Conrad Blog:

Hawaii

Well, tomorrow Kristin and I leave for Hawaii for two weeks. We're going for her old roommate's wedding, and then staying a while to see the place (and climb mountains). It's going to be great, but I'm a little stressed out about it right now. We are staying on Oahu for the first week, and then jumping to the big island for the second week, and that leg of the trip doesn't have any firm plans at this point. We have a pretty good idea of what we'll do there and when, but as far as actual tickets or reservations.... I'll feel better once those plans are firmed up a bit.

We've got some ambitious goals for this trip. The first week won't have too much going on aside from the usual pre-wedding planning, beach-bumming, museum-going, and sight-seeing -- Not to trivialize those things. I can't imagine they will be anything less than spectacular.

But I think the 2nd week will be where it really starts getting crazy. The big island has practically all ecological environments in the world, in a very small amount of space. It's got desert, rainforest, mountains, snow, coral reefs... We plan on seeing a LOT of those. It also is home to the world's largest mountain, which we hope to climb. It's not the tallest, mind you, but from the base of the sea floor to the summit, it dwarfs mount everest by quite a bit, I think. Luckily, most of it being beneath the sea makes our jobs much easier, and it actually only qualifies as a pretty hardcore day hike. Kristin and I have bought more outdoor gear than I ever thought I would in preparation for it... As a very nerdy computer programming bookworm, I still don't really know how I feel about that. I think its good. I like being active, but all the accouterments that come with still confuse me. There was a lot of "what is this? why do I need that?" going on while we were walking around various outdoors stores...

This trip will be heavily documented, to say the least. Kristin and I are now the proud owners of a very nice Nikon outfit. I don't plan on bringing a computer along, so I stocked up on CF cards before we left, and we've got 10 gigs now. We'll weed out the bad shots as we go, and hopefully that will be enough. Kristin's dad also got me a few photographic toys for my birthday. He got me a Holga - a cheap, fun, unique medium format camera that takes really cool pictures. I've only got one roll of film for that right now, so we'll have to conserve. But that should offer a whole new perspective on the trip. On top of that, Kristin's dad also got us a pinhole attachment for the Nikon. Which is really crazy. Pinhole cameras do not use lenses. They "focus" the light by making it pass through a very small hole in an opaque medium of some sort. Light is weird, and this works, and you don't have "focus" or "depth of field" like you would with a traditional lens. The pics (I think) tend to be a bit softer, and you have to use super-long exposures on them (the pinhole only lets a small amount of light through), but they're a really interesting idea that I haven't explored yet.

We'll be screwing around with the lo-fi panorama technique that I was working on in Mexico and Paris. We want to get a good one like this that we can print and mount on gatorboard and hang in our living room. The beauty of the lo-fi collage is that you can get HUGE prints from stitched-together 10.2 megapixel images. HUGE.

I'm also curious to see what kind of stuff the Holga kicks out. Medium-format film can theoretically be blown up larger than 35mm, but when you're shooting something like a Holga, image quality is typically pretty far back in your mind. You're just worried about getting something fun and unique instead. We're shooting 120-size t-max at 100 speed.

We should have internet the first week and then off-and-on the 2nd week, so I will probably post a few blogs on the run down there, hopefully I'll be able to upload some photos while I'm down there, too.

If anyone has ever been to Hawaii and has travel tips, leave them in the comments. Or if you want me to take a particular kind of picture or something, leave it in the comments. Thanks for reading!