Hawaiian Sky

Hawaiian Sky

This compilation of photos represent a few of the most important lessons I’ve learned throughout my life, particularly here in Hawaii. Look up. Some of the best views come at the end of a steep, rocky, dangerous summit. There is beauty in the storm clouds. Some of the greatest risks open the doors to the greatest rewards. The Hawaiian sky has been a place of refuge for me. I can literally hike into the clouds. I can get lost in my thoughts while staring at the ominous clouds grazing over majestic mountains. When I look up I reach a certain levity in my thoughts. Everything balances out; the things that are stressing me out suddenly seem so small. Through these photos one can see how the colors of the sky affect the colors of the ocean, and the viewer can also see how the colors change depending on where the sun is in the sky.

For these photos I used both a 24mm lens and a 50mm lens. I love the 24mm lens to capture the grandeur of the clouds and the width of the sky. The 50mm works well to capture the waves and people to get a greater depth of field. I typically shot the photos in manual and adjusted the focus to either the clouds or the ocean. Through editing the photos I was able to achieve greater clarity and contrast. The colors I have pretty much left the same. On the black and white photo I made the whites brighter and the blacks darker so that the contrast would be greater, because I wanted the photo to really put the viewer in a dream-like state. Overall, I wanted these photos to be relatively ordinary, but also to capture the extraordinary beauty of the Hawaiian sky at its best moments. My biggest inspiration for this project was Mark Gee, he is a night sky photographer, but I wanted to capture the same immensity of the sky as he does.