Personal Panoramic History, Part 8: 2015

Previously in this series of posts, covering 2014, I had some panoramas from the top of Mauna Kea to where it disappears into the ocean. In contrast, 2015 might just be The Year of Ocean Panoramas…

March

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In March of 2015 my friend Graham and I went for a hike at a little forest reserve up the Hāmākua coast called Kalōpā State Recreation Area, and while I didn't get any good panorama opportunities in the forest, on the way we stopped at Laupāhoehoe Point, a little spit of land sticking out of the craggy coast where you can access the ocean.

View looking east-south-east along the Hāmākua coast.

It's a lovely area, and we had some spectacular weather for the visit; being on the windward side of the island it's likely clouded over or raining much of the time.

May

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Nā Pali cliffs, near Kīlauea, looking south-east.

Interestingly I don't remember exactly what this trip was. I know the location: it's at the top of the steep cliffs (pali) between Kīlauea and the ocean, yet I don't remember why Graham and I came there or what we did for the rest of the trip, since these are almost the only photos I have from that day. We'd come earlier in the month to see the lava lake in Kīlauea, but here we were apparently just hiking? Apparently we didn't go to Kīlauea Iki or anything else like that, or I would've gotten photos of it. I think we stopped near here to have lunch, or something like that. It is a mystery.

Regardless, this panorama definitely hasn't been shown before. I vaguely remember of that trip that there was a lot of poor weather around; you can see that on both sides of the picture there are dark storm clouds, but we were lucky to have clear skies above us when this was taken.

June

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I don't actually have any panoramas specifically from June, but that month I noticed that panoramas make great desktop wallpaper for a dual-monitor display, and it could almost be considered the point where I realized that I'd been doing them for a while and started to get more intentional (albeit slowly) about looking for panorama opportunities.

July

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July, however, has several panoramas due to my mother's side of the family having a reunion in Oregon which I attended. We stayed right on the beach and explored a few locations up and down the coast as well.

This panorama and the next were taken relatively close to each other, the first looking north, the second looking south along the coast. The first and third of this series of four have shown up before on this blog, but the second and fourth are new, as I only put their constituent photos together into a panorama with Hugin.

I'm not sure why I never put these photos into a panorama, but my guess would be that due to the Sun's strong reflections in the middle of the scene the color correction would've been beyond my skill to do manually. Luckily, Hugin handles varying color composition throughout a panorama quite nicely and can compensate for it automatically to a pretty good extent.

These two panoramas above and below show Simpson's Reef; the lower one just from a slightly wider angle, which is likely why I never bothered putting it together after creating the first one.

I don't remember much about the reef from the little informational placard that was posted by the lookout, but I remember that the largest island in it was almost completely covered in sea lions (though they're hard to make out at this scale).

And that's it for 2015! A fairly slow year in terms of quantity, but some pretty nice panoramas. Looking ahead, 2016 will be similarly slow, but it's got some interesting ones that I haven't shown off before. A hui hou!