Golden Hour in Maui

In October 2007 Aoife and I went on our honeymoon to Maui in Hawaii before travelling onto San Francisco for a few days, and later taking in some more of California.  Naturally I brought a camera, and though I took plenty of photos, apart from a few images that have already made the blog, I have never sat down and processed them all.  I’ve finally started doing that and so over the next while you’ll see shots from that trip, interspersed with other stuff I have lined up, appearing on these pages.

First up is this shot from Maui in Hawaii.  Of all the places we visited, Maui was the place where I seemed to take the least amount of photos. Time seemed to be better spent by the pool, overcoming jet lag and recharging after the busy week that had preceded the wedding.  We did spend one day travelling across the island in a rental car and I got some nice images that day.  The shot above though was taken on a catamaran on which we took a sunset cruise in the middle of the week.

Landscape photographers often talk about the “golden hour” in the day – there are two really: the hour just after sunrise and the hour just before sunset – which has the best light for photographing landscapes.   It is so called because the sun, low in the sky, can cast a beautifully golden light across a scene, giving everything a nice warm feel, and also due to its low position, casting elongated shadows which can form nice compositional elements and give a nice sense of shape and texture to objects in the scene.

This shot has hints of those qualities.  I deliberately framed it as a partial silhouette, shooting into the sun which is partially obscured behind the sail.  The low sun gives the skipper an elongated shadow that stretches out in front of him, while the light warms up the tone of the picture nicely.

If I was to take this shot now, I’d probably take this partial silhouette again, but then would like to see how it would look to bring in a flash off camera, using it to light against the sun, to fill the shadows of the skipper.  The flash would need to be in close, and probably softened via a mini softbox, and so would require a much tighter crop, but it could make for a nice portrait of the skipper of the boat.

That’s one of the things I like most about photography – as you learn new skills and new techniques, and even acquire new equipment, you can constantly find ways to improve (or even just do differently) photos you’ve taken in the past.  As long as that persists, you need never run out of things to photograph.