mauiVistas

haWaii

 

waikiki sideWalk

 

iWave

 

Filmed on location at Waikiki beach on Oahu.  Experience Waikiki beach just like you are there.

iLand Tour

 

A scenic tour through Maui, Molikai, Kauai, Oahu, and the historic City of Dreams.

welcome to Paia

 

iLand view #2

 

Molokai Royal Plantation

 

Island Favorite

 

Kahoolawe Mouth

 

It is a dry mouth to be sure.  Fun in Gallery Show in Studio Artist V5.5.5.

Here is comes - part 2

Wundermap processed by MSG screening preset at 6:30 am here. You can see how the hurricane has moved since the previous post yesterday. So the center looks like it is going to glide by the top of Maui.  It's been unusually quiet the last few hours since these things eat up the normal trade winds.  Trees are just started to blow a little bit now.  We'll see how bad it gets in a few hours.

Another MSG preset processing the source image for above visualizes the storm in a different way.

Here it comes...

Used the satellite image of incoming hurricane douglas headed towards hawaii as the source for MSG processing in Studio Artist.

Here's the magical Wundermap showing the projected path, satellite and radar cloud cover overlay.

Added some IpOp gradient lighting effect processing to pass the 'must be Studio Artist generated' requirement for posting to this Studio Artist art blog.

Now, we just have to hope that the magical properties of the very tall mountains on the Big Island and Maui will mess with the air flow on this thing and knock back the extended range a little bit.  Note that if you just slide the existing satellite image of the hurricane cloud spin up the path, the extended range completely covers the island of Maui.

The spin is counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere where we are. So we get hit by gusts blowing in from the north as it gets near, then it does a 180 degree spin and then starts blowing from the south. Last time one got near Maui it started a giant Brush fire on the west side associated with that southern wind flow, which always seems to be an evil wind here.

Duck and Cover

So because the world is so stable and calm these days, we just received a Tsunami Warning Alert here in Hawaii. But i don't think duck and cover works for incoming waves. Run like hell probably makes more sense. This guy is ready, he's going to go out preaching heavenly redemption to the unwashed. Before we are all washed clean by a cleansing wave.

Earthquake is a 7.5, so not a threat. If it was an 8.5 or higher maybe you'd want to start worrying a little bit.

Goodbye Hanalei

One more spin around the dock to say goodbye to Hanalei. Where apparently Puff the Magic Dragon and Little Jackie Paper live. I searched for their house. I didn't find it, but i did find some drunk guy changing the oil in his truck in the beautiful beach park parking lot. And what better place to change your truck's oil, i thought to myself. Than on the most beautiful beach on the entire island. Note to self, whenever i'm on the island of Kauai, always make a point of changing the oil in my rental car in the parking lot at Hanalei beach. Not this one, the one way down at the other end of the beach. Ah, Hawaii at it's finest, i thought to myself, as i watched this guy change his oil on that beautiful beach.

And what a magnificent beach it is, over 2 miles long. Wide, wide, wide, like a beach should be. Like every beach in Hawaii would be if the idiots in charge hadn't built roads literally right next to them, or allowed evil developers to build houses right at the bleeding edge of the water. But not in Hanalei for some magical reason. The magic of the camera i used that never lies to take this photo makes this shot of Hanalei seem like it's a little tiny island surrounded on all sides by water. And it is a precious gem stone, a thing of beauty in a crazy world. So maybe it really does look like this.

Slit scans are so much more fun than normal perfectly stitched panorama photos. Dare i say more artistic. You can mess with space and time in all kinds of different ways by working with slit scan effects. I actually used the Studio Artist Temporal Scan Tracker for all of these recent Kauai posts, but they are dialed in to be like more conventional slit scans. But of course nothing is conventional in Studio Artist, so all kinds of magic stuff having to do with how the images are supersize interpolated and magical aperture remapping are going on behind the scenes when you run those Studio Artist Temporal ip op effects to process your video pan footage. Any idiot can write a 1 pixel slit scan effect, but our scan tracker temporal effects have magical aperture remapping going on inside of them, so you can dial in much higher resolutions than you would get with the simple any idiot can do it 1 pixel slit scan approaches.

Welcome to Paradise

And paradise does have everything in it. Green tropical plants. A beautiful hula girl in a grass skirt. Wondrous gifts await you there. A tropical mountain can be seen in the distance on the right side. There are even some informative magazines stored in their own metal boxes which keep them dry from gentle tropical rain storms for you to read at your leisure. Telling you all about the local hot spots, the awesome vacation properties available for sale, various way to spend your hard earned money on dubious adventure experiences like zip lining, and more. My wife and i joked that they should instal a zip line from the vacation condo we were staying in right down the sheer cliff face it was hanging off of directly into the ocean, where a big shark would open it's mouth and eat you as you flew off the end of the zip line into the clear blue waters of the Pacific Ocean.

This second slit scan gives you a little more perspective on the particular slice of paradise we are featuring in today's post. Lucky for us this isn't New Jersey, or Waikiki or Lahania for that matter, because then they would have put this little slice of paradise right smack in the middle of the stunningly beautiful beach scene i posted here yesterday. But for some strange reason the good citizens of Hanalei actually had some brains in their heads, and kept this tourist mall back on the main road, which is so unusual for Hawaii since isn't hanging literally 3 feet off of the main beach like it usually is everywhere else in the state.

