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OK. So it’s been three months since we went to Switzerland, but I’m not done posting images. I’m just catastrophically slow at updating my blog now that I have my own business (by the way, check out our killer website, designed by HeyDay Creative).

On top of that, our little family has decided to move to a bigger house. Where this house will be, we don’t know yet, but getting our current place ready has been pretty consuming. The plus? Eventually, there will be new wall space in a new home to decorate with enlargements of Switzerland.

Switzerland still sneaks up on me and blows me away with what we saw. Will I ever see a landscape more beautiful than the Berner Oberland? Will I ever experience a better network of trains? Will I ever attempt to eat a three-foot-long coiled sausage bathed in brown onion sauce?

The answers are: No. No. And hell no.

For the last three major trips we’ve gone on — Mexico, Kauai and Switzerland — we’ve rented a couple of lenses from BorrowedLenses.com. Each time, we’ve made sure to rent a tilt-shift lens.

Now I have never pretended to be the most technically aware photographer. I couldn’t begin to accurately tell you how the optics inside these lenses work. All I know is that a tilt-shift warps the field of focus so that you can manipulate the scene in all sorts of wacky ways. With a normal lens, the field of focus is always parallel to the front of the lens. With a tilt-shift, you pivot that plane in all sorts of weird angles.

There, that’s the best I can do to explain it. Wikipedia is more eloquent.

On Lake Lucerne, we took a day-long boat tour, and that’s where the Canon 45mm TS-E really came most in handy. As paddle-wheelers and charming villages passed by, I set the aperture to a narrower depth, pivoted the lens down (or sometimes on a diagonal) and fired away.

While tilt-shifts can often miniaturize a scene, I find that they can actually show a place in a way that is more true to how the eye sees it and how memory imprints it. Take for instance, the image above. In my memory, the hills, the water, the trees — they are all splashes of color, nothing more. But the structures, the boats and mostly, the feeling — that’s what resonated and stuck with me most. A tilt-shift can capture just those memory burners. They’re fun images to share: “this is how it looked, but this is how I remember it.”

The same goes for this image of Wengen. No other shot I took of this town showed just how nestled in the valley it really was. A standard 45mm wouldn’t have done it as well.

To that, I say “yay, tilt-shifts.”

It took nearly an hour to discover what was happening.

We had hiked up to this meadow just outside Zermatt, on the trail that eventually leads to Zmutt and the North Face of the Matterhorn. It was getting hot, and Varenna was inspecting the gravel on the trail, handing her best specimens to Mom, and then pushing her stroller like the big girl she was proclaiming to be (“bick guhr! bick gurh!). We were all content, and not planning to go too far. After all, this appeared to be it: the iconic view of the Matterhorn, the one that conjures visions of alpenhorns and men yodeling “Ri-co-la” into the crisp glacial air.

But as we turned to head back to town, the moon was suddenly quite noticeable and on a very interesting course.

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And so, over the course of maybe 20 minutes, it swooped low, landed on the summit of the Matterhorn, and temporarily turned the world’s most famous mountain into a Santa hat.

It disappeared, then reemerged, like an arrow piercing the heart of Switzerland and coming out the other side. It was our second-to-last full day in the country, but it felt like an apt conclusion to the trip.

Photographing the Eiger…

Every story needs a bad guy. In the Book of the Berner Oberland, its the Eiger. Its history of mountain climbing is layered with one tragedy after another. From its Wikipedia page:

Since 1935, at least sixty-four climbers have died attempting the North Face, earning it the German nickname, Mordwand, or “murderous wall”, a play on the face’s German name Nordwand.

The mystique of this mountain is palpable the moment you lay eyes on it. From Männlichen, it appears like a blunt arrowhead piercing the clouds. From Kleine Scheidegg (above left), it resembles a lurking sharks fin. Both places are ideal spots for the classic Eiger photograph, but to capture images with a little more nuance, you really have to hike underneath the mountain’s legendary North Face.

We tooled around in the pastures underneath it at the Alpiglen train station (above right), located halfway between Kleine Scheidegg and Grindelwald, and it turned into one of the most transformative travel moments of my life. I’ll devote a whole blog post to it at some point, but in short, the Eiger began to shed loose ice chunks and snow plumbs in a display that was at once intimidating and exhilarating to witness. Our neighbor at the hotel hiked the North Face trail — which skirts beneath the entire length of the mountain — and he reported that at one point he discovered a single climbing glove beneath the rocks. Who knows how it got there, but it clearly captivated and slightly haunted him just seeing it there.

