Tony Seeley Photography

The other day Lisa asked me if there was somewhere I’d like to go while in Maui.  I told her I’d like to photograph a Hawaiian waterfall and she hit the web and started her research.

In the end she found a place on the northern part of the island called Iao Valley State Park.

Now some of the best-known waterfalls in Maui are in the Hana region of the island.  This is where some of the waterfalls were shot for the film Jurassic Park.  However this is a pretty inaccessible part of the island and the best waterfalls can only be reached from the air.  So we hit the road to go to Iao Valley.

A couple of years ago we visited Kauai.  This was a really beautiful island but we found every day it rained for an hour or so.  Maui is a little different; you really don’t see any rain on the coast at all. However if you head inland and drive towards the mountains you hit what are in essence tropical rain forests and can get very wet.

Flowing through the valley is the Iao “stream” – at least that’s what it’s called.  But you say stream to me and I envision something you can jump across, but this stream is a pretty wide river with a lot of water.  While there we didn’t find any big waterfall drops, but instead came across a number of small drops.

What made it “interesting” was that in the middle of the river were a number of young women who were swimming in tiny bikini’s.  Now I have nothing against pretty bikini clad women but not if I’m trying to take a landscape shot.  I pointed the camera in their direction once just looking for some thing else to shoot (honest) and the looks I got would kill a cat!

In the end I took a number of shots of different parts of the river.  Tonight’s posting was taken by the entrance to the park, in the future I’ll post some other shots.

I liked this one because of the large rocks in the foreground, the very green foliage in the center and the large peaks in the background, one of which (the one of the left) is the Ioa Needle which is a 1200 foot lava remnant covered in vegetation.

As you can see the sky was pretty gray – but it was still 82 degrees – so standing in the river to get some pictures was actually a lot of fun.

Yesterday Master Chief buried Carter when he fell asleep on the beach – big mistake, today was payback time.

I probably should have posted this particular image the first day we got to the hotel, but as I only took the picture today that would have been difficult.  The reason being that the waterfall is what you see when you drive up to the hotel, it’s across the road from the hotel reception.

This waterfall is of course a man made and not natural, but it looks really pretty and the water is coming down pretty fast so I thought it would make a nice picture.

Waterfalls are a little tricky.  You don’t want the water to be frozen in time, but to appear almost “Ribbony” (that’s a real word right?) so that the picture gives the felling of motion.  To do this you need to have a long exposure.   But (and here’s the hard bit) you also want the leaves around the waterfall to be sharp and not blurry, which does tend to happen as over a long exposure the water rushing past blows the leaves about.

So what you have to do is take two images.  One with a long exposure for the water, and one with a short exposure for the foliage and flowers.  Then you blend the two pictures together to create the “perfect” waterfall.

Of course I didn’t do that here as it’s a total pain and loads of work (plus I was rushed and forgot), so here you get ribbony water and slightly blurry flowers.  Enjoy.

Tonight we went to the Cheeseburger Island Style restaurant in Wailea, but we lost the Halo guys, then I found them playing on the wall decorations!