Posted 10:48 PM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: How Green Was My Valley

How green was it?? This green:

Iao Valley State Park, Maui
November 2008

The Iao Needle, which you've seen before, is off to the upper right of this photo.

This turned out to be a strange series of pictures. I came home one morning to find the West Maui Mountains to be free of cloud, which is fairly unusual. So I decided I'd go down to the Iao Valley to get some good pictures of the Needle, since my previous photos were all thick with cloud.

I keep my camera with me at all times for just such an emergency, so -- despite having worked a 15 hour shift -- I headed over there. The sky was beautiful, the air was cool, and the tourists were minimal. I got to the park about 7:30am and climbed up hill and down dale until about 9.[*]

And when I got the prints back...they sucked. The actual photos of the Needle were a bizarre shade of green; rather bright but washed-out. Working with the scans today, I realized that those images had little contrast. I fiddled with the colors but was never quite happy with the results (I'll post 'em eventually, though).

Was it the lighting, the film, the temperature of the film (COLD), the processing? Don't know. The later photos in the sequence, like this one, were a rich, almost embarrassing green. I did minimal fiddling with the colors of this one, and found I had to desaturate the color before I felt I could post it. That doesn't happen very often, I can tell you.

Anyway, as I said the Needle off the frame to the upper right. You can see the little brown viewing shelter on the near hill. The tin-roofed building on the lower level houses the restrooms.

This is the view from the upper half of the parking lot; I was just about to leave when I realized this might make a pretty good picture. So I climbed over the parking lot railing and wandered onto the grass to get an unobstructed view. By this time the tourists were beginning to roll up and they were following me like goslings. "What's she taking a picture of? What can you see?"

[*]Stayed up that day until 11am, which meant I'd been awake for 23 hours -- not unheard-of, but unusual -- woke up again at 1pm and couldn't get back to sleep, though I was exhausted. Thought I was going to die. So you can imagine my emotion when I saw the thoroughly unimpressive prints.

Labels: Foto Friday, Hawaii