Photographing the Mönch…

There is not a whole lot said about the Mönch, which I suppose makes its name all the more fitting. It’s the strong and silent type.

Wedged between the Eiger and the Jungfrau, it is easy to put this 13,474-foot mountain in the backseat, but I would imagine that if it were located by itself anywhere else in Switzerland, it would be a major draw for travelers. From certain angles, it appears to be the tallest of the three peaks (its not, the Jungfrau is), and it is punctuated by a large glacier that oozes like an icy, mortal wound from its North Face. But it lacks the Eiger’s steepness and sharp angles, and the Jungfrau’s bulk and dominance. So, you’ve probably never heard of it as a result.

So, naturally, photographing the Mönch typically means photographing it with its neighbors, usually from that stellar view from the Månnlichen, or from Mürren. But its such a majestic beast in its own right, I’d suggest trying to isolate it for a few images as well. As I combed over the shots I came home with, only three really stood out as being just about the Mönch. One was a simple image cropped on the summit, which was simple and arresting just because the mountain is so huge. But I think the above two images tell the story a bit better. On the left is how the Mönch appears as you approach Mürren on the railway, which is an angle that best show’s the pitch of the mountain’s North Face. And on the right is a pair of hikers from near the Eiger Glacier station, who were gazing at the Mönch’s lower wall. They seem to be saying “holy crap” with their body language.

Photographing Staubbach Falls…

The Lauterbrunnen Valley is home to 70+ waterfalls, but hands down the most photographed is Staubbach Falls, which slips off an embankment of meadows and plunges 1,000 feet onto the valley floor, most of it in one unbroken fall. Situated right next to it is the tourist hub and namesake of the valley, Lauterbrunnen, so these falls get plenty of attention and a good deal of the postcard royalties.

I’ll devote a later post to the waterfalls of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, specifically Staubbach Falls and Trummelbach Falls. But I will note here that light conditions are best in late morning when the falls are hit by full sun. Shortly after noon, the spray of the falls catches great backlight, which is also fun to work with.

Photographing Mürren…

Where should you stay in the Berner Oberland?

It’s a question that seems to plague a lot of people based on TripAdvisor’s forums. We spent all six nights in Wengen and would highly recommend it (pros: within striking distance of the trails beneath the Eiger-Mönch-Jungfrau, easy access to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, first ride up on the Männlichen gondola). Although, next time, we will consider staying in Mürren. For one, this is where Mürren is situated (dead center, below image).

Two, it appears to have the best hiking access in the area, with several trails cruising amongst the meadows below the Schilthorn, and the quickest access to this area’s closest thing to a wilderness area, Hinteres Lauterbrunnental, an UNESCO Natural Heritage Site that is tucked into the back of the valley, and home to several massive waterfalls. Furthermore, from Mürren’s cliff-hanging perch, you could probably throw an Aerobie across the narrow valley into the west face of the Jungfrau. The mountains are as in-your-face as any place I’ve been.

I also found it’s streets and architecture more photogenic than Wengen, Grindelwald or Lauterbrunnen. There is a sector in the middle of town that is filled with older wooden structures typical of life in this valley before tourism. Like much of the Alps, these communities used to be quite poor as they were extremely isolated and depended upon the land and its unreliable climate for subsistence. The old sector of Mürren is a compelling reminder that tourism can completely alter a community’s economy forever.

Photographing the Swiss Life…

Quaint could be the most overused word in travel and tourism. I’d say its second behind charming.

They are so overused by writers that they have come to mean nothing, because any place that is desirable in some sense has been labeled so at some point.

But these two words do exist, and truthfully, travelers are irresistibly drawn to places that are simple, old-fashioned and pleasing to the eye. The rural Swiss aesthetic — particularly in the Berner Oberland — seems obsessed with capitalizing on it.

I’d be lying if I said “I didn’t fall for it.” I’m a sucker for the idyllic life probably because I’m not cut out for it. The back-breaking work… The changing weather… The smell of cows… The low wages …

But to see a wall of perfectly stacked firewood under the eaves of a rustic farmhouse? That’s camera fodder!

These images were taken at Alpiglen, a destination along the Grindelwald–Wengen railway that is situated below the Eiger’s North Face. The train station is literally surrounded by cows, and the trail to the Eiger passes through a working farm. In fact, any area with “alp” in the name indicates an area where farmers take their cows for the summer to feed on pastures and fatten up for the winter. Wengernalp, Grütschalp, Bussalp — this is where you’ll find your traditional Swiss cows and burly men of daunting constitution yodeling “Ricola” into the wind.

