Time for another entry in my Facebook Photographers series. And like the previous entries, this one comes from the Hawaiian islands with a young and talented photographer, Makena Gadient.

(Photo Credit: Makena’s Flickr photostream)

I met Makena at the ‘09 Maui Photo Festival as one of the high school scholarship winners – all of which were pretty amazing for shooters their age.  Since the festival in September, I’ve been following along with her work on Twitter and the beginning of her 365 project on Flickr at the start of the year. It’s been great watching her experiment with a lot of different techniques and really starting to come into her own style this year.

Perhaps one of the things I envy the most about Makena (aside from living on Maui ) is that she’s coming into this hobby at such an ideal age. When you talk about teenagers getting into something with as much commitment and dedication to a craft that she is now, you can definitely tell that they have a bright future ahead of them and the sky is the limit with what they can, and will, accomplish.

Finding Makena’s Photos

In addition to posting the daily photos in her 365 project on her Facebook page, you can also find them and outtakes on her Flickr account.  It is certainly a lot easier to see the collective set on Flickr, and compare images from the beginning of the year to the recent weeks.

When you check out those photos on both sites, you’ll notice a reoccurring theme in both places – that is the support an encouragement of her friends and her family.  From acting as models to providing feedback and coming up with new ideas, there’s a lot of positive energy there that only fosters great things.

If you do have a Flickr or Facebook account, you’ll certainly want to follow along for the rest of this year and with where Makena’s work with photography may take her. If she follows her aspirations in photography in the future, I’m sure we’ll be hearing more from her.

Back to the Festival

Although I won’t be making the trip back to Maui for this year’s photography festival, I still will be following along with everyone.  In addition to Makena, I made so many connections last year that I still keep tabs on, and there will be more MPF alumni that will be featured in this series in the coming weeks and months.

Stay tuned.

– Kris

Photo: A de-saturated look at one of my previous beach photos.

Of all places to find inspiration for creative work in Photoshop, would you believe this one came from Windows XP?

I had this photo as my desktop background on my office machine – which unfortunately is still running the ancient operating system.  For those of you that might remember it, the Shut Down sequence fades your desktop to black and white in the background. And there you have it.

I couldn’t help but keep some of the color in the blue skies and a touch in the water, but always open to feedback.

– Kris

Back with another edition in the Facebook photographer series. This edition features the surfing snapshots of Clark Little.

Clark Little was one of the many cool photographers and instructors that I met at the Maui Photo Festival last September. However, you’d be hard to compare Clark on the same level as many of the other professional photographers holding workshops. You see, Clark isn’t your photography professional. In fact, he’s a surfer who, according to his bio page, only started his photography career in 2007.

So what’s so special about Clark?  As his website puts it:

Clark had a unique talent for taking off on hopeless closeout shorebreak waves and surviving in one piece.

Put a camera in Clark’s hands and you have some amazing works of art.

If you haven’t clicked on any of the links above yet, then check out his gallery on clarklittlephotography.com and you’ll see what I mean.

More Photos on Facebook

One of the reasons I wanted to feature Clark in this Facebook series is that just about every week, he’s posting new photos right to his page’s wall, which means right into your news feed. If there were ever photos as of late that you could share online without captions and have them constantly speak for themselves, these would be it.

Plus, if you want to meet Clark in person, pack your bags and come join the fun at the ‘10 Maui Photo Festival in August.

Stay Tuned

Be sure to check back for more editions of the Facebook photographer series, and if you’d like to request a fan page to be featured next, head over to my page on Facebook and leave your recommendation there.

– Kris

Is it August yet?

The latest promotional video for this year’s Maui Photo Festival has been posted on their website and on Facebook, and in the mix of all the photos from the great photographers I met at last year’s event are two of my own.

• Aerial view of Honolua Bay
• My Haleakala sunrise self-portrait

As if you really need any further convincing that Maui is a perfect destination for a photography workshop like this, check out my ‘09 festival review on Maui by Photo and my enlightening experience during the sunset hula photoshoot.

Hopefully we’ll see you out there for this year’s event.

Mahalo,
– Kris

Photo: Series of waves washing on the shores of Wailea Beach, with clouds over West Maui near the horizon.

Now that I’m sort of back in business with my laptop situation, I wanted to throw in a few paradise shots before getting back into all the hockey images from the last two Chicago Wolves games I shot.

First, The Composition

Before I get into the detail conundrum I’m in, I wanted to say I really liked how this composition came out. Not just with the waves and the trees, but the clouds over the mountain as well.

Contrast that with this similar shot that has a more wider feel to it, and you’ll see what I mean.

Now, The Conundrum

This image made its way through my workflow with a stop in Topaz Adjust, the new Version 4.0.  I’ve been using TA for a few months, and this one is with one of the new presets named “Detail – Strong”.

Now, I also did this same image with Topaz Detail, which I’m just starting to experiment with.  You can view those results on Flickr here.

