Category Archives: Art

A rainy morning in Kahala

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It was raining when we got out of bed, and still drizzling when we left the house to watch sunrise on the beach.

Although it wasn’t raining hard, the passing showers made it a damp and less than appealing walk, and it appeared to be raining heavily offshore. Were those showers eventually going to be heading our way?

I have to admit that we cut our walk short. We got to the far end of the Waialae golf course and then turned around instead of continuing on down the beach toward Wailupe.

Here are a few photos to share what it was like this morning….

A rainy midweek morning

The (fantastic) view this morning

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At Waialae Beach Park in Kahala.

The guy in the center of the picture turned out to have been there on a private photo tour. What luck to be there on a morning like this, instead of one of those gray days that never shows a bit of color.

This is why we get up early and walk to the beach before dawn. Every once in a while you’re rewarded with something like this.

The camera probably doesn’t lie, but it may not capture the truth

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Today started out as one of “those” days. It was still dark when we left the house to walk down to the beach, but the colorful glow already visible announced the sunrise to follow. So we picked up our pace in order to (hopefully) get to the park in time to get a picture of the morning’s colors.

I went ahead, managed to get into position, and started taking photos. Today I was carrying my Canon M6 with a short telephone zoom lens.

But what I saw displayed on the camera’s screen was vastly different from what my eyes were seeing.

Here’s what the camera delivered. The camera wasn’t capturing the colors visible to the eye. Most of the color was missing, and replaced by sort of a purple cast to the whole image.

It was very disappointing, to say the least.

But luckily I was using so-called “raw” format, which saves the original data before the camera guessing how it should be displayed.

When I got home, I loaded the raw file into Adobe Lightroom. It turned out that all it really needed was an adjustment to the color “temperature,” which shifted everything from slightly blue to more closely match what visible to my eyes.

Here’s the same photo that has been “corrected.” Much better, and true to the way it appeared to us.

So it goes. It’s always an adventure.

One of Apple’s advances in its newly announced iPhones is that they will be able to capture and save in a digital negative format that retains the same raw data. That’s progress that I welcome.

Camera vs smartphone

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It’s getting to be a tough call.

I was just reading a couple of columns written last year by a self-described “camera geek” admitting that he was now relying more on his iPhone than a traditional camera while traveling.

And with Apple and other companies dramatically improving their phones with each technological generation, it does seem almost inevitable that phones will continue to eat away at the camera market.

Travel Photography in the Age of the iPhone, 8/18/2018

The Future of Photography is NOT Mirrorless, 9/7/2018

But then I thought back to this past weekend, when I forgot my camera when we drove out to have dinner and spend the night with friends in Kaaawa. On Sunday morning, I had just my iPhone to rely on. I wasn’t confident that it would suffice.

As far as the photos were concerned, the iPhone produced very good results. And it was relatively simple to give them an additional tweak in Lightroom, which (along with Photoshop) are my primary editing tools. You can see the results below and judge for yourself.

However, I found using the iPhone camera to be awkward. I never did quite figure out the best way to grab ahold of it, wake it up from it’s slumber, frame the shot and take the photo.

A standalone camera is made to be fit in your hand. It has some heft, which helps reduce camera shake, and is balanced in your hand. I carry it on a strap, over one shoulder, usually holding it in one hand. Moving it into position at or near eye level feels natural. I’ve used cameras for so long that they feel natural.

The iPhone kept capturing photos that included part of a finger in the image, even when I thought I was being very careful. To wake up the iPhone XS required me to hold it in one hand and swipe up with the other and then take a good look at the screen to get get past its security and be ready to shoot. I tried carrying it between photos, but that didn’t really work. Then I stuck it in a pocket, but that wasn’t satisfactory either. The iPhone was always within easy reach, but somehow required more attention than any of my cameras, which by now just work.

Bottom line: I don’t think I’ll be retiring my cameras any time soon.

But, as I wondered recently on Facebook, when will someone license the great smartphone software and package it in a traditional camera body?

Kaaawa by iPhone