Hiking and Landscape Photography on Kauai

Pretty spectacular view. Down there, you can't see it, there's some really cool different ridge pinnacles with all this foliage on them. Really thin ridges that lead up here and there's some trees down there. Actually see a tree down there that might make for an interesting composition. Not entirely sure if I want to try maybe a wide-angle shot or a telephoto shot, so I think it'd be worth getting out the gear and trying both. So I've got the Sigma 100-400 on here right now, and I love the way these ridges actually lead into this tiny little tree in the distance. The problem is, I think the composition is interesting at 100mm, but I want to be a little bit wider, and I didn't bring my 70-200mm, 70mm actually would have been perfect for this. So I think with this lens I'm going to do a slight panorama, because if you see here, if I kind of aim the camera down, you can see how interesting these ridges are. Just doing a timer for this, and then I'm going to tilt the camera up slightly, and one more shot. So here's my first image of these lush green ridges, and just a beautiful scene here. I love how the cliffs kind of make that V-shape that leads you right into the tree that's right in the center of the photograph, and even the ridges on the bottom of the image help to kind of frame the whole thing. Now I did three horizontal shots to create this slight panorama, and that was mainly to include part of the top of the photograph, and those little shades of orange on the hill. I felt like those orange shades really helped to add a bit more color diversity to this image, and overall I'm really happy with the way this one came out. Now since we were talking about the single exposure, I wanted to show you really quickly what that looks like. So while I was composing this image, I certainly felt like the panorama was the way to go. I felt like the bits of orange towards the top of the image were really going to help the color contrast and elevate the composition. But once I got back to Lightroom, I realized I quite like this single exposure too, for very different reasons. It's a lot more simple of a frame, and you really get that beautiful swoosh lead-in of the ridge right into the tree, and I almost don't mind that the top of the left side ridge is cut off here. I'd be curious to hear which one of these two images you prefer. Do you like this single exposure image that's a little more simple, a little more close up, or do you prefer the panorama that includes that top part of the orange hill? Please let me know in the comments. I think that's going to wrap it up for the telephoto lens at this spot. Now, I'm going to try 50mm, which I don't use often to be honest with you. I don't really pull out my 50mm enough, but I do have it in the bag quite a bit, because it's so small and lightweight that I can just bring it with me and it doesn't really matter that much. It's so lightweight compared to the 100-400mm. Yeah, that's pretty cool with the wider perspective too. You just see all of those ridges, and it makes a really nice pattern in the composition. The different shades of green, and this is a 16x9 crop, so you would see a little bit more to the composition, you'd see more down here to the bottom, and a little bit more on the top as well. One of the other areas I had the pleasure of capturing on Kauai was Waimea Canyon, which if you've ever been there, it is absolutely spectacular. Here's some of my favorite images from that shoot. So with it raining almost every single day, or at least every single day that I was on Kauai, you definitely have some great opportunities for rainbows appearing out of the storm. So oftentimes I'll wait at a spot with all of my gear just kind of sitting in the rain, and then all of a sudden those clouds part for maybe 10-15 minutes or longer, and a rainbow just appears out of the darkness. And that's what happened on this specific occasion, and I love the simplicity here. I love that warm, golden light that's basking that beautiful ridge, and then the rainbow just kind of floating there on the right side. So here's another one of my favorites from Waimea Canyon. This image is certainly less dramatic in the sense that there's no rainbow here, but the lighting here was so gorgeous to witness, and I love how the little bits of dappled light on those ridges create these nice V-shapes, and you have this isolated, bright area of the cloud right towards the center of the photograph, right above the horizon that helps to bring the viewer's attention into that area. On my last day in Kauai, I decided to do just a little bit of seascape photography at sunset near Poipu Beach. In natural Kauai style, it's raining on me, but the waves are really interesting, and I found a really intriguing composition that I'm playing with. So I've got the Nikon D850 with the 16-35mm lens, and I'm trying mostly 0.5 of a second for my shutter speed. Oh wow, now it's really starting to pour rain. This has literally happened every single time I've tried to vlog or do a photoshoot. It's just like, oh, you're trying to shoot video? Let me just... we're just gonna start raining. Before I started this vlog, it was pretty nice weather. The clouds were getting a little bit of sunlight. Now it's just a patch of gray and rain. So I actually can't fit this entire composition with this cove in the frame with the 16-35mm lens, so I'm doing a panorama. I'm doing one shot for the water coming through this cove. I'm getting some different variations of the water filtering out and coming in. And then I'm doing frames for the sky. So I'm tilting the camera up a little bit, and I'm doing horizontal shots, and I'm gonna stitch those together to get a slightly wider perspective. So here's the final seascape image that I was just shooting, and this is a little bit earlier when the sun was still in the sky and, of course, before it started raining on me. And as mentioned before, I had to do a bit of a panorama here, so one shot for the sky and then one shot for the foreground flow. Admittedly, this is not the most creative composition I've ever come up with, but it was just really fun to be out there, fun to experience sunset on the beach, especially in a place like Kauai. I feel like you can't really go wrong shooting seascape photography. Overall, this trip to Kauai was just a blast. I captured such a large variety of different types of images, from the more dramatic rainbows to some of the more subtle rainforest photography, and even a bit of wide-angle seascape photography. So looking back on the images from this trip, I don't think any of them scream my top favorite images of all time or anything like that, but you know what? That wasn't really the goal of the trip, and frankly, it's never really the goal of any of my trips. I mean, the first things that I look at are, did I express my creativity, did I play around, and did I have fun? And certainly all of those were met on this trip. I experimented with a lot of different types of photography. Some of it worked, and maybe some of it didn't work, but honestly I was just having the time of my life capturing this beautiful island and the incredible diversity that it has to offer. I'm so thankful I was able to take you all on this journey with me. If you're not already, please subscribe to the channel because there'll be plenty more landscape photography vlogs in the future, and give the video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it. As always, thanks so much for watching, and I'll catch you in the next one.