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.

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: A view of Miami at dawn while aboard a cruise ship on our last day.

Taking a stroll down memory lane for today’s photo. The above shot if from a four day cruise to the Bahamas Cindy and I took in February ‘07 courtesy of my employer at the time. Pictured here is the view of Miami just at the crack of dawn (as the saying goes) as we watched the sunrise from our ship docked in port on the final day of the trip.

Ignorance is Bliss

Being from 3 years ago, this image was taken with my first DSLR, the Canon EOS 20D. In fact, I had that camera for less than a year by this time, and had very little knowledge of anything other than the Auto, Landscape, Portrait, and maybe the Night Portrait basic modes. Heck, I didn’t even know the difference between JPEG and RAW back then. In fact, I don’t think I took my first RAW capture for another year after this was taken.

It just goes to show you that, even back then, the auto modes on these prosumer DSLR’s are still pretty capable under some conditions, and if you don’t know every little setting on your camera, you can still get great images.

Now, if only I knew then what I know now, that would be a whole different story!

– Kris

Photo: Young, bundled up visitors take in the sunrise at Haleakala on a chilly February morning.

One of the many shots I took on our first sunrise visit to the Haleakala summit on Maui.

It was an amazing experience to say the least, and totally lived up to all the hype I had psyched myself up for.

I might be able to revisit Haleakala for the sunrise part of the Maui Photo Festival in two weeks, and should the opportunity present itself, I’m definitely going back.

My plan for the most part is to go through all of them day-by-day, activity-by-activity from the two week trip itself. First up was the early morning drive up to the Haleakala volcano to see the sunrise and so much more. More details about our trek up the volcano can be found in this journal entry over at my Maui blog.

Flickr Photoset: Haleakala

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Photo: A cloudy dawn sky gives some hint of the sunrise as seen from Hana along the east Maui coast.