Fujifilm X-T4 + XF16mmf/1.4 R WR: 120s, f/11, ISO800

Working achronologically, the last few weeks have been a departure from the usual weekend haunts. A road closure for filming was as good an excuse as any to revisit an old haunt. One of my most successful photos on unsplash was from this very spot! The tide was quite high on this morning, and as I walked along the beach in my tabis I nearly banana-peel-fell on something slippery! I turned my headlamp on and saw a clear, shiny, jello-like blob on the sand and instantly felt a chill up my spine! It was my first encounter with a box jellyfish! Thankfully I wasn’t stung! I quickly moved away from the shoreline and set my camera up. It was a long exposure kind of morning with little surf and very mild breezes where even the palm tree leaves merely tickled the air. A few exposures in I decided to experiment with orientation, then panoramas in different orientations. I settled on the vertical because I liked the foreground rocks the Platypod’s unique angle allowed me to get. Though they’re not visible in the photo, the water was clear enough to see a few fishes! I dialed in the Nisi circular polarizer to emphasize the foreground clarity.

I tried stitching the panorama together, but in the end decided to fake the additional sky with Photoshop’s increase canvas size and amazing “content-aware fill” tool. I chose this odd 2:1 ratio to fit the image as a more true iPhone Wallpaper. (I also painstakingly removed a distracting sign and some dead palm-tree leaves). All in all, I really like how this one turned out. It has inspired me to start an iPhone wallpapers personal project, so anticipate seeing more of these in the near-future!

Where last weekend’s sunrise was peaceful and relaxing (minus the box jellyfishes), this morning’s was anything but. Many Hawaii Parks don’t open their parking gates till the sun actually rises, so when I get to the location a bit early I gotta park on the street and get a bit of exercise. About ⅓ of the way into the park, I started to see cars rolling into the parking lot. It was bit late to turn around back to the car to move it, so I just trucked it in all the way to the spot I was planning to shoot from. The tide was high again, but the wind was awake and constantly blowing sea spray into my camera’s filter. Cleaning the filters in the middle of the exposure caused a bit of unwanted camera movement that I did my best fix in post-processing. I even got splashed a few times, and the water was a bit higher than I was hoping so I couldn’t shoot from the spot I had originally envisioned. The sun also decided to rise a bit to the camera-right of my ideal target. Still, I’m pretty happy I was able to salvage an image!

Fujifilm X-T4 + XF23mmf/1.4 R: 1/4s, f/11, ISO800

Two weekends ago I re-returned to this newer rotation spot armed with the 23mm lens and a commitment to ¼s shutter speeds! I’m really happy with the results, BUT I regret not having the wider 16mm lens to get more sky in the frame, hence the return of the 16mm in the subsequent weeks!

Lastly, two more bits of news… first, Happy Valentines Day to the couples out there, and Singles Awareness to my fellow compatriots. Second, my main computer: a 15” MacBook Pro Mid 2012 model passed away last week. A moment of silence for my main girl.

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That’s my story as to why there hasn’t been a post for a bit and I’m sticking to it! The good news is that all of my digital assets live on an external device (a lesson I learned the hard way many years back…), so not much data was lost. I do still have a septuagenerian 21” iMac Late 2011 to fall back on as I eagerly anticipate a new line-up of Apple Silicone Mac computers as my next major upgrade, so wish me luck that this obaa-chan computer can hold out ‘til then!

Until next post… 👻

02.14.2021