Kauai's Kalalau Valley Lookout

The towering, majestic cliffs of Kauai's Na Pali ("Pali" = "Cliff") coast represent one of the Kauai's most spectacular sights. While numerous waterfalls and streams (that are all powered by the wettest spot on the planet, Mt. Waialeale) quietly but dilligently carve out rugged valleys, the ocean just as inexorably pounds the earth down below into Pali. Stone-walled terraces still exist in the valleys as monuments to where Hawaiians once lived and cultivated taro.

While the Na Pali coastline can be experienced in many ways - on foot (via the Kalalau Trail that starts at Kokee State Park), via a helicopter, or on a raft - the easiest, and arguably, the most visually stunning views (although one could just as easily argue that any view of the Na Pali coastline is destined to be "visually stunning", so that comparisons are essentially moot!) can be had from the Kalalau Valley Lookout (~4000 ft. elevation). You can get there simply by following Waimea Canyon road all the way to the end (see my earlier Waimea Canyon in Color blog entry).

The lookout area is typically shrouded in Mt. Waialeale's cloud cover; though if the clouds are slowly drifting out toward the water, only a bit of patience is required and they are likely to part long enough (at least in spurts) to permit a peek of this magnificent valley. However, if there are heavy clouds coming in from the ocean, you may need a considerably heavier dose of patience to catch a view!

Kalalau Valley Lookout is my Church, for it is here that I feel closest to the heart and soul of the world and universe. It is here that I most strongly resonate with Einstein's Cosmic Religious Feeling. And it is here that I can best hear the faint whisper of the true answer to the question, "Who am I?"

Molokai = Tranquility

Each Hawaiian island indelibly leaves a unique imprint on a photographer's mind/I/soul. For example - for me - Oahu , while indisputably lovely and a photographer's paradise, is somewhat of a tropical version of a fast-paced (at least by "island" standards, as all the Hawaiian islands are decidedly "slow" by mainland standards!) mainland resort, and leaves me both relaxed and a bit anxious to go somewhere "quieter" after a brief stay. To be sure, much of Oahu's "fast pace" is arguably confined to Waikiki, Honolulu and their neighboring areas, and much of the rest of Oahu (particularly its eastern and northern shore regions) induces a feeling much closer to what I associate with Kauai (see below) than to how I have characterized it here. Nonetheless, since my experience of this island has always been anchored to Waikiki (and Honolulu), Oahu unfortunately remains in the category of "extraordinary place to visit for a few days, but..."

The Big Island is full of nervous energy and mystery, as though it is still unsure what to make of itself or where it wants to go. It feels unsettled. While this unfocused energy undoubtedly provides a creative spark, it makes it hard to completely still my inner world; which is something I must therefore always consciously devote some of my own energies to do whenever I am on the Big Island. I therefore typically leave the Big Island feeling both exhilarated (for having seen so many wonderful sights) and exhausted (for having to counter the Big Island's yin with a bit of yang).

Maui contains many scenic wonders (Haleakala, Hana, and the Sacred Pools, to mention but a few), but is - for my tastes - too commercialized. The seemingly endless parade of pristine new golf courses, while clearly a welcome sight for some, takes much away from a "pure" experience of the natural Hawaiian splendor. Maui thus always leaves me longing for a simpler, less glitzy, Hawaii; somewhere where the gentle whisper of the land and trade winds can still be heard above the modern din. I am sad for Maui, as its heritage and true self seems to be slowly, but inexorably, eroding.

Kauai holds the dearest spot in my heart, as it is a perfect blend of old and new, and displays some of the most awe-inspiring natural beauty on earth. If there were one place on earth I could choose to live, it would be Kauai. I equate Kauai with rejuvenation; physical, spiritual, and artistic.

Thus, finally, we get to Molokai: a simple, quiet, tranquil oasis of the deepest, most ineffable calm that I have ever experienced!


I am convinced that time comes slowly to a stop (and if not a full stop, certainly to no more than a crawl;-) halfway between wherever it is you start your journey to Molokai and your first step onto this special place.


You become oblivious to everything - every time - except for the eternal now.