They move slow, they have massive bells hanging from their neck, and they have a rather vacant look in their eye. The cows that is.

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Go ahead. Ogle all you want.

Words often fail me. They fail me the most when it comes to mountains. Grandeur. Majesty. Magnificence. Please: those words are chumps when you are beneath the Jungfrau (above two images), a hulking mountain that towers over the Lauterbrunnen Valley like a glacier clad bully. It’s name (roughly translated as Young Girl in German) is hardly worth dissecting. It makes little sense. This peak is a beast.

It’s neighboring two peaks — the Mönch and the Eiger — fit into a little folktale. The Young Girl protected by the Monk from the frightening Ogre. How quaint. Our first full day in the area — in mid-June mind you — was spent underneath the Eiger’s legendary North Face watching mini-avalanches, snow plumes and chunks of ice fall off its sheer walls. The Eiger is less like Shrek, more like an assassin.

And then there is the Matterhorn, the world’s most recognizable mountain. On the approach to Zermatt via the train from Visp, not a seat is used by the passengers. They are all standing, dangling out the windows hoping for that first glimpse of its iconic, snowclad summit peaking over the shoulder of the hills.

So magnetic is the mountain’s pull, people travel across the world to its remote little corner of the Alps, drop $350 CHF a night at a Zermatt hotel, eat $40 CHF pizza, and simply stare at its broken-nose summit. Slipping under the radar are its equally grand neighbors, like the cut-glass peak of the Weisshorn (above left) or the hulking, glacier-clad eminence of Monte Rosa, the tallest peak in Switzerland. “Meh,” the tourists seem to say with the direction of their turned heads. “Just look at the Matterhorn!”

I’m an English major from The Colorado College, and I remember one particularly frustrating lecture that was devoted entirely to “the gaze.” The implications of a character gazing at another. What does it mean to gaze? To pine? To possess with the eyes? Yawn. Maybe it was because we were reading Wordsworth’s poetry, but I thought it was a rather dumb topic.

But if the lecture was on mountains, then I would have gotten it.

Yes, sitting by a lake and staring at a towering, rippled, snow-covered peak is a noteworthy action. You are possessing something with your eyes. The strength, the unflappability of a mountain that has stood there for eons. An undaunted thing that rules over its subjects. An unmoved mover.

What man doesn’t have some stupid, innate, overinflated sense of self worth that he wants to possess the character of a hulking mountain? I don’t know one.

Lucerne is said to be one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. I still have a lot of Europe to cover, but its hard to imagine a cleaner, more idyllic, more photogenic city than Lucerne. The place seems designed for postcards, coffeetable books and small 1-inch-by-1-inch decorative chocolate wrappers.

To get my best shots in Lucerne, I made my way to these places:

Capturing Blue Hour

There is a certain moment at dusk when an urban landscape looks its best. The grit fades into the shadows, the sky holds an ethereal cobalt, and the light of the buildings and streetlamps twinkle to life. It doesn’t last long, and in Lucerne I only had one true crack at it: the last night we were there. The previous two evenings I was too exhausted and jetlagged, and because the sun sets so late in Switzerland in June, I ducked in early before blue hour happened.

Fortunately, in the limited window I had, I lucked out and found one of the best vantage points in Lucerne. In the Google Map, I’ve labeled this image Jesuit Church at Blue Hour, and it was taken along the northern shore of the Reuss River.

Elements of Lucerne remind me of Venice — the stately bridges crossing placid water, the waterside restaurants with tourist menus in four languages, loads of drunks shouting into the wee hours (just add a thick cloud of rotting fish to the air and it might complete the vibe). This location, I feel, showed Lucerne at its romantic best.

Here’s another angle I played with while I had a quasi-blue hour. Like much of Europe in summer, dusk seems to last forever. It wasn’t really dark until 10pm or so, and since we were traveling with a 1-year-old, it was hard for all three of us to stay up that late. Still, from about 8:45pm to 9:45pm, there is a dwindled light that is fun to work with. From the Lake Bridge, you have this beautiful angle of both the Chapel Bridge and the Jesuit Church, with white swans in motion.

