well as the crater below – which would have not been possible in a single exposure due to the range in highlights and shadows created by the intensity of the newly risen sun.

Here, I wanted to get as much detail as possible, so I shot at f/16. I could have framed the shot without the sun, but knowing that such a small aperture would give me a starburst effect (I was playing around with earlier in the trip) I waited to get enough separation between the clouds and the sun and placed it in the corner of the shot. Of course, it also gave me a bit of lens flare, but I didn’t mind.

Stick Around, It Ain’t Over

This was my 3rd Haleakala sunrise, and just like the previous two trips, right after sunrise, the summit and lookout points go from being shoulder-to-shoulder crowds right before the big moment, to a sparse group of folks right after. I don’t know what everyone’s hurry is, there’s still more to see (and shoot) than just the sunrise.

Better Next Time

I did want to fill in some of the foreground rocks, but my attempts with using a fill flash came up fairly lame. In hindsight, had I brought along my 32″ 5-in-1 reflector with me instead of leaving it in the hotel room that morning, it may have given me a better result than the flash. Something to try for next time.

One Last Note…

Hopefully this goes without saying, but never, ever stare at the sun through your camera’s viewfinder to get a shot like this, or any other sunrise or sunset image. You’re only asking for trouble.

For this and my other sunrise shots from the crater, I have a tripod setup and was using the Live View mode on my LCD to frame the image, switched back out of Live View (to activate autofocus again), and used the autofocus focal point selector to pick my focus point. Finally, I had a remote shutter release to fire off the brackted shots (remember, I was shooting for HDR).

Net result, I wasn’t staring at the sun through the viewfinder. Please don’t learn this the hard way.

Two large trunks of the Lahaina Banyan Tree.

Back Story

First of all, this tree is huge. Check it out in Google Street View if you haven’t been there before. Believe it or not, that’s all one tree, as the branches of these banyan trees will actually bore their way back into the ground to form what looks like different trunks.

On our last free day in Maui before the Maui Photo Festival officially started, we spent some time in Lahaina for lunch and a little shopping. We took a break from the afternoon sun to enjoy the shade of this 150+ year old tree, and as we did, I took a stroll around looking for different shots to compose. Since this beauty of nature is typically too large to get in one frame (at least other than an aerial) I’ve seen a lot of people shoot underneath the tree itself.

That’s what I was going for here.

And because you’re in the shade, and there was various amounts of light peeking through the tree above, I went ahead and bracketed my shots at +/- 1EV stop and put this image together with HDR in Photomatix Pro.

The sun sets along Maui’s west coast as a dinner cruise ship approaches.

Back Story

Admittedly, it doesn’t take much to grab a great sunset like this on Maui, with only a little bit of help from the clouds and mother nature. It’s really more about spending the time to scout a good location and something to frame the shot with, and deciding whether you want to go warm or cool with the sky.

Still, I have a big thing for palm tree silhouettes (more on that in a second) and in the process of shooting that night, I found myself shooting next to an older gentleman from Arizona trying to capture his little digital memory of the golden moment. We started up a conversation, shared a few of our camera settings while the light was still just right, and then spent maybe another 20 minutes afterwards just talking story (as they say in Hawaii).

Although the Maui Photo Festival hadn’t officially started yet, and this person wasn’t an attendee, it was great to already be sharing stories and taking about camera gear and creative tastes with another photographer. Something I probably wouldn’t have done a few years back before first attending the workshops in ’09. That’s a pretty neat change, for me.

Those #MauiSunset Photos

The other reason I wanted to get a few good sunsets this trip was to help support the #MauiSunset Catalogue project that I began earlier in the year. The concept, unbeknownst to me at the time, started two years ago when I begin using the #MauiSunset hashtag on Twitter. I even wrote a post over at my Maui by Photo site trying to help spread it’s use at the time.

Fast forward to about this time last year when I formally re-branded my Maui photo day calendar to the Daily Maui Photo website that exists today, and the creative juices started flowing.

Not long after that, when trying to come up with ideas on how to expand to more than just one Maui photo a day, it occurred to me to have a Maui sunset photo every night. Well, short of relocating to Maui (a whole separate topic altogether) I had to rely on others to help source those special, magical moments every night. At that point, I decided to head over to Flickr and create the #MauiSunset group and start inviting photos that I found on the service.

From there, I put together a simple catalogue page that lets people browse different sunset photos by the night they were taken. There’s over 250+ photos so far, and even though it’s not as real-time as one could wish for, it’s been a neat little experiment to put together.

Now I just need to get sometime together to help promote it and get the word out. So if you happen to be still reading this, would you care to help?

Photo: The very top of the Cana Island lighthouse looking over trees as seen from across a nearby bay.

Another, more closer to Earth view of the Cana Island lighthouse that was featured last week in the Before and After series. I grabbed this shot with my point and shoot after seeing the view from the road on the way back to our hotel.  Didn’t even get out of the car, just opened the window and snap.

I brought out more of the trees and surface of the water with Topaz Detail and the Feature Enhancement preset.

