Along the downslope of the Mighty Mauna Kea lies the verdant pastures of the Parker Ranch.
Once or twice a year these Ena Ena wildflowers grace the environment.
This image makes me feel small as I gaze upwards to the mountain. The aspect of scale on the Big Island is always something to behold!
I made this image some years ago of a floor in the forest on the island of Molokai.
As you can see the floor is littered with Cook Pine needles in various shapes, forms and colors.
I actually used an old Nikon D 70 with a Sigma 18-55mm lens. The amount of detail that was pulled from the scene was astounding. It go oea to ahow that a high megapixel camera doesnt necessarily exhibit more sharpness.
The Cook Pine is native to New Caledonia, an island archipelago northeast of Australia and is most evident on the Isle de Pines.
The tree’s scientific taxonomy was first made by Johann Reinhold Forster, a botanist on Captain James Cook’s second round the world voyage. It is named directly for Captain Cook, and not for the Cook Islands. Cook never disembarked on the island.
This tree is truly unique in that it “leans” toward the equator from its base to its top. The reason for this mysterious anomaly is unknown and the further north in latitude the greater the tree leans. Most trees in Hawaii don’t exhibit this behavior because of the island’s proximity to the equator.
This landmark above the town of Waimea on the Big Island is always green.
That’s because it literally sits on the fault line between the wet and dry sides of the island.
It appears as an emerald.
I remember testing out a new Sigma 180-500 aspherical zoom lens a few years back.
This photograph was made of the sun as it was near to sinking into the Pacific Ocean in Hawaii.
I like the simplicity and singularity of a heavenly body that never changes (at least in our lifetimes).
There is a stretch of the highway coming down from Volcano, Hawaii that has many mini-forests of giant albizia trees.
These trees grow so tall that they essentially kill themselves because their root systems are so shallow that wind can play a factor with their survival.
Others like this lone sentinel survive standing as a skeleton