Sea of Black and White

"The intellect of the wise is like glass: It admits the light of heaven and reflects it." --Augustus Hare, British writer and raconteur

Chris and I stopped in Hawaii on our way home from China for a few days before the holidays. The weather was magnificent, and by that I mean it was typically "Hawaiian" - always nice and warm, but sometimes brilliantly sunny, sometimes foggy and threatening rain; sometimes a shower will blow through, then a brilliant rainbow will arch across the sky; and it's always windy. Always, always windy, as you can see from the flying spray on these waves off of Poipu Beach in Kauai.

Being a relative newcomer to photography, I'm still trying to work out all the "gadgets" and settings on my cameras, and in so doing, I often point and shoot expecting one thing and wind up with something very different. Mostly my "mistakes" are best relegated to the trash bin, but once in a great while, something wonderful happens and the result is a happy accident!

The water off of Poipu today was a wonderful shade of aqua interspersed with deep blues and bright greens and topped off with dancing whitecaps. The sun was reflecting brilliantly off the water making the colors "pop," and the wind was whipping up the surf and stirring the greens and blues in the swirling water. You can imagine my enthusiasm as I snapped away, taking shots from all angles of the ocean in its turbulent, brilliant glory!

That being said and having painted that vivid picture for you, can you imagine my surprise when half of my shots came out of the camera in almost perfect black and white? Some magical trick of light caused many of my colorful images to transform into tones of muted gray with hardly a hint of color to be found. The shots were fascinating, because I knew exactly what I had seen - how could all of those brilliant colors have simply disappeared?

And then, as I looked more closely, I came across this shot, the one wonderful "mistake" that I made today; and I realized that no matter how schooled or skilled I ever should become in the art of photography, it will inevitably be these unexpected moments, these unpredictable "tricks of light," these "mistakes" that will be the reason why I keep chasing after those perfect moments in time; today, quite by accident, my lens caught the light of heaven reflected in the spray of these waves, one split second of brilliance in a sea of black and white.

Aloha!
Poipu Beach
Kauai, Hawaii