Big Island Drive 1

Part one of the big island drive. One of the benefits of being a working astronomer is that usually you get a day or two on either side of a trip to go see some cool stuff. Well, that's what Jaquie and I did. We drove down the windward side of the big island. Beautiful stuff. And the rain wasn't all that bad - it was so dry at Hale Pohaku that my lips and nose had been bleeding for 3 days. The rain felt good. I'm so glad that I'm over my hatred of it, instilled at a young age in a cloudy grey land where sun is a once-a-month affair in winter.....

Waipio Valley on the Kohala side.

Waves breaking at Laupahoehoe - SLR's are nice cause of the 1/4000 shutter. Too bad I'm not rich.

I got some neutral density filters just before going over - they rock. This was a 30 second exposure. I'm really starting to enjoy smearing things out. For those inclined - to me it relates to spatial and temporal lenght scales - everything has a fractal nature to it's scale. Take a picture of this waterfall at 1/10000 and see the droplets and shock waves propagating inside the droplets. At 1/100 you see the bulk gravity waves in the water (ripples, surface waves). At 1 you're starting to see foot sized variations in general flow patterns, say a wave bending around a rock. At 10sec all that is smeared and you just see streaks of white - the bulk variation in the density from the rocks underneath. I wonder what 10000 seconds might look like.......
I really liked the color of this one.