Friday, Feb 8, 2008


A friend and I made plans to go shooting yesterday. When I left the house in Mililani, it was sunny and about 80. By the time I got to Honolulu to meet my ride, it was overcast. By the time we got to where we were going to hike and shoot, it was raining. We foolishly went east to the windward side, where it usually rains regularly. We should have gone west. Sigh.

So we wound up at Ho'omaluhia Botanical Garden. It was really beautiful, and would have been even more so if we hadn't had to slosh through mud, guck and rain. Every once in a while, the rain let up, so we were able to get a few shots without jeopardizing our camera equipment. Our shoes, however, were another story. It's been raining so much here that the earth can't absorb the water fast enough.

Same scene but in differet format

We finally decided to give up the effort, and we headed back to my car. It was at Magic Island and by the time we got there it was time for the outrigger canoe practices to begin. So I decided to stick around and watch and get some more photos.

There appear to be boy's teams and girl's teams. It's really fun to watch them, you can tell they're putting all their efforts into the practice. I was going to stop and ask when they had their races/meets, but by the time I got into the car and was driving near their put-in spot, it was raining again and I didn't feel like getting out of the car.

Before I left though, when it was still pretty nice, there was a small wedding going on. By small, I mean about 8 people total, and no photographer. Hmmmm, getting married in Hawaii, in the shadow of Diamond Head, and just one or two point-and-shoot cameras... Okay! Anyway, the reason I mention this is that this wedding group was the epitome of a photographer's nightmare of mismatched clothing. It was bad enough that no one matched (not even the bride and groom), but take a look at the guy on the far right. He doesn't even match himself!! It was kind of like a Hawaiian psychadelic experience.

So, I finally rounded up some facts about Oahu. The island is 44 miles long and 30 miles wide and according to information from 2004 the population is 876,176. Honolulu alone has somewhere around 600,000 of that population. There are 69 accesible beaches of which 19 have lifeguards. 23 state parks, 286 county parks/community centers. Mt. Kaala is the highest peak at 4,025 ft.

Manhattan, on the other hand is 12.5 miles long and 2.5 miles wide with a population of 1,622,582. (In an earlier post I stated that Manhattan has a population of about 8,000,000--wrong! NYC as a whole has pop. of 8,214,426) So Manhattan, being 1/4 of the length and 1/15 the width, has almost twice the population of Oahu.

na hoku=the star