Working With Perspective

The crown jewel of Lucerne is the wooden Chapel Bridge, or Kapellbrücke, which spans the River Reuss on a diagonal. Dating back to 1333, it is historically important on two accounts: It is the oldest covered wooden bridge in Europe and the world’s oldest surviving truss bridge. It’s long corridor is decorated with paintings depicting the city’s history, though, tragically, many of these were lost in the 1993 fire that devastated much of the bridge (a boat moored to the bridge caught fire and it quickly spread).

Draped with colorful pansies and crowned by a stately brick tower, the Chapel Bridge’s exterior captures all the postcard attention. But I found the interior of the bridge provides more opportunities for creative photography. The bridge’s natural linear perspective, its artistic details, and the opportunity to incorporate the cityscape into the shot, all pose unique challenges.

The locations for the above and below photos are listed on the Google Map as Interior Chapel Bridge Shots and Interior Blue Hour Chapel Bridge, respectively.

The Postcard Shot

On the one sunny day we had in Lucerne, I rose early and so did my daughter, and the two of us cruised around the quiet city for a good 90 minutes. She’s only 1-year-old, and usually patient with me and my happy snapping. The biggest thing in Lucerne that really got her excited were the swans, and this location below — labeled Chapel Bridge and Mt. Pilatus — not only kept her happy and smiling, but it produced one of my favorite shots of the trip. I will post some tilt-shift images from here in a later post.

Beauty in the Details

Later on our trip, we went to Zermatt, where it is easy to get lulled into the habit of placing the Matterhorn in the background of every shot. The Chapel Bridge in Lucerne has a similar effect. It’s kind of like that guy at a wedding who seems to poke his head into every person’s photo and mug for the camera. Truthfully, I’m not sure I got enough variety to my Lucerne shots, but one subject that would have been fun to play with more are the town’s murals.

Colorful, vivid and lively, these painted walls decorate a few of the buildings (mostly restaurants) in the old town quarter of Lucerne. This one (above right, labeled Old Town Murals on the map) seemed to depict the harvest season, hell, and all the reasons why I hate clowns.

And this one (Zunfthaus zu Pfistern) suckered me in because I had never seen a golden pretzel before.

Finally, this fairy-tale like mural lies just across from the Harvest/Hell/Clown Show building. My one struggle in all of this was finding a unique way to frame these paintings. It just felt all too easy to crane my neck up and take a picture like a tourist. Oh well.

And because it’s like that dude at weddings who sneaks into every shot, here’s the Chapel Bridge one more time, from a vantage point labeled Quintessential Chapel Bridge.

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I recently spent two weeks touring around Switzerland with my wife and our one-year-old daughter. It was a magnificent trip — one of those get-it-out-of-my-system-now kinds of trips while Varenna is young and portable. Ha! That’s at least what we thought when we booked the trip in January. She’s a bit more … mobile, shall we say.

But we had a very good time, and ultimately, I was pleasantly surprised with the images I returned home with. In the moment, we both were a bit distracted trying to keep our daughter entertained, engaged, and safe. We worked hard every hour of the trip, just not on photography. Or so it seemed.

Switzerland is a lavishly colorful place. Blessed with ample rain, fertile soil and some of the most chiseled mountains on this planet, it’s hard to take bad images. And if you are the type who comes home with 2,900 images on an external hard drive that need sorting, correcting and categorizing (I am raising my hand as I type this), an unfortunate thing starts to happen. You become numb to emerald green, cobalt blue and buttercup yellow.

Since Tanager Photography started in 2007, I’ve maintained that I am a color photographer. Tanagers are colorful birds, and they travel great distances. But I found myself appreciating a new aesthetic with my Swiss images, and it surprised me — desaturation. It’s nothing revolutionary, and believe me, I’m not acting like I just invented the iPad here. But as I edited my images and adjusted them, I couldn’t help but get excited seeing some of them transform as I moved the saturation slider to the left.

Our trip took us to four distinct places, each with their own photogenic qualities: Lucerne, with its wooden chapel bridge (above right and below); the Berner Oberland with its hulking glacier-clad peaks and lush pastures; Zermatt with the mighty Matterhorn (top); and Zürich, where scores of clock towers seem to suggest that the Swiss are punctual or something.

I’ll devote a later post to where and what to shoot in Lucerne, but its really all about that picturesque wooden bridge with its colorful flower trellises and multi-hued riverfront. I must have shot every conceivable angle on that bridge, but what rounded out the collection wasn’t a fresh angle so much as it was a treatment. By desaturating, the textures of the wood rose to the surface, making my collection of images on the bridge a lot more three dimensional.

