A Day at the Beach

Not a real beach, but a beautiful rocky shoreline on a stunning Friday afternoon up near the Upolu Airport, Hawaii. And, if you can believe it, I was on "assignment" to capture something pretty much just like this.

Nice gig if you can get it. Just to be sure, this *was* the idea, eh Chaunce?

Winter is the time of year that the Humpback Whales make their annual migration to Hawaii to have their calves and relax. They start to show up as early as November/December but are easily spotted off all the Hawaiian islands in January and February. By March/April they'll head back up to Alaska with their newborne to feed on the krill again. While they're here they don't eat much at all. Isolated shoreline areas like this stretch on the northwest side of the Big Island is a great playground for them. They like the solitude here.

I had hoped to capture something like this today, but honestly didn't think I'd actually get much of anything! Go figure.

My SanDisk Extreme 16 GB CF cards, at 60 MB/s were too slow however to keep up with the Nikon D3 shooting raw images at 9 fps. So I will be upgrading to 90 MB/s cards here shortly. I might have gotten away with things had I shot in JPG ... but it wasn't to be. Faster cards will be more useful.

I think I should do this again before the whales leave this year! This was kinda fun!