For me, Molokai is tranquility, for that is the state of mind I am always in whenever I am lucky enough to visit. Just "being in Molokai" is akin to performing effortless meditation.


The hard part - speaking now as a photographer - is to find ways of expressing how I feel about Molokai in my images. Unfortunately, I've yet to hit my mark! I guess I'll just have to go back for another tranquil, timeless, effortless meditation ;-)

Waimea Canyon in Color

On the heels of my prior post (Kauai in B&W), comes an unabashed about-face (at least regarding this particular photo!) and the "almost self-evident" observation that some pictures are destined to be captured and expressed in color.

As "proof by demonstration" (as a mathematician might say) I present the image above. This was captured at the Waimea Canyon lookout on Kauai. While I do have a B&W version of this photograph, I am unhappy with it, as it fails to convey what I really felt as I stood - mostly in awe - gazing into my viewfinder. As any honest photographer will tell you, if your image does not communicate at least something of your inner state/vision at the instant of capture, your image is, at best, a banal "postcard"; and, at worst, a failure (as an artistic expression). In these terms, I therefore confess that, to the best of my current ability to work in the digital darkroom, I simply cannot create a "successful" B&W print from any of my RAW images of Waimea Canyon!

The colors, in this case, cannot be ignored. They are Waimea Canyon! To try to collapse them onto a grey-scale tonal range (and desperately try to make up some of the lost aesthetic ground by selectively dodging and burning) seemed to me, in the end, to be carelessly blind to what I really want to convey about this magnificent spectacle. And to try to do this, haphazardly, without having first previsualized (ala Ansel Adams) what I wanted to do with the image before I pressed the shutter, was encroaching uncomfortably close to the land of "false" art. Indeed, I will further confess that Waimea Canyon is so spectacularly, and colorfully, beautiful that it is a rare instance of a scene where I did not (could not!) first previsualize it in B&W! While for most non-fine-art-B&W-photographers such a statement is either silly or meaningless, I can assure you that it is a very strong statement for a fine-art B&W photographer to make (and is never made lightly)! ;-)

Keep in mind that even the color version you see here - though I hope many viewers will enjoy it - also falls short of communicating the true spectrum of colors that the "real" view consists of. In posting to the web, I have converted the image's color space from Adobe RGB (my usual work space in Photoshop) into sRGB, which has a relatively muted palette; and in any event, I cannot account for different kinds of monitors and calibrations.

For the best view of what is truly one of nature's wonders, you must go to Kauai, rent a car, and drive the 50 or so miles from Lihue airport along Highway 50 west toward Waimea. Take Waimea Canyon Drive, which appears right after mile marker #23. The winding road weaves its way though the canyon area and will eventually deposit you at Pu'u o Kila Lookout. Enjoy the view!

Kauai in B&W

The island of Kauai (in Hawaii) is arguably one of the most beautiful islands on earth. Words alone certainly cannot do justice to the extraordinary beauty that awaits the lucky visitor; images, even superb ones, also invariably fall far short of communicating the experience of seeing, feeling, breathing, hearing, tasting and simply being with Kauai, as its sweet gentle rhythms slowly embrace your mind and soul and lift you into truly another dimension of light and form.

Why B&W? Kauai (indeed, all of Hawaii!) is nothing if not fantasmagorically colorful!?! So why present images of Earth's natural gift that are devoid of color? My answer is that, as a fine-art photographer, my eye/I responds most strongly to light and form (followed by texture); color, while undeniably enjoyable and aesthetically pleasing, more often than not (at least for me!) diverts my attention away from the core beauty of a composition. Ironically, Hawaii is so intensely colorful that when color is present in a photograph, it is hard (sometimes impossible) for me to visually penetrate the deeper layers of a scene (and it is precisely those deeper layers that drive much of the "art" in my photography). When there are too many blues and greens and reds, I am effectively blinded! (On the other hand, if I am to be completely honest, my propensity for B&W may stem simply from an inability - thus far - to faithfully render the color I remember "seeing" with my camera on my computer and by my printer. Perhaps in time I will learn to do this to my satisfaction and actually start enjoying natures joyous colors!)

