Jewels Underfoot IV: Hawai'i

People I used to work with knew I'm a sand sculptor and interested in sand. They'd bring me samples from places they travelled. I have kept the samples all these years, labelled with the location but with no notes about who did the collecting.

I have five samples from Hawai'i. They are astonishingly varied by location, and even within one sample. These photographs are intended to show the beauty of the sand rather than being quantitative, but the long dimension of each image is roughly the same at about 3 centimetres.

This sample is from Wai'pio, on the Big Island's northeast coast. Look closely at the variations. It's nearly all volcanic origin. Olivine and bits of lava. My early macro technique didn't work well for this sand; I was using direct sunlight, which led to intense specular highlights against the dark grains. The contrast was too great. I bought a diffuser to tame the highlights and got much better photographs.You can click on any of these to show them full size.

This is a work in progress. I've been looking around the Web at sand images, and thinking about what I like and what I don't like about them. One clear idea is that one image isn't enough, so I'm adding more of each sample.

I also realize that mine lack an indication of scale. My purpose is to show the beauty of the sand, but there may be ways to show scale that don't interfere with that. Here's one experiment. The image immediately below is at the "normal" size I use: a crop that's about 4000 pixels wide, scaled down to 1584 pixels.

The next image is a crop to actual pixels from the same photograph I used above. I've carefully set the subject at the minimum focus distance so the sand grains are as big as I can make them on the camera's sensor. Given that the focus distance will be the same for any image made this way, the grain size can be compared.

At this distance there's not much depth of field, and little tolerance for movement. I use mirror lock-up and the self-timer. I usually apply minimal sharpening, but for this one I experimented with two passes: one a relatively coarse setting to get the outlines, the second finer to get the detail of each grain.

This is an experiment. The sand shown below is from Ocean Park, photographed at the same scale (about 1:1 on the sensor) as the Wai'pio sand above. This photo shows the sand on a 1mm grid. The same scale applies to all of the other close images here. In short, the images show a scene about 8mm wide.

And here are two more images of the sample.

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This is from Hidden Beach, on Maui. Easier to photograph because the sand is light colored, so not so much contrast with the specular highlights. Still, I'll reshoot this someday using the diffuser. Each grain polished. Kind of like desert sand, but even more smooth.

Below are three more images of the same sample. I cover the bottom of the white platter and move it around to get varied composition, and a better idea of what the sand is like. These benefit from better technique and equipment.

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This sample is from Hanuma Bay on the island of Oahu. It's an interesting mix of volcanic and coral and shells.

Because I was interested in the sand of Hawai'i, these were some of the first macro photos I took. My technique has improved since then. I took advantage of good light and photographed this sample again, using a better 100mm macro lens and a diffuser to soften and spread the light.

I put the sand on a white porcelain platter. That sits on top of a platform on a tripod so I can level it. The diffuser shades the platform. Sand covers the bottom of the platter and I move it around to get different compositions. Even within a sample there are variations, so I'm adding the three following images from Hanuma Bay to give a better idea of what this sand looks like.

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This sample is from Ha'ena Beach Park on Kauai. 

I made more photographs of this sample, using the 100mm L macro and with a diffuser to soften the sunlight. The one immediately below is the usual 4000 pixels scaled to 1584. Below that is an actual pixels crop from the same photograph.

Two more images of the same sample, just because the sand varied and beautiful.

I've learned that sand varies by large-scale location, and also within any particular deposit. Any beach really needs to be sampled from many locations: high-tide, low-tide, under water, upper beach beyond normal high tide. I can do that for local beaches, but for places like Hawai'i I'll accept whatever I get.