Hawaii photos

[focalintent]

My posting of hawai'i photos is going to be less narrative inspired and more based on grouping. The first group was the previous post, the sticks and stones. Dead trees in lava flows that are barely 35 years old. Walking around those flows was incredible.

elvendoll and I took a lot of camera gear down to hawai'i on this trip[1], more than we did to Costa Rica. We ended up both taking far fewer photos than in costa rica. Some of that was both of us being more selective in what and how we shoot. Another part of it was not having the cameras available as frequently. Still another part was the less frenetic pace of this trip permeated everything - including our shooting.

This next set of photos is of yulia with her camera - starting with catching her taking a photo of her shadow on the green sand beach (yes - green sand! It was amazing - and an incredible hike to get to it, too):





Earlier in the week we were wandering around volcanos - at one point we climbed down into one of Kilauea's craters - Kilauea Iki. In 1950 this was a lake of lava nearly 400 feet deep. Even today, there are still steam vents that you can walk up to. This is yulia on the floor of that crater, the two of us photographing each other through the steam. You can make out a hint of the rainbow in the steam that we could see:



We seem to frequently end up taking photos of each another - a different shot from inside that same crater:



Finally, I have two versions of this shot - but I like this one the best of the two. It doesn't show the view she was shooting as well but I find this picture to be very serene and peaceful and calming:





[1] For those interested - she was packing a Canon 10d with a 28-70 f/2.8, 19-35mm f/3.5-4.5, and 75-300mm f/4.5-5.6. I had a Canon 5d with a 24-105mm f/4L IS, 70-200mm f/4L IS, sigma 100mm macro, and lensbaby 2.0. In addition on the film side I had my zeiss ikon 6x9 folder and hasselblad w/80mm f/2.8, 40mm f/4, and 150mm f/4 as well as a 2x extender.

Comments

[pir.livejournal.com]

Nifty pics :)

I've got a canon 30D sitting in a drawer with no lens. Any recommendations for a couple of good starter lenses for a reasonable range of situation use, including quite low light and at least one physically small for portability?

[sol3.livejournal.com]

From the lenses that i've owned and used:

For cheap and low light and portability - canon's 50mm f/1.8 "plastic fantastic" is a great lens. You can probably get it for less than $80 by poking around.

For a bit more range, Tokina's 28-70mm f/2.8 was a nice lens - esp. on a camera with a cropped sensor (like the 30d) - it looks like it's since been replaced by the 28-80mm f/2.8. I liked that lens better than the canon 28-105 f/4-5.6 simply because of the wider aperture. Sigma and Tokina also have similar lenses in this range and they're all in the $100-250ish range (between ebay/used and new). The nice thing about buying 3rd party lenses off of ebay is they don't hold their value like canon's lenses do - so they're frequently as much as half the cost of the lens new.

There's also a number of inexpensive 28-200mm and 28-300mm lenses - that perform less well in low light but are compact and portable. I don't own/have any of these - but there've been times i've considered getting one. There is a price paid in terms of quality with those lenses - but I think some of that gets masked by the smaller sensor (problems around the edges of the image being most frequent - and the cropped sensor gets rid of those edges :). The really nice thing about a 28-200 or a 28-300 lens is no need to change lenses for a wide range of situations - though, another drawback is they aren't as good with the low light as an f/1.8 or even f/2.8 lens would be.

[pir.livejournal.com]

Cool, thanks for the info :)

[maighread.livejournal.com]

I just like that you're saying she was packing. hee hee

[inaxismundi.livejournal.com]

more! more!