In the meantime, here are a few images from Kauai (and only a few, as it will likely take me six months or more to finish processing even the first drafts of all the images I captured on our Hawaii trip!). The image at the top is taken from the first of two Kalalau Valley lookouts that reward the patient driver who has managed to make it to the end of Waimea Canyon Drive on the western end of Kauai, as are the first and fourth images that follow. The others are assorted images from the northern coast (horse scene and water) and a view along Waimea Canyon Drive itself (last image below).

Frozen Impermanence

On Oahu's north shore is an extraordinary little beach called Laniakea Beach. It is also called Turtle Beach because visitors are usually treated to the amazing sight of green sea turtles swimming close to shore to feed on seaweed growing amidst the rocks. More often than not, visitors will also find several turtles basking gently on the sand, alongside tourists and locals (who are all doing pretty much the same thing).

The photograph shown above was taken in July, while my wife and I were on a much-needed rest-trip to Hawaii, and were (on this day) utterly mesmerized by these magnificent (and somehow, inexplicably, at least to me, magnificently regal) creatures. What caught my photographic (and philosophical) eye as I was watching "Russell" (which is this particular turtle's name; since they frequent the beach so often, they inevitably interact with their human counterparts on a first-name basis;-), beyond Russell's obvious innate beauty, is how wonderfully this tranquil beach scene illustrates the "paradox" of the permanent transience of nature.

The exposure here is quite long (~30 sec or so, made possible by stacking a polarizer on top of a six f-stop neutral density filter and gently frightening the beachcomber onlookers out of the viewfinder by placing my camera on a rather imposing tripod). The result is that while Russell remains tack sharp (indeed he did not move at all during the two hours my wife and I were observing him!), the water has been rendered as an ethereal fog.

The image thus represents an interesting blend of disparate time scales: the hint of waves, lapping on to shore every few seconds (along with the implicit rise and fall of the associated tide), the day-long silent but ostensibly "frozen" basking of the turtle, and the much-longer times during which the rocks themselves appear to be unchanging and anchored to the sand (which, too, in the spirit of our musing on the illusions of permanence, we know will eventually fade away with time). To which we can also add the ~1/40th sec worth of intuitive-mind "processing" that took place behind the lens, during which yours truly saw Russell, the water, and the rocks (and felt the ever-present "push" of Oahu's strong trade-winds) and immediately thought, "Ahh! What a lovely, lovely self-contained universe of frozen impermanence!"...and clicked the shutter.

For another glimpse of frozen impermanence, and another clue about the nature of illusion and reality, my wife and I visited the western shore of Molokai, which is where I suspect infinity goes to rest every once in a while...

The "Ordinary" Transformed into Something Else...

One of the most magical properties of photography is its ability to transform the ordinary - by which I mean common, everyday things and places - into something else: sometimes this "something else" is the same ordinary object(s) but with a subtle uncommon twist; sometimes it is the same "ordinary" object(s) but observed from an unusual perspective with less-than-common lighting; and sometimes (in those improbably rare but magical moments!) the photograph captures something that at first sight appears to be the same as something you recognize as utterly ordinary and uninteresting, but which upon further reflection shines radiantly with an ethereal glow, as though a portal into a hidden dimension of beauty has been revealed, if only for an instant. The "image" - in such rare instances - points to something that is simultaneously obviously of this world, and just as obviously not! Sadly, I have no examples of the latter category to show you, though each time I go out with my camera, a part of my soul waits (yearns, hopes, dreams...) expectantly, for the world to bestow this joyous gift; I know it exists, for I have seen it - many times! - if only in my mind's eye as I slowly bring my finger to the shutter, so as not to disturb the magic, and whisper a short prayer as I press it that the camera has captured what I see. Alas, it has not yet done so; but the beauty is too great to ignore and not share with others. In the meantime, however, I do have a few humble samples from the first two categories... The "ordinary" objects depicted here are commonly known as mud, rock, tree, old glasses, a reflection in a puddle, and a fence on the beach. Oh, and the image at the top of this entry, is a view from an "ordinary" hiking trail at a local park (Great Falls, VA side). How uncommonly beautifully "common"! ;-)

Previsualization ...or... Why Ansel Adams Could Never be Happy With a Point & Shoot Camera

"You don't take a photograph, you make it." - Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams introduced the idea of previsualization into the photographer's lexicon (see my earlier Blog entry on Adams); a term he used to label the importance of imagining, in your mind's eye, what you - as a "photographer" (not just a snapshooter) - want the final print to reveal about a subject (and to communicate of your artistic vision). Without this preconception, wherein much of the artist's creativity resides (specifically, in the implicit steps that must be followed, starting with composition, focal length, shutter speed, filtration, and so on, in order to achieve the previsualized image), the resulting "photograph" is at best a product of inspired "luck" (or intuition) and, at worst, shallow and unable to communicate meaning.

