This image was taken just outside the Sea House Restaurant when I noticed a particularly interesting sunset developing (4.6mm, 1/196 sec, f/2.4, ISO 50)
As frequent readers of this blog know, we regularly make a trip to our favorite place to relax and enjoy ourselves every May — the Napili Kai Beach Resort on the Hawaiian Island of Maui. This year was no exception except that for a variety of reasons we were both feeling very low energy this time.
Fortunately, we were in the perfect place where being low energy didn’t matter. Instead of visiting other parts of the island we enjoy or seeking out new places to have dinner, we mostly stayed at the resort, either eating at the resort’s Sea House Restaurant or making our own meals in our well equipped kitchen and only very occasionally making a reservation at one of the several excellent restaurants in the immediate area. We relaxed by just enjoying the very comfortable weather and by catching up on our reading (and for Billie, some of the time, her knitting).
As usual, I had brought my complete bag of camera gear along with the idea of going out to seek interesting compositions to photograph. In my very relaxed approach to vacationing this time, though, more than half our time on the island had gone by before I decided to even open my camera bag to charge the batteries.
I wasn’t feeling very inspired even then but decided to go out the next morning to see what I might find. Sadly, it turned out to be a very cloudy, even a somewhat overcast morning. I looked around, took a few shots that mostly just documented the weather, and then headed back inside. Here are two of those images which mostly provide a sense of the cloud cover that morning.
Here’s one other shot from that same morning which shows that there are usually brave, morning people already out just walking the beach along the bay (high tide around 6:30 AM that day).
Photo Note: Frequent readers might also notice that I’m experimenting with higher levels of ISO in these and other photos from this trip. High ISO can provide additional camera sensitivity when the light is not as bright as needed for a well exposed image but can also introduce additional noise into the photo (kind of like visual static or distracting added graininess). Newer cameras have more effective sensors which can produce less noise than older cameras. In addition, more recently huge improvements in post-processing software can remove much of the noise that is produced at even very high ISO levels.
A day or so after this discouraging morning, I decided that I would just take a few images of flowers on the resort property. These five images are just a small sample of the horticultural display available.
Plumeria (tree) flower at NKBR (300mm, 1/8000 sec, f/10, ISO 2500) 
Phalaenopsis orchid at NKBR (105mm, 1/800 sec, f/10, ISO 3200) 
Red Ginger on Napili Kai Beach Resort property (150 mm, 1/800 sec, f/10, ISO 8000) 
Shrub flowers at NKBR (105mm, 1/1000 sec, f/10, ISO 2000) 
Plumeria (tree) flowers at NKBR (105mm, 1/1000 sec, f/6.3, ISO 1250)
Well, that about covers our overly-relaxing Maui vacation this year except for the photo at the top of this post.
We were having dinner at the Sea House Restaurant on the last full day of our trip having finished packing most of our belongings earlier that afternoon. Every table in the restaurant has a view of the bay outside and I happened to look up and notice that a very attractive sunset was developing. I felt it would take me too long to try to retrieve my camera from our packed belongings and so, reverting to the adage, “the camera you have with you is the best one for the job” reached into my pocket for my Samsung Galaxy S10 (I know — not the newest Galaxy phone available) and stepped outside to get a clearer view of the sky. Within a few moments, I managed to capture a good image of the sunset and came back to our table to finish dinner.
This has been a more difficult year than usual for us and one of the results has been that my pursuit of photography has suffered. I’ve found some time to continue my continuing photography and post-processing education but not enough time to actually go out and just shoot images. This post represents my first photographic outing, such as it is, and my first blog post, in 2024. I’m hoping that will change before the year is out.
I encourage you to take a closer look at any of the images you may find interesting by either visiting my photo website and using the Menu to visit Places > United States > Maui or my Flickr site and then choose Albums > 2024. In either app you can enlarge the image to fit the size of your screen and see all the image detail and, generally, with higher fidelity color.
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