Moloaa Beach

Moloaa Beach was another new discovery for me on my photo hiking tour of the east and north sides of the island of Kauai, HI with Kauai Photo Tours.

I shot quite a few images here with my Nikon D-7100 and Tamron 10-24 and 18-270mm lenses, but it’s this image from my Lumia Icon smartphone that I like the best.

Why?

Possibly because it’s native aspect ratio lends itself to landscapes such as this.  We were getting ready to leave, and I pulled my phone out and made this image using the automatic setting as I wanted to send one of “those” emails. You know what I mean.  One of “those” emails or messages we tend to do from time to time when we want to share something… and perhaps make someone a little jealous…  It’s a sign of the times – vanity made easier by technology!  In this case though, I wanted to share it with Mrs Frog who was enjoying her time at a different beach.

My next favorite images from this location were made with the 10-24mm zoom.  It’s just time and well, time that are keeping them from being posted at the moment.  I’ve never done scenics on a beach with a 10-24 before, and I have to admit that I really enjoyed it.

I am not getting paid for this – but I do have to say that I love my Tamron 10-24mm lens.  It’s not a Nik**, and no ultrawide zoom is perfect, and for what the Tamron costs compared to the Nik**, you can either save a lot of money or use that money to put more toys in your camera bag.  But I digress…  You’ll have to wait to seem more of that lens’ work.

Back to Moloaa Beach…

Technical details:  This jpg is from a dng file.  The original was at 0.00035 seconds, f2.4 at ISO 64.  The camera is also capable of full manual settings, shutter priority and aperture priority, any one of which could have improved upon the original just a bit – but not bad from a phone camera at all!  I tweaked the image just a bit in Perfect Photo Suite 9 – adding a slight skylight filter effect as well as a slight color enhancement.

Moloaa Beach on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai.
Moloaa Beach on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai.

This image of Moloaa Beach is in the Coastal and Beach Scenes Gallery on Laughing Frog Images.

 

Symmetry at Sky Harbor

One of the benefits of today’s smartphones is that it’s easy to create an image as you’re walking along almost anywhere, like, for example, an airport.  As proof, I offer you Symmetry at Sky Harbor.

I was changing terminals one morning, and looked to my left and thought “there’s a picture there…”

Out came the Lumia Icon and I snapped a few pictures.

However, things just weren’t quite right in the Lumia’s original 16×9 (16 pixels wide for every 9 pixels high).

I had symmetry, but it wasn’t right.

When I got to my next gate, I opened the image in my Picture Perfect app and began to create the symmetry I wanted.  In this case, symmetry (at least to me) meant that the image needed symmetry as well.  That meant a 1:1 (square) crop.  So, that meant a little finger dragging to position the crop box and a simple tap to finish the image.

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I left the colors as the camera captured them.  The muted pastels of the building and the sky offer a stark contrast to the metallic-like reds and blues on the tails.

(I still prefer the classic “AA” image of American Airlines that dates back to the late 1960’s, but I didn’t get a vote when they changed.)

If you look closely, you’ll also see another element of symmetry – the auxiliary power units that appear just below the tail of every aircraft.

It’s all in the details, which in some case rely upon how long you look at an image to find them.

This may never sell as the cropped image is too small for much more than a coffee cup, and it may never win any awards – but I like this image, and that’s part of what it’s all about.

It may also give you some ideas the next time you see symmetry, or the potential for it, in your travels – airport or otherwise.

You can see this image in the planes gallery on Laughing Frog Images.

Thanks for visiting!