The Vote

Which one do you prefer?  I’ve added a call for input on both images on Flickr, but if you’re not part of the Flickrverse, please leave your thoughts here or on Facebook when the post is published there shortly.

Many thanks in advance,
- Kris

The edition of the Before and After series is an anniversary of sorts. It was exactly one year ago today that I took the before image that you see below, and it was during our overnight stay in the heavenly town of Hana along Maui’s east coast.

Being able to view the sunrise in Hana was a special moment for me personally, so now that I look back one year later and relive those moments, I wanted to make this image a little more special.

The Before Image

This image does a pretty fair job as-is for taking me back to that moment. There were a few things I wish I had done differently back then, and here’s a short list.

• Scout out a location the day before – it was a pretty long day driving all the way to Hana, but I still could have taken 15 minutes to find a spot before we went to dinner that night.
• Remember the tripod – left it in our cottage, and by the time I realized that I needed it (because of the low light), going back to get it would have meant missing the moment.
• Shot bracketed exposures – I wasn’t shooting HDR at the time, and I’m not necessarily saying it was a strong HDR candidate. If I had bracketed shots – and that tripod – I could have used a few other multi-RAW techniques in post.

Okay, enough with what didn’t happen and onto the after image.

The After Image

Although I may still go back and try to recover some of that orange glow around the sun, this image is where I’m leaving it for now. Wanting to make this one special, I played around with a few tricks to get to this look.

• First up was a little cropping. It ended up putting the sun closer to the middle than I prefer, but there was too many distractions in the foreground otherwise.
• Next was multi-RAW processing in ACR using a gradient layer mask to blend separate exposure adjustments for the sky and the foreground.
• To bring in more detail, I used two different tools from Topaz Labs. The first of which was Topaz Adjust by applying the Clarity preset and tweaking the Noise tab to clean up the clouds a little bit.
• Topaz Detail was then used by applying the Feature Enhancement preset to add just a little more definition to the clouds and the surface of the water.

Thoughts?

Let me know what you think or if you have any other suggestions of things I should try differently. I like the after image being a little brighter, but tried to avoid getting to bright so that it didn’t feel like dawn anymore.

– Kris

Photo: Taken at the top of many cliffs during a hike along the northern end of West Maui.

At first this might seem like a typical landscape photo looking into the vast Pacific Ocean. Maybe it’s not even that interesting during an initial flyby when flipping through a stack of photos. But there’s a few things I like about this shot that I wanted to share.

• Look down there, tiny little people. Both at the very bottom of the image and down by the water – just below center. Goes to show you just how high up we were.
• See that peak there just before the giant volcano in the background? That’s Kahakolua Point, which I also captured later that same week during my helicopter tour. I thought that was pretty neat that you can see it from here.  Check out this map on Flickr to see just how far about these two points are.
• And of course, the volcano on the horizon. Okay, it’s only the dormant volcano Haleakala and not something spewing giant amounts of lava. But it’s intriguing to me that you can see it in the distance from so many places around the island.

So, maybe this image isn’t going to be hanging up on someone’s wall anytime soon or may not get attention from too many others, but every now and again, I like having images that I personally find interesting or share a special meaning only to me and a few others.

That is sort of the point, right?

Photo: Looking at the tops of the West Maui mountains while cruising out on the water.

One year ago today we were on our way to Maui for our most recent 2 week stay on the Valley Isle.  This shot was taken during the dinner cruise we signed up for near the end of that visit.

While a winter/spring trip wasn’t in the cards this year, it’s always wonderful to revisit photos from our previous trips to keep us motivated to save up for that next trip.

Photo: Iconic green palm trees against cloudless blue sky.

Grabbed this shot back in ‘07 while walking around the grounds of the Westin Maui Resort in Ka’anapali. We were just taking in the sights – as it was our first return visit to Maui – and happened to look up and decided to snap this one. It became an instant favorite.

A Different Look

I posted this image in a different form about a year or so ago when I was playing around with AndreaMosaic. Here’s another look at that image.

Click on the image to see a larger view on Flickr where you can see all the tiny little photos it’s comprised of. Seeing as I’ve been to Maui two more times since I last played with AndreaMosaic, I should probable give it another whirl.

Photo: A panoramic view of Honolua Bay in West Maui near Kapalua.

One of the bigger panos that I’ve managed to shoot well enough to work. This view was a combination of 12 vertical images I captured on a golden hour excursion during the ‘09 Maui Photo Festival.

Since I was facing generally northwest with trees and mountains between me and the 7am sunshine, the light wasn’t the greatest. Still, I liked the detail in most of the final image and decided it post it here on the blog.

Click on the photo to view on Flickr and see a larger version with more detail.

Save Honolua

One last note about the area of Maui that this photo was taken. Its natural beauty is currently being threatened by commercial and private development, and one of the groups aiming to stop those threats is the Save Honolua Coalition. If you wouldn’t mind, take a moment to read the story behind their cause and follow their regular updates on the Save Honolua Coalition page on Facebook.

Mahalo,
– Kris