Honolulu 1995 or so

Bringing light to Polynesia.

Once upon a time, I used to shoot. Sometimes the images were picked up for publication, other times they weren't. Day in and day out, my Domke F2 bag loaded with a Canon F1N and a large assortment of lenses was never out of reach. Captured some great moments and captured some tragic ones.

I've been thinking about digitizing my large library of images and I've been debating on whether to farm the work out to a local lab or just by a film scanner and do it myself. The local lab charges $.95 per slide or frame. I've got thousands. Without a doubt, it's cheaper by the dollar to buy a nice Nikon scanner but I'd have to do it myself. This means cleaning the slides/negatives, setting up the session, scanning and correcting. With the time I have available, it would probably take me years (or never) to digitize my library.

Conversely, it will end up costing thousands to farm out the work. So I did a test run. I grabbed two random sheets of slides and sent them off. This was one of the images from that set, and one of my favorite images.

There's a pull off on Roundtop Drive just below Tantalus that overlooks the eastern half of Honolulu from the tall buildings of Waikiki to the neighborhood of Moi'ili'ili and the entrance of Manoa Valley and the University of Hawaii (Punahou School, where Barack Obama attended is just below the railing right where I'm standing).

That pull-off is famous on the island for it's tantalizing view and as a favored make out point for locals. On any given night, you'll find an assortment of tourist gawkers, couples and voyeurs milling about.

To create this image, we set up the F1N set on the Domke bag on the hood of my Karmann Ghia with 20mm prime lens set to F16 and did a 30 second exposure using Fuji Velvia 50 slide film. In the middle of the exposure, I fired the Vivitar 185 flash at full power pointed at the lens.