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Photo: A view of the mysterious Alau Islet from the intriguing red sand next to Koki Beach near the small town of Hana, Maui.

Another image reliving our fond memories of visiting Hana last February and making the wise decision to spend a night there.

Going back to Hawaii (Photography)

No official trip plans to Maui yet, but as I’m starting to revisit my previous images of Aloha and running them through my newest workflow, I’ll be working to add a format and output step for posting to the Hawaii Photography site, too.

Of my latest images (i.e. since September), this is the first one I’m adding there, but will work to go back and upload some of my recent creations as well.  To see all my photos at HP, check out my profile page.

And if you have lovely images of Hawaii that you’d like to share with other fans/photographers of the Aloha State, be sure to sign up while you’re there.

– Kris

More Reading: More on Hawaii Photography (Dec ‘08 post)

One of the many great shots I took during our helicopter flight as part of the Maui Photo Festival last September.

It was later in the flight, so by this point I had to switch over to shooting JPEG instead of RAW to preserve memory card space. I had spare cards with me, but seeing as it was my first time in a helicopter without doors and I was sharing the back bench with 3 other people, I wasn’t about to try fiddling with a card switch.

I mentioned it because I feel like I could have done more with this in Adobe Camera Raw had it not been just a JPEG file.  I did run it through ACR twice (a 2nd pass for the horizon and sky in the background), but having the RAW file without the in-camera compression of the JPEG version would have been better.

To make up for it, I decided to give it a spin through Topaz Adjust to try and kick it up a notch, and was generally pleased with the final results.

The New Account

This is the first photo coming from my new Flickr account as mentioned yesterday. While most of my daily photos will likely continue to come from my original account, I will be featuring images like this from time to time that have gone through a more thorough creative process and post production workflow.

I wish I had enough time to do this on a daily basis, but not quite there yet.

One last note, if you’re interested in knowing where on Maui this is overlooking, such as that curvy road up near the edge of the cliff, this guy is geotagged on Flickr. Just click the photo and look for Map on the right hand side somewhere down the page. Switch to Hybrid mode, too, for another interesting look.

- Kris

Here’s the first pano I’ve stitched together since I upgraded to Photoshop CS4, consisting of 9 images I took from the 20th floor balcony at the Hyatt Maui Regency last September. While the process for PhotoMerge in CS4 isn’t that much different, what few new options they do have and whatever improvements they might have made behind the scenes seem to have worked better than what I was used to in CS3.

Having a newly installed OS certainly helped the speed of it, too.

The source images for this set were taken a little later in the morning, which meant the sky was more blown out than I had hoped. A few minutes after capturing these images, I dropped the frame down taking out the sky and filling the frame with just the resort areas below. I used those captures for this HDR shot instead, which I was really happy with.

I wish I could say I was already shooting HDR back in February when I took the photo used for this image, but no. Instead, I tried a little multi-RAW processing to increase some of the range from the mountain ranges and the sky, and then kicked it up a notch with Topaz Adjust to bring it home for the final result you see here.

For me, it was good that I learned about Topaz Adjust right around the same time I recently started trying out HDR. That, and a little intro to multi-RAW processing techniques have given me many great opportunities to go back to the shots I wished were HDR and still give them the good treatment.