The wonderful thing about life is that we never know!

We create this crazy illusion that we control our lives, yet when I think about it, I realize how little is planned and how much is serendipity. In my quest to see and photograph in all the National Parks, I find myself still twenty-one parks short. Out of the fifty-eight locations that carry the N.P. designation, I’ve now visited thirty-seven.

The Hawaiian Islands is about the last place I expected to have any chance to visit. My little rule has been that if I can’t drive there, I don’t need to go there! However it was easy to break that rule when the opportunity presented itself. Since I had never envisioned myself there, I had no preconceived ideas about what it would be like, other than I certainly wanted to see the two National Parks.

The toughest problem to solve making this image was of course the lens flair. A lot of times when faced with this issue I’ll choose to live with it or even better, work it into the image. Here I wanted as little as possible. Using a lot of glass added to the equation and made things dicey. With a Singh-Ray Color Intensifier and a 4-ss grad ND meant I’d surely get flair if any of the direct light of the rising sun hit the lens. Since I’m a Canon shooter I have always used the self timer in conjunction with the mirror lockup feature. This allows me the same capability of a remote release and mirror lock up feature to lessen the possibly of camera shake by simply pressing the shutter.  Setting the self timer to 10 seconds allowed me time to get out in front of my set up and climb the rocks I had purposely set up in back of for this use. Now holding a sheet of cardboard brought also for this purpose and looking into the lens I could see if I was successful. I shot continuously through sunrise. Working through some 30+ frames, I later decided on the one here!