The same thing occurred with my images from the Berner Oberland. Here you have the towering, snowy triumvirate of the Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger graced with these verdant green fields — truly one of the most spectacular scenes on earth — and yet, the temptation is to point a wide angle lens on it and turn the saturation up to 11 because that’s how it looks. In hindsight, one of my top pictures from the area was a simple shallow depth of field portrait of a pine-cone decoration hanging on the door of a house in Wengen (second from the top). Easiest shot in the world, and yet, when paired down and drained of its color, it just seemed to complete the other, wide-angle, saturated shots in my collection.

In Zermatt, where the landscape is drier and more harsh, adding a black-and-white treatment here and there seemed to give the land a new interpretation — that of a hostile moonscape covered in ice. I felt that the mountains surrounding Zermatt had been tamed by too much man-made activity (trams, trains, gondolas, cables, roads, girders, pipes, everywhere). Extracting that brutal harshness in the glacial landscape seemed like a nice counterpoint.

Ultimately, what gets me excited about travel photography is the whole collection from a place. Does it tell a story? In Switzerland, that story is buried in the textures of the land, the buildings and the people, and its not so easy to see at first. It wasn’t until I was at home in Denver, working in Lightroom, that I started to see these images come together in a way that was exciting as a whole. It took draining the color from select scenes — an act that defied my style as an artist — to make sense of the Swiss story.

Coming up: mountain porn, waterfalls, tilt-shifting Switzerland and shooters guides to Lucern, Zürich, Zermatt and the Berner Oberland. The Tanager Blog will be a busy place for the next few weeks.

I’d hesitate to say I’m “into gear.” I’d rather read a personal finance blog than the Digital Photography Magazine Buyer’s Guide. In writing, gear is just not interesting.

Where things get interesting for me is when gear enables new techniques. Last year, I used BorrowLenses.com to rent a 200mm prime lens and a 24mm tilt-shift for Holy Week in Mexico. To have two new weapons in my bag made the week’s imagery 100% better. The 200mm allowed for more intimate candid shots during the processions, while the tilt-shift opened up hundreds of doors of creativity for my cityscape and architecture. It was like shooting in a third and fourth dimension.

For Kauai, I once again rented two lenses: this time, a 24mm–105mm zoom lens (a must for the helicopter tour) and a 45mm tilt-shift lens. Once again, the tilt-shift rocked.

Kalihiwai Beach; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 400, 1/2500 sec, f5

Tilt-shift photography is a bit hard to explain, so here’s the Wikipedia page. But in essence, its about manipulation. Tilting manipulates the plane of focus, while shifting reorients the subject in the image area without moving the camera back, thereby eliminating converging lines (handy in architecture imagery). The lens actually moves on the camera body. A knob pivots the lens up and down for tilting, while another knob slides the lens across the front of the camera. A third button rotates the lens on the camera body, so pretty quickly you can get funky.

In Kauai, I was shooting landscapes, and didn’t end up shifting as much as tilting, so all of the images in this post are the product of angling the lens up or down and rotating it on the camera body, and not shifting. I did a brief illustration on the above image to show how tilting alters the plane of focus. On conventional lenses, the focus is related to the distance from the camera (e.g., everything 10 feet away is in focus, while everything closer and further is out of focus). Think of that focused area as a plane. With tilting, that plane is redirected. Suddenly, a swath across the image will be in focus, which in the above image includes my brother Ben and his son Jeremiah some 30 feet away, footprints on the beach 25 feet away, and the surfers bobbing in the distance, some 200 yards away. Meanwhile, the waves 25 feet away, as well as the distant palms trees and nearby footprints, are heavily out of focus. At that moment, I wanted to train the viewers eye to my brother and the surfers at the same time.

Kalihiwai Beach; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 400, 1/3200 sec, f5

Here again I tilted and tried to get the plane of focus to follow the surf line into the distance. I almost nailed it. Because of its nature, shooting with a tilt-shift is all manual focus, so getting it exact is a challenge.

Waimea Canyon; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 200, 1/500 sec, f6.3

Everybody’s favorite effect with the tilt-shift is to “miniaturize” a landscape. By shooting down from a high vantage point and altering the plane of focus, you can make a landscape look like a handcrafted model. My best effort at this is the top image of the Hanalei Valley Lookout, but it also works well here on Waimea Canyon. Again, the key is having an elevated position and tilting down on the scene.