A common "lament" of many of today's amateur photographers - particularly those who fancy themselves as following in the footsteps of pioneers such as Adams - is that their point & shoot camera (or, worse, their super-duper-sophisticated, modern digital single-lens reflex, or DSLR) simply doesn't produce the kind of pictures they want; or, though it is rarely stated this way, doesn't produce what they see in their mind's eye!

The reality, of course, is that no camera, however sophisticated, can "guess" what is in the artist's mind, and then, having correctly guessed, perform whatever digital prestidigitations are required to produce the "perfect" digital file; a file that, moreover, must then also be printed correctly on some chosen combination of printer and paper. It is ironic that as the power of our tools (including cameras, software and printers) increases, and becomes more affordable and user-friendly, the desire to use our tools (to convert a simple point & shoot image into a photograph that more closely resembles an inner vision) generally declines. We expect more out of our cameras; and when the camera (through no fault of its own or its manufacturer) inevitably fails to deliver what we demand, we just as inevitably blame the technology.

The simple lesson of previsualization - that is as applicable today as when Ansel Adams was capturing his spectacular images of Yosemite National Park - is that while one might get lucky, and capture a fine image, the far more likely result of approaching a subject without an idea already in mind is disappointment.

Fine art does not just happen; it requires a (sometimes prodigiously willful) act of inspired, participatory creation. The artist must be a willing and active participant in all of the steps leading up to the image's final (typically print) form; including the act of capture (see my entry on Galen Rowell's participatory photography) and the (often elaborate) digital equivalents of analog darkroom tonal manipulations.

Case in point: consider the two images at the top and immediately below. Arguably, neither the before (straight out of camera) image shown above, nor the after (digitial darkroom manipulation) image that appears at the end of this paragraph belong to the lofty heights of fine-art photography as practiced by Ansel Adams. Indeed, depending on one's aesthetic tastes, neither image may even be terribly "interesting" to look at;-) However, despite the fact that the two images are visual imprints of the same thing (a broken window), no one will argue that they are very different!

I can confidently assert that the after image is precisely what was in my mind's eye when I pressed the shutter. More to the point, the objectively rather bland before image of the broken window was very faithfully rendered by my DSLR. But it is emphatically not what I wanted the print to look like, and which I knew I could create by having previsualized the process necessary to get there at the instant I pressed the shutter. The bland before image simply needed a "bit of work" to get it from its "faithful" form, into a state in which I, as photographer, am satisfied that it (at least) stands a chance of communicating a bit of my aesthetic vision.

If you, like me, are moved by the mysterious power of the after image, in which a subtle, ethereal "glow" seems to radiate from the black void (the "existence" and communication of which required the digital equivalent of selective dodging and burning, and an attention to the distribution of tones in the RAW image), you must agree that it would have been a great shame for me to have glanced at my DSLR's output, see the "uninteresting" recorded image, and, with perhaps a sad sigh for emphasis, conclude, "Well, better next time," before deleting the file from my compact flash card!

A nice way to summarize these musings, and as an homage to another of Adams' favorite sayings, is to think of the DSLR's RAW output as an "equivalent" of a musical score (the image "exists" but in an essentially latent, as-yet-unrealized form); what the photographer subsequently does with that RAW file in the digital darkroom is analogous to a performance! (The "performance" can - indeed, undoubtly will - change in time as the photographer's own skills, tastes and "eye" evolve. If there is a single deep lesson that photography teaches us, it is that there is no such thing as the one "true" objective reality ;-)

A few older examples of Before and After images can be viewed on this page.