Due to popular demand, I will post another Hawaii photo. ;) Well, I did spend a lot of time trying to get this one to turn out right because I knew this would make a good Picture Of The Week if I could pull it off. In the end it required a little more digital processing than I usually like doing to my photos... but sometimes that is necessary to get the desired effect.

All of the Hawaiian islands have many waterfalls, due to the rugged young landscape. We saw more waterfalls than I can count, and most of those were visible from the car. One day we set aside an hour just to drive a stretch of road north of Volcanoes National Park and look at waterfalls. This one was particularly interesting, because the water is flowing through a lava tube! There was a good view from the road bridge, but I decided to climb down under the bridge to get this view directly down the lava tube.

For those photography nuts out there, this is a 2 second exposure at f/22, ISO 100, with some postprocessing.

Comments

Great photo, it makes one curious as to what is on the other side. It would
have been fun to go through the tube to see.

what kind of post processing did you do?

Well, my goal when I was taking the picture was to show the other end of the
lava tube.  However, I couldn't get it to show up without totally overexposing
everything else in the scene.  Also, using the metering on my camera exposed
the rocks and trees nicely but totally blew out any detail in the water.  

Finally I decided to underexpose the image.  Back home, I took my underexposed
image and I started by selecting the end of the lava tube (which was
practically black), feathering the selection a little bit, and bringing up the
levels so that the rocks at the end were visible.

Then I was faced with the
problem of the underexposed trees and rocks.  Basically everything in the image
was underexposed except for the water, so using the freehand selection tool I
carefully selected all of the water.  Then I feathered the selection and
inverted it.  Then I adjusted the levels to produce the final image.

The
result:  My rocks and trees are exposed nicely, my water has nice detail, and
you can clearly see the end of the lava tube.  It now looks much closer to what
I saw with my own eyes when I was there.

The only downsides I noticed are that
the reflections in the water are more subdued than they should be (because they
weren't affected by the level adjustments), and one of the rocks has a slight
fringe on it due to the selection being slightly off.  I think I'm the only one
who would notice though.

i want a new picture!!