Notes To My Mother

If you haven’t heard the term, “god rays”, it refers to those streams of light that emanate from the location of the sun and stream in all directions into and through the scene in front of you. Mostly we see these rays streaming down, but you will find situations where they are streaming in all directions. It all depends on the conditions present in the scene. Kapaa Beach In the image above taken on Kapaa Beach in Kauai, you can see that the rays are shooting up as well as down. The rays are visible because they are lighting up particles in the atmosphere. The light is filtered, that is, the light is interrupted by clouds in portions of the image and that is what gives the rays definition.  Take away the clouds and leave the particles in the sky and you would see what would look like a hazy glow. For an image like this one I recommend you use a tripod, turn off image stabilization, use mirror lockup or shoot in live view, use a hand held remote or your 2 second timer....

On the north side of the island of Kauai, just west of Hanalei Bay is a little beach called Lumahai. You can park along the road and walk down a well maintained trail to the beach. The beach is quite different from most of the others in this area as it slopes steeply into the ocean. This affects the wave motions, preventing them from breaking in the usual way. Watching them you can see that the water that is receding back to the sea is moving very fast, pushing against the incoming wave so that just as the wave crests, at the point it would normally break and wash onto the shore, the receding wave stops it and it just kind of collapses and washes onto the shore, without ever breaking. Here is a picture of it, just at the point most waves would break. I was at this beach in the late Spring and the surf was fairly mild. I can imagine in the Winter when the surf is much larger on the north shore that the wave action at this beach would be spectacular.  Because of the st...

The beauty of a thing depends almost entirely upon what perspective you choose to view it from. I am looking at an image I took of Queen’s Bath on the island of Kauai. I think it is beautiful. Lovely colors, water spilling over the rocks into a pool - the Queen’s Bath - making lovely doily like patterns on the surface. Yet, the other day I saw a picture of the same scene from a completely different angle, taken in the middle of the day in full, harsh light. From that angle in that stark light there was nothing attractive about the Queens Bath. It was kind of disappointing, and for awhile it affected my perception of this scene: which was the “real” Queens Bath? Is this it this one or the other? I had to remind myself that I can be fooled by these things. Just because something is not so beautiful from one particular angle does not mean it isn’t beautiful from another. Same place, same person, same experience viewed just a little differently and it is transformed from no...