My Head is Spinning

My head is spinning round and round. Taking in the green lush beauty of Kauai's north shore after my visit to magical Hanapepe in dry and dusty south Kauai. If you've been following this last week's posts you're going to get a sense of the brain shock you get as you travel from one side of Kauai to the other. Like all of my vacation photographs, this is exactly what i saw as my head was spinning on the dock in Hanalei. The camera doesn't lie. And neither do my video pan slit scan experiments. I'm even listening to ThisQuiteArmy on Guitar Moderne as i type this, which is making my head spin round and round even more. My world had been transformed by a relatively short car ride in our Alamo rental car.

I had traveled from a rift in space and time in the land of the lost to a beautiful beach. One i would never find in Poipu or Hanapepe, no matter how hard i looked for it. Unlike most of the beaches in Hawaii, they didn't screw up Hanalei beach by building the houses too close to the ocean, or putting a road right on the beach. Maybe they will keep it unscrewed up for all time, which basically means until global warming washes it away in a few decades, as well as the actual town itself. Enjoy it while you can.

That Spouting Horn

The first time we went to Kauai, we said, we have to go see that spouting horn. That sounds pretty slick. So we followed the signs, and then we got there. The whole time, we kept saying to ourselves, where are the beaches? Surely there must be some beaches in Poipu. And then the road dead ends, and there is the spouting horn. As shown above. In all it's glory. But no beaches. Head to the north shore if you want real beaches.

Now you have seen it too, no need to drive down that dusty dead end road. You have seen it all. And trust me, there are no beaches in Poipu. Maybe a long time ago there were, but they've long since vanished. Take the other road instead that takes you to Hanapepe. Because a magical world of really cool art and a crazy old school dusty Hawaiian town awaits you there. And it's way more interesting than that spouting horn place. Which to be honest is just a dusty tourist trap at the end of a dead end road.

Every island has one, it's very own spouting horn. Oahu has one as well. Don't lie down over the blow hole like some crazy tourist did on Oahu. Because the end results aren't pretty. And never, ever turn your back to the ocean. Never. Especially when you are near a spouting horn.

Hanapepe Town Square

All movement in Hanapepe is drawn towards the center. So was my eye. And this is what i saw there.
Another crude tribute to James Hoyle, who apparently started the whole Hanapepe art thing. Or so we were told. It was a pretty cool place. Like stepping back in time. I mean, they even have a bookstore. How much more old time can you get than an actual store that sells books. A bookstore that isn't online, but is a place you can actually walk into. And so we did. I loved the fact that they had a bookstore. Because Maui didn't. If you are coming from the north shore of Kauai, headed south, and if you need to decide between Poipu and Hanapepe, there is no choice to be made. Set the GPS in your rental car for Hanapepe.

Hanapepe Ice Cream Shop

My quick and dirty salute to James Hoyle. Who was one of the first artists to call Hanepepe home in the 70's. I was working off of a photo of what appears to be an old abandoned ice cream shop i took on the main drag through town there. So like many Hawaiian tourist paintings, this is way more colorful than the real deal, which was pretty old and beat.

I'll try to dial it in and post something better later. James is way better with the coloring in his paintings than this crude tribute attempt i knocked off in about 2 minutes by quickly building a 4 step PASeq in Studio Artist. He uses an impressionist mix of colors in specific regions as opposed to just the maximum saturation coloring i selected. So you'd want to use one of our opponent mixture coloring options. And you'd want way better shaping on the paint strokes as opposed to the tube paint i'm using.

He also paints in the individual strokes initially with flat paint, and then overpaints with a smaller interior raised oil stroke. So you could use something that initially lays down a flat vector paint fill and then a raster raised oil stroke on top. Using path start repeat modulation to do it. Or generate the bezier paths for the paint strokes and do it from that using multiple passes.

And of course you don't want the paint strokes to cross or run into each other. I used clever programing of the blanking buffer to pull that off. You want something that's kind of like a wood cut or Australian Aboriginal kind of thing, but with brightly colored impressionist paint strokes as opposed to just colored dots like you see in Aboriginal artwork. He has a very cool individual style to his work, so my crude attempt to knock off something here is in tribute to his superior talent as an artist. My hat is off to you sir. Take the trip to Hanepepe and check out his artwork for yourself up close at the Amy-Lauren Gallery. They also have some of his work in the galleries in Poipu, but Hanapepe is way more fun to visit than Poipu.

Giorgio's Gallery in Hanapepe

Once you drive past the world famous Taro Chip factory chip factory we explored in yesterday's post, you'll turn left and hit Hanapepe's main street. And right in the center of it is Giorgio's Gallery. This was how it looked there at dusk as we kept searching for that famous swinging bridge.

Earlier in the day we toured the place. And met the man himself. And it's got quite a nice selection of awesome artwork for you to check out. I was really jazzed by one artist in particular, the industrial cityscapes of an artist named Dusit. Not something i would have expected to find hiding in a small gallery in Hanapepe on the island of Kauai. But then Hanapepe was full of surprises.

This photo above shows how the gallery looked earlier in the day when we went for our tour. It's really amazing, because the main street through town is really a straight line, but the rift in space and time apparently located somewhere near that famous swinging bridge apparently bends the fabric of time and space as you wander the streets of Hanapepe. So it bent the light coming into my camera. 

And there must be some kind of gravitational lens effects going on as well, because i swear i could see 2 different liquor stores that had the same artwork on the front of them, as seen in the photo above. Which looks exactly like the street scene that awaited me when i hoped out of our Alamo rental car and walked across the street to enter Giorgio's gallery.