Follow-up to Yesterday

In yesterday’s post I posed the question of which whether the use of Topaz Adjust or Topaz Detail worked better with that particular image. I had a few comments on Flickr with some good feedback, and if you’d like to weigh in, please do.

– Kris

Photo: Series of waves washing on the shores of Wailea Beach, with clouds over West Maui near the horizon.

Now that I’m sort of back in business with my laptop situation, I wanted to throw in a few paradise shots before getting back into all the hockey images from the last two Chicago Wolves games I shot.

First, The Composition

Before I get into the detail conundrum I’m in, I wanted to say I really liked how this composition came out. Not just with the waves and the trees, but the clouds over the mountain as well.

Contrast that with this similar shot that has a more wider feel to it, and you’ll see what I mean.

Now, The Conundrum

This image made its way through my workflow with a stop in Topaz Adjust, the new Version 4.0.  I’ve been using TA for a few months, and this one is with one of the new presets named “Detail – Strong”.

Now, I also did this same image with Topaz Detail, which I’m just starting to experiment with.  You can view those results on Flickr here.

The Vote

Which one do you prefer?  I’ve added a call for input on both images on Flickr, but if you’re not part of the Flickrverse, please leave your thoughts here or on Facebook when the post is published there shortly.

Many thanks in advance,
- Kris

Being able to view the sunrise in Hana was a special moment for me personally, so now that I look back one year later and relive those moments, I wanted to make this image a little more special.

The Before Image

This image does a pretty fair job as-is for taking me back to that moment. There were a few things I wish I had done differently back then, and here’s a short list.

• Scout out a location the day before – it was a pretty long day driving all the way to Hana, but I still could have taken 15 minutes to find a spot before we went to dinner that night.
• Remember the tripod – left it in our cottage, and by the time I realized that I needed it (because of the low light), going back to get it would have meant missing the moment.
• Shot bracketed exposures – I wasn’t shooting HDR at the time, and I’m not necessarily saying it was a strong HDR candidate. If I had bracketed shots – and that tripod – I could have used a few other multi-RAW techniques in post.

Okay, enough with what didn’t happen and onto the after image.

The After Image

Although I may still go back and try to recover some of that orange glow around the sun, this image is where I’m leaving it for now. Wanting to make this one special, I played around with a few tricks to get to this look.

• First up was a little cropping. It ended up putting the sun closer to the middle than I prefer, but there was too many distractions in the foreground otherwise.
• Next was multi-RAW processing in ACR using a gradient layer mask to blend separate exposure adjustments for the sky and the foreground.
• To bring in more detail, I used two different tools from Topaz Labs. The first of which was Topaz Adjust by applying the Clarity preset and tweaking the Noise tab to clean up the clouds a little bit.
• Topaz Detail was then used by applying the Feature Enhancement preset to add just a little more definition to the clouds and the surface of the water.

Thoughts?

Let me know what you think or if you have any other suggestions of things I should try differently. I like the after image being a little brighter, but tried to avoid getting to bright so that it didn’t feel like dawn anymore.

– Kris

Photo: Taken at the top of many cliffs during a hike along the northern end of West Maui.

At first this might seem like a typical landscape photo looking into the vast Pacific Ocean. Maybe it’s not even that interesting during an initial flyby when flipping through a stack of photos. But there’s a few things I like about this shot that I wanted to share.

• Look down there, tiny little people. Both at the very bottom of the image and down by the water – just below center. Goes to show you just how high up we were.
• See that peak there just before the giant volcano in the background? That’s Kahakolua Point, which I also captured later that same week during my helicopter tour. I thought that was pretty neat that you can see it from here.  Check out this map on Flickr to see just how far about these two points are.
• And of course, the volcano on the horizon. Okay, it’s only the dormant volcano Haleakala and not something spewing giant amounts of lava. But it’s intriguing to me that you can see it in the distance from so many places around the island.

So, maybe this image isn’t going to be hanging up on someone’s wall anytime soon or may not get attention from too many others, but every now and again, I like having images that I personally find interesting or share a special meaning only to me and a few others.

That is sort of the point, right?

Photo: Looking at the tops of the West Maui mountains while cruising out on the water.

One year ago today we were on our way to Maui for our most recent 2 week stay on the Valley Isle.  This shot was taken during the dinner cruise we signed up for near the end of that visit.

While a winter/spring trip wasn’t in the cards this year, it’s always wonderful to revisit photos from our previous trips to keep us motivated to save up for that next trip.

Photo: The view from our balcony after about 30 hours of snow. Isn’t it pretty?

Whenever we get one of those marathon snow systems here in Chicago where it snows non-stop for at least 18 hours, you can almost be guaranteed of three things when it finally stops:

1. There’s a ton of snow on the ground,
2. It’s going to be very frigid because all the moisture is out of the air,
3. and the clouds will be all but gone and it will be super sunny.

That was the case earlier this week, and I took the opportunity to setup on our balcony and catch this shot in the morning before it got too bright out.

It’s an HDR image of 3 exposures, which was necessary since I wanted to capture the blue sky in the background and the snow down below.  One of my HDR shots that doesn’t look like HDR, which is actually a big goal of mine.

- Kris