Kauai Sunrise

Posted by Don Smith (California, United States) on 18 August 2009 in Landscape & Rural.

Tropical sunrises and sunsets are truly incredible to see and photograph, but if I had my choice, I would pick sunrise simply because most tourists are sound asleep (and the locals are readying themselves for work), thus most locations are empty!

Such was the case with this beautiful morning along the east side of the small garden island of Kauai at Kealia Beach, just north of Kapaa. This was actually my last frame of the morning as I was beginning the trek back to my car. I spotted these Naupaka plants fronting Kapaa Creek and the opening through the clouds on the horizon began to glow with warm sunrise hues.

I decided to try a low perspective with my 16-35mmL as these plants have an iridescent glow in low light situations. What I liked most about this image is the many layers which adds depth to the image. As professionals, we try to represent the world in a three-dimensional plane on a two-dimensional medium. By adding layers in an image, it can create the illusion of depth and allow the viewer's eye to move through the frame.

I had inadvertently left my split-neutral density filters in my car but I was able to balance the scene with the help of the split grad filter in Adobe Camera Raw. It is really a simple tool to use as I selected my sky, then applied a - 3.5 filter and bumped the contrast just a bit. I would not want to rely on balancing all my images with this technique, but in this situation, it certainly did save the day. I would still advocate the use of split-neutral density filters to get the image properly balanced at the point of capture, or, bracket your shutter speeds in one-stop intervals and combine in Photoshop (though this does take time).

Try finding interesting foregrounds the next time you are shooting a gorgeous sunrise or sunset and see if it doesn't add visual interest and depth to your image.

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