Kalapaki Beach; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 100, 1/1600 sec, f4
Hanalei Valley Taro Fields; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 200, 1/5000 sec, f4

Shooting vertical images with a tilt-shift lens can present its own challenges. I think that’s because I often go vertical when I’m looking up a bit, so as with the sailboat masts on Kalapaki Beach above, or the foreground/mid-ground/background of the taro fields at dusk, executing the right plane of focus can be difficult. Sometimes it works for completely the wrong reasons. The sailboat shot is actually mostly out of focus, but the bow on one boat, the surf and the clumps of palm trees are crisp, giving the shot a surprising intimacy (not what I was going after). On the taro field shot, I should have done a diagonal plane of focus going the other way with the sunbeams. Oh well.

Here are some other experiments:

Palms on Kalapaki Beach; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 100, 1/200 sec, f4

Wailua Falls; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 400, 1/640 sec, f4
Anini Beach; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 800, 1/320 sec, f7.1

Outrigger Canoe on Kalapaki Beach; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 400, 1/250 sec, f4

Palms on Kalapaki Beach; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 100, 1/1600 sec, f4

While on Kauai, Hailey and I took a 90-minute helicopter tour of the island with Jack Harter Helicopters. The tour was billed as a photographer’s tour because it went slower and took its time with each section of the trip. Because of this alone, I highly recommend it. Kauai’s interior and much of its coastline is inaccessible (to most of us) and seeing it by air is really the only way to truly get a sense for the island as a whole.

However, don’t kid yourself. Just because its labeled a “photographer’s tour” doesn’t mean you’ll get great shots. In fact, its very hard work to get semi-pro to professional quality shots from these kinds of tours. I’d even go so far as to say you can’t get professional grade images unless you go on a windowless/doorless flight, and risk getting wet (which you will, when the tour heads to Mount Waialeale, the wettest spot on Earth).

Obviously, my No. 1 reason to do the helicopter tour was to get amazing images of the Garden Isle. We dropped a lot of money, and learned a lot along the way. I figured it was worth it to do a photographer’s scouting report for those of you considering a similar trip. Here are six tips to make the most of it:

1.) Try to minimize switching lenses and bring two cameras if you have to – Jack Harter (and probably all other helicopter tours) don’t allow bags, and once you are on the chopper, its easy to see why. Space is tight, and between the straps, life preservers and headphone cords, a bag would be a tangled-up nightmare. So, without a bag, you have to be judicial with what you take. Your chief camera should have a zoom lens (24mm–105mm is ideal). The second camera can have a longer telephoto range or an experimental lens. I had good luck with a prime 200mm f/2.8 lens, but I’d imagine a 300mm would be too close to be practical. Hailey had the second camera and was trying to rock a 45mm tilt-shift, which was incredibly difficult under the conditions, but when it worked, it was amazing (upper right). Also, keep in mind that things happen fast on these tours (and I was on the 90-minute flight), so always stay one step ahead of the pilot in terms of what’s coming up and be prepared to have the right settings ahead of time. The last thing you’d want is to see Weeping Wall, frame the shot, and decide to switch lenses for a better focal length. The view will be gone by the time you’re set.

2.) Don’t fight glare. You can’t win. Just enjoy the views for a moment – Unless your tour is windowless, glare is inevitable, and can be frustrating if you let it bother you (see two examples above … and for the record, that is not a butt crack). They tell passengers on this tour to wear dark clothing to minimize glare, but that didn’t help us: our pilot wore shorts and his thighs were the leading contributors to glare from our angle. My advice? If the glare is bad, put the camera down and just enjoy the moment. You can’t fight it, but you can quickly fail to register just how spectacular that waterfall on the other side of pilot’s thigh-glare is.

3.) Be prepared for any seat in the house – The tour company will seat you specifically based on weigh distribution on the helicopter, so calling shotgun will do you no good. I was seated in the back row middle, which I thought would be the worst seat in the helicopter. It wasn’t the best, but it wasn’t horrible. I had good luck with the long lenses (24mm–105mm and my 200mm prime) from this spot, but glare was exaggerated from here, especially at wider than 50mm. Hailey was on the left side, back seat, and had less glare, but a whole different problem: the warped glass. Front center and front right would have probably been the best seats for shooting, but they also may have had significant glare. Hard to tell without sitting in that spot.

