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Just one more panorama, for old time's sake.
This one is a two-image view of the island of Molokai, lighted
by the Hawaiian sunset, shot from our lanai at the Sheraton
Maui.
Yep, while you were shoveling snow in Minnesota
or worrying about floods in Europe, Betty and I were on the
island of Maui, revisiting the sites and sights of our honeymoon
40 years ago. What does this have to do with digital
photography, you ask enviously?
Well, Maui is definitely a place to get away
from the Program. Most prosumer digital cameras offer several
exposure modes and I found it vital to switch to the Shutter
preferred mode to get the pictures I wanted.
The Sheraton puts on a nightly sunset
extravaganza with a young man who jogs through the grounds,
lighting tiki torches, then climbs a cliff to the sacred Pu‘u
Keka‘a (Black Rock) and dives gracefully into the sea.
To capture this legend, I set my shutter speed
at 1/1000 and mounted the camera on a tripod with a telephoto
focused on the Black Rock. Although the raw exposure was several
stops underexposed, I captured the diver at the key moment.
In Photoshop, I added two layers to the raw
image, each set to screen blending mode to lighten the
underexposed image. Using the Program mode, I would have
achieved a better initial exposure but the diver would have been
badly blurred.
The other big show in Maui was put on by the
humpback whales which migrate to Lahaina Roads from Alaska each
winter to bear their calves, then feed and train them to survive
their return to the cold Alaskan waters.
Blowing, breaching, tail slapping and sometimes
leaping from the water, these leviathans kept us glued to our
hotel lanai for a week. Again, a high shutter speed enabled me
to capture some whale activity out to sea but I wished for a
true SLR digital camera with a super-long lens. Trying to
capture whales out of the water was largely a matter of luck
through the LCD.
On one extraordinary afternoon, a family of
whales visited right off the cliff of our front yard and let me
shoot through the viewfinder rather than squint through the LCD
finder. I even had zoom to wide angle to include the people in
the yard peering down at the whales.
The constant 30-knot winds we experienced made
shooting Maui's weird and wonderful flowers almost impossible in
Program mode. Once more, a 1/1000 shutter speed made the task
simple with the camera in the Macro mode. The constantly bobbing
blooms of giant Proteas would have been a blur without the
Shutter preferred mode.
Finally, on the slopes of Haleakala, Maui's
extinct volcanic crater and a fine National Park, 1/1000 of a
second stopped a group of bikers swooping around a curve on
their 38-mile ride down the mountain. To be ready for unexpected
action such as this, I set my Auto-Off feature to five minutes
instead of my customary 1 minute. This meant I had to change
batteries more often but the results were worth it.
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