Photographing Doc

When I decided to photograph Doc in a Hawaiian setting, what I was visualizing was taking it to a beach with palm trees and turquoise water.  Sunday afternoon I asked my husband if he would help me out with it.

Remember that he is in the army.  Right now there is a big "exercise" going on with all services.  By "excercise" I mean "war games" of some sort.  Luckily, he doesn't have to go out to the woods and live in a tent or anything, but he is working an overnight shift.  He gets home about 3-4 AM and then sleeps until noon.  So it is Sunday afternoon and we haven't done much together so I asked if we could go photograph my quilt.  In fairness, it probably wasn't what he wanted to do, but he was a good sport about it!

This was actually the first try.  It was perfect!  Palms, ocean, and even boats--a plus.  We decided not to go too far and went to the harbor/beach at Hickam AFB.  There is a "point" of land, nicely grassy and with lovely trees, that sticks out into the water with the marina on one side.  That is my husband sitting on the table, hiding behind and holding up the quilt.  The big problem was that the afternoon trade winds were blowing.  Pretty hard at times.  See?

After taking some pictures at this first spot, we walked out further on the point.  I tried more compositions:

Still too windy!

A pretty picture, but you don't see much of the quilt.

The really neat feature of Hickam Harbor and Beach is that it is formed on one side by this land, Foster's Point, and then there is the harbor/marina and then the public beach and on the other side of the beach is the reef runway for HNL (Honolulu International Airport).  It is so cool to be there and watch the jets taxi out and then turn to take off.  We were lucky enough to see a few.

And the view is great, too, as you can see Diamond Head behind the sail.

As we continued to walk to the end of the point our attention was captured by a floating beach ball.  We saw it speedily floating out of the harbor, and a guy had gotten off a boat into the water and was swimming hard after it.  The scene reminded me a bit of Tom Hanks swimming after "Wilson" in Castaway.  At any rate, the guy was almost hit by a sailboat (this is the harbor, not the recreational beach) and the whole time I'm thinking "are we going to see this guy swim out and drown trying to save a $2 beach ball?"  Finally, he saw us--the ball was maybe 12 feet off the point--and he asks if it is our ball.  It isn't even his??!!!  We yell no.  And then I yell "you aren't going to drown for that ball are you?"  He realized about that time that he was losing ground.

I, of course, got a photo.

All in all, it was a fun hour we got to spend together.  As you can see, it was a gorgeous day!

Aloha,

JoAnne