4.) Best light for the Na Pali Coast is evening light – Our departure was at 9:30am, and by 10:15am we were circling over the highlight of Kauai, the Na Pali Coast. Problem was, we were looking back into the light, which would have been fine if I could maneuver to harness the light. But buckled in, and with lots of glare out the right side of the helicopter, it was difficult to compose shots without major drawbacks. My point is this: it may be worth taking the risk to fly in the afternoon. The weather may set in, the crater may be extra cloudy and wet … heck, the flight might even be cancelled. But if you get sunny conditions in the late afternoon, the Na Pali would be a freaking photographic jackpot. Your call.

5.) Be prepared for darker conditions in the craters and inland valleys – This caught up with me at the Weeping Wall (above right) at the end of the tour, the one cloudy spot we encountered on our extraordinarily sunny trip. After firing a few frames, I realized my shutter speed was teetering around 1/60 second, way too slow to be shooting from a moving vehicle. Sure enough, a lot of the images from inland were throw-aways. It’s easy to just keep the camera on one setting the whole trip and forget about it, but the waterfalls of the interior are one of the most stellar sights on Earth. Best not to miss a shot of them because of complacency.

6.) Embrace post-production – While initially flipping through the 449 images we took while airborne, I had a bit of a sinking feeling. It didn’t appear I had much to show for my efforts. But back home, and after loading everything into Lightroom, it became clear I had a lot of good images. Most of this was just contrast adjustment, some of it was just cloning out a minor glare here and there. Nothing too technical, and nothing that altered the reality of what we saw. In the end, I’m just glad I kept shooting.

So remember how a few posts ago, I said that I wasn’t much of a beach person?

Well, I’m back from Kauai, and you can consider me converted: I love beaches … if by “beaches” you mean the stunning, drop-yer-jaw, how-could-God-design-such-a-perfect-thing beaches that seem to be nestled into every corner of the Garden Isle. In fact, after visiting Kauai for eight days, it may be safe to say I’m forever spoiled. The bar will be high for any future strips of sand I encounter (sorry, Chatfield Reservoir).

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We spent so much time discovering new beaches, I’m still picking sand out of my hair. Here are the 10 best I visited, with a few challengers we didn’t have enough time to see.

1. Ke’e Beach (near Haena) – It’s one thing to feel like you are driving to the end of the earth. It’s another thing to see a fiery sunset when you get there. Still another thing to have a rainbow hanging in the sky from where you just came from. Such was the majesty of Ke’e Beach on our final night on the island. Situated at the end of the road on the rugged North Shore, Ke’e Beach is the jumping off point for the Kalalau Trail along the Na Pali Coast, and it beholds a stellar view of the sea cliffs, especially in the evening hour. A ringed reef gives the illusion of safe swimming, but this being winter, the currents were brutal, and swimming was off limits. That was fine: watching the pyramids of rolling water pound the reef was just as thrilling as the misty explosion of light caressing the Na Pali.

2. Kauapea Beach (near Kilauea) – This gorgeous beach is often referred to as “Secret Beach” — “Misnomer Beach” might be more appropriate, especially when its located off of, I kid you not, “Secret Beach Road.” But while it has been discovered, it is still pristine, expansive, and filled with so many intimate coves, tide pools and empty strips of sand, you could spend day after day going back. We trekked down the 1/4-mile-long trail and promptly found a private platform of fine sand — elevated from the rough surf and ringed by black volcanic rock — for our 8-month-old daughter to dig into. A mile down the beach (after passing my brother and his family playing wave chase) we discovered sand-bottom tide pools replenished by the surf. This is how beaches should be … endless, vast and full of treasures.

3. Kalihiwai Beach (near Kilaeua) – To the west of Kauapea Beach lies this local fave on Kalihiwai Bay. My 7-year-old and 4-year-old nephews loved it for boogie-boarding, and I loved it for the curtains of mist that flooded the cove and created incredible light conditions … and seemingly endless creative possibilities for photography. Kalihiwai Stream feeds into the beach, and next time, I’d like to take a kayak up this beautiful river to Kalihiwai Falls.

4. Black Pot Beach/Hanalei Bay (Hanalei) – Here’s what I recommend: go to Java Kai in Hanalei before sunrise and get a cup of coffee and a surfer sandwich (bacon and eggs on an English muffin), and take it to Black Pot Beach where the Hanalei River meets the sea. Try to time it so that you witness the full moon set and the sun rise simultaneously, followed by a long stroll around the bay for as long as your legs can take you. Repeat every morning you’re there.

