Fujifilm X-T4 + XF16mm f/1.4 R: 120s, f/11, ISO160

The past few sunrise Saturdays have been at Lanai Lookout, my favorite sunrise location on the island. It’s a stretch of coastline on the east side of O’ahu. I like it because I generally find compositions more easily than at other sunrise spots, and there are a lot of different spots around this area to explore. That said, I definitely feel a little rusty. I even had to borrow a memory card from Ryan yesterday since I forgot to put mine back into my camera after unloading it’s data from a shoot I’d done earlier in the week.

Fujifilm X-T4 + XF16mm f/1.4 R: 120s, f/11, ISO800

Last week the tide was low and the usual shallow puddles had all but disappeared. I’ve been particularly anchored, compositionally, to puddles and tide pools as of late to explore using the circular polarizer of my filter system more fully. It took me quite some time to find the tide pool above. The sun had already risen and the previous shots from the morning weren’t great. This pool was filled with Sea Urchins and fingernail-sized hermit crabs. It was a good opportunity to try the circular polarizer. I learned that the closer the camera was to the ground, the less percentage of the glare from the surface of the pool I was able to cut. Typically, I like to shoot low-to-the-ground because it’s a perspective we don’t often see as we walk around the landscape. As I play around with the glare-cutting properties, it seems I’ll have to reset my mindset a bit.

The feature photo and this one were shot this week. It was a “King Tide” (around 2ft above baseline). In the first photo, I was drawn to the line of puddles, it kinda reminded me of a line of footprints in sand. I tried a few angles… low camera puddle centered. I ultimately chose a higher camera and puddle off to the corner because I liked how it drew my eyes toward the horizon in the middle of the frame. I chose NOT to cut the glare with the polarizer because the white glare from the puddles helped them to contrast with the dark foreground. For this second shot the big square rock in the foreground kind of reminded me of some photos of some mainland lakes I’d seen on social media back when I voraciously consumed such things. It’s always tough getting out of bed this early, but days like these remind me that it’s worth it.

11.07.2021