Blue Hour At The Andaz Maui

As I walked back to our room at the Andaz Maui resort I turned around to take one last look at the Hawaiian sunset. The blue hour was just beginning, and what a sight! I’d just spent an hour shooting at the beach, but I couldn’t resist setting up my tripod one more time to capture this scene across the pool.

I often find the best light comes after the sun has set, and this evening was no exception. As always I exposed this shot for the highlights, expecting to have more success recovering the dark areas of the sky in post-processing.

Unfortunately as I brought up those shadows in Lightroom a huge amount of ugly noise was revealed. Using a combination of Topaz DeNoise and Lightroom I had to do a fair bit of work to balance the noise reduction against loss of detail in the image. It’s a bit of a black art and I still feel like an apprentice!

Poolside At Big Island’s Fairmont Orchid

One morning I was up early enough to try and get some shots of an empty swimming pool at the Fairmont Orchid on Big Island. It’s not often you see these places empty during the day, so I took my chance and did a full circuit around the water’s edge.

You’ll probably be unsurprised to hear that I’m not the kind of traveller who likes to spend their day sitting by the pool engrossed in a good novel. I find photography pretty relaxing for the most part, and when I need a break I’d rather find a beach and just listen to the ocean. While doing my utmost to remain out of the sun!

I wanted to try and evoke that classic Hawaiian postcard feeling with this shot. I boosted the temperature way up to around 13,000 for the entire image to get the yellow tint, and then played around with the hue, saturation and luminance of blue to get the colour I was after in the sky.