Nourify Photography

Trip to Oahu, Hawaii

For years, the scenic beauty of Hawaiian islands has attracted both professional landscape photographers as well as casual travel photographers. This past holiday season, we got a chance to spend a week in Oahu. It is the 3rd largest and the most populous among the islands of Hawaii. While you may experience huge crowds and heavy traffic (particularly in Honolulu and Waikiki areas, reminiscent of bigger metropolitan cities), it still offers some top beaches, amazing scenery, and some very famous attractions.

Lets start with what Travel Photography is. The Photographic Society of America defines a travel photo as an image that expresses the feeling of a time and place, portrays a land, its people, or a culture in its natural state, and has no geographical limitations. You can find a lot of guides and tips online on how to prepare for, and capture stunning travel photos. Two examples are: Travel Photography on Wikivoyage and National Geographic Tips.

The very first challenge for travel photography is to decide how to balance between traveling light versus carrying the right equipment. If you shoot with a DSLR, the so-called super-zoom lenses (e.g., 18-200mm for APS-C sensor cameras or 28-300mm for full-frame cameras), will enable you to carry only one lens, and will serve you well in most situations. But, with the current lens technology, the versatility and flexibility of super-zoom lenses come at the expense of many optical imperfections such as distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration and sharpness and contrast issues, particularly when shooting at larger apertures. Moreover, super-zoom lenses are typically slower at the longer end (i.e., at larger focal length, the aperture cannot be opened up as much, requiring slower shutter speeds for the given lighting condition).

While for many of our travels, we may opt in for a super-zoom lens, for Oahu, we decided to load a bit more gear in the hope of better capturing the many photographic opportunities we expected to encounter. Specifically, we took the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 for wide-angle landscape shots, the Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 for portraits and telephoto shots, and the Nikon 50mm f/1.4 to cover the focal lengths in between and for possible low-light indoor situations. We also took along our SB-910 speedlight flash as well as our Neutral Density (ND) filters. ND filtering effect is one of the very few effects that cannot be achieved in digital post-processing and still requires the addition of a physical filter in front of the lens. What it does is to reduce the amount of light entering into the lens and hence makes it possible to use slower shutter speeds (e.g., to get smooth water effect under the daylight as you will see in some of our pictures below) or to use larger apertures (e.g., to get smaller depth of field under the bright daylight). One issue with using ND filters is that once you put them on, what you see through your viewfinder can get pretty dark, making it very hard to compose, focus, or meter. So you would have to first compose and focus, and then install the ND filter. As for metering, you can meter and find the proper shutter speed without the filter, and then calculate what the shutter speed should be once the ND filter is installed. Specifically, you would have to just multiply your shutter speed by 2^n where n is the number of stops of light that your ND filter eliminates. For example, if you needed 1/100 sec without the filter, once you put a 10-stop ND filter, your shutter speed should change to 10 seconds (1024/100). Instead of using the meter in your camera, you can also use a pretty cool free iPhone app called Pocket Light Meter. Another issue with using ND filters with ultra wide-angle lenses such as 14-24mm is that they typically have a large bulbous front element that prevents installation of normal screw-mount filters. So, with our 14-24mm lens, we used a Fotodiox Wonderpana 66 FreeArc filter holder system with a 4-stop ND filter. Finally, to carry all this gear on the plane, we used a Think Tank Airport International V2.0 bag, and, to carry around the needed gear for our daylong excursions within Oahu, we used a Think Tank StreetWalker Pro backpack.

OK, now to the pictures…

We had not planned our trip early in advance, and as such could not find decent deals on hotels, and thus ended up renting a condo unit in the Island Colony building in Waikiki. It was an older unit and not very clean, but being on the 43rd floor, it did offer an amazing view of the ocean, Ala Wai Canal, and Diamond Head. This was the view from our Lanai right before sunrise:

And this was the view once the sun had risen a bit above the horizon:

And once we managed to capture a bit of lightning:

On the first day, we headed to Liliuokalani Botanical Garden and spent some time by the Nuʻuanu Stream and Waikahalulu twin mini waterfall:

We then headed to Nuʻuanu Pali lookout to capture a panoramic view of the Windward (Northeast) coast of Oahu:

We finished our day driving up to Sunset Beach on the North Shore of Oahu, and capturing the beautiful sunset over the ocean:

The next day, we visited the beautiful Byodo-In Temple:

And then headed to Kailua Beach park for some water and sand play at the beach. While there, we put a 10-stop ND filter on our 70-200mm, and took a few shots, and stitched them together in Photoshop CS6 to get this panoramic view:

On the 3rd day, we first visited the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum and  the Battleship Missouri Memorial at Pearl Harbor:

And then headed to the Polynesian Cultural Center:

The next day, we started with a Dolphin Encounter at Sea Life Park. It is much smaller than Sea World in San Diego, CA, but does offer some amazing views of the ocean:

And then headed to Dole Plantation for some fun in a Pineapple farm:

Living in California, we don’t get any chance to observe the sunrise over the ocean. So we decided to seize the opportunity in Oahu, and on the 5th day of our visit, woke up pretty early, and headed to Sandy Beach on the Southeast shore of Oahu.  The first picture was taken earlier under much less light allowing us to use a 4-stop ND filter, and drag the shutter long enough to get a very smooth water effect. The second picture was taken later when we had to increase our shutter speed a bit:

We spent the rest of the day snorkeling and relaxing in Hanauma Bay:

The next day, we first headed to Kualoa Ranch:

And stopped by Kualoa Regional Park, where we captured a shot of Chinaman’s Hat island from the beach:

We then headed back to Honolulu, and took a sailing cruise where we managed to take a few shots of Downtown Honolulu from the ocean:

After the cruise, we visited Bishop Museum, and enjoyed a journey through the different realms of Hawaii in their 3-story Hawaiian Hall:

We ended our day with a quick stop by Iolani Palace, which is the only royal palace in the United States used as an official residence by a reigning monarch:

And on the other side of the street, the statue of King Kamehameha, in front of Aliʻiolani Hale, which is currently used as the home of the Hawaii State Supreme Court:

On our last day, and before we headed back to the airport, we stopped by Waikiki beach, and took a shot of the bronze statue of Duke Kahanamoku, who was a five-time Olympic medalist in swimming, and has been credited with spreading the sport of surfing:

Hope you enjoyed the pictures. As always, please feel free to leave comments and critique. Thanks for visiting…

 

 

 

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