5. Haena Beach Park/Tunnels (Haena) – If for no other reason than to stare at powerful waves for an hour. This was the second beach we saw on the trip, and for a Kauai newbie like me, it was gripping. By late November, the waves get enormous in the Hawaiian Islands, and the breakers pounding the reef off of adjacent Tunnels Beach were easily 20-feet high. Nearby is Maniniholo Dry Cave, which is apparently where Puff the Magic Dragon lives (or where his inspired creators got massively baked and creatively mispronounced the nearest town Hon-uh-LEE!).

6. ‘Anini Beach Park (near Kilauea) – We stayed across the street from ‘Anini Beach, which was a shrewd move with four kids in tow. Nowhere else on the North Shore (or the rest of the island, from what I saw) has calmer waters than ‘Anini. A lengthy reef nearly a mile offshore protects this lagoon, and harbors the perfect habitat for green sea turtles (I swam with four of them in a 20-minute span). It’s not a particularly photogenic beach, but to really have it work its full effect on you, I recommend you go for a swim just after dawn. Do breaststroke, and use the distant Kilauea Lighthouse as your beacon. It will be one of most memorable swims you ever take.

7. Poipu Beach Park (Poipu) – What? A beach on the South Shore? I know: I’m not showing much love for the drier side of the island in this post. We made it down this way thrice: once to drive up Waimea Canyon, once we flew over it, and on the third visit, we actually went in the water. Where we dabbled in the sea and snorkeled with parrotfish was at Poipu Beach, easily the most crowded scene we would encounter all week, but not in a way that inhibited the magic of the place. In addition to the best snorkeling of our trip, we witnessed a magnificent sunset over the tidepools down the road, on the other side of Brennecke Beach.

8. Kalapaki Beach (Lihue) – After three or four visits to Kauai, this might not make the top 10, but it makes my list for nostalgic reasons. We departed on Thanksgiving night, and Kalapaki Beach is where we hung out before our 8pm flight (we also ate at Duke’s, but I’ll leave that for the food post later on). A ukelele duet provided the soundtrack, while the girls danced and the boys rolled on the perfectly manicured grass. It was a place where our family showed just happy and content we all are with life right now.

9. Kealia Beach (near Kapaa) – It’s impossible to miss Kealia en route to the North Shore. Stretching like a lazy hammock under a grove of trees twisted by the wind, this surf-pounded beach is as inviting as they come. It’s also a big surfing and boogie-boarding spot.

10. Larsen’s Beach (near Anahola) – This was the beach that made me realize just how different in character every beach on Kauai is. Located on the northeast corner of the island, Larsen’s feels arid and empty. This is what I imagine Lanai feeling like. Of course, like nearly every beach on this trip, the surf was up and going in the water would have been foolish. So instead my baby daughter tried to eat coral bits on the beach and my nephew discovered a mammoth, grotesque-but-totally-awesome blue lobster head on the beach.

So I was there for only eight days and will admit that I can’t call this the definitive list of Kauai beaches until I visit Honopu Beach, Lumahai Beach, Hideaway’s Beach, Lydgate Beach Park, Mahaulepu Beach, Shipwreck Beach and Polihale Beach. What other beaches do I need to visit next time? Comment below.

More Kauai-oriented posts to come in the next few weeks.

We are in Kauai right now, and it … is … awesome. So far, I’ve photographed sunrise from ‘Anini Beach, lunch at Hanalei Juice & Taro Company, Haena Beach Park, the Kilauea Farmer’s Market (where I ran into a college friend who is now a farmer on this island), and this morning, sunrise on Kalihiwai Bay and morning over the magnificent taro fields of Hanalei.

I’ve always touted that I am not a beach person (as if its something that distinguishes me), and so far, that is only holding up true in one sense, and that’s my favorite two places on this island (at least in the first 48 hours). One, is a bend in the highway between Princeville and Kilauea, where massive, ornate, flat-branched trees rise up over a curve in the highway, and transport the driver to a whole different place, like Japan, China, Taiwan, or the end of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. It is startling and devastatingly beautiful.

The other favorite place is the Hanalei Valley taro fields. This morning, while our daughter napped in the backseat, Hailey and I stared at this valley for 20 minutes, watching the farmers work the taro paddies while stilts (a long-legged wading bird) dashed in the ponds, and a 1,000-foot waterfall plummeted from a mountain in the distance. It was fascinating to watch this scene, pictured above, unfold. While the buzz-buzz of tourists, surfers, snorkelers and hikers zip past this valley lookout, these fields are tended to just as they have been for generations. I found it transfixing.

Oh, and the beaches are spectacular. Its hard to imagine having a better beach experience anywhere. More to come on that another day, but right now I’m on vacation.