1 Wind Turbines – North Shore, Oahu 1

2 Wind Turbines – North Shore, Oahu 2

3 Wind Turbines – North Shore, Oahu 3

Fine Ass Coffee Mill – Oahu, HI 1

Fine Ass Coffee Mill – Oahu, HI 2

More than a few times my daughter, my wife and I drove northward exploring Oahu’s North Shore and Haleiwa. We had rented a blue Ford Fusion so that we could explore and see the island. Using our Tom Tom GPS we found that both the GPS as well as traffic signs encouraged the use of U-turns along highway intersections as the best means to handle road to road transitions.

Our first excursion was a scouting endeavor, a drive northward that became our first trek around Oahu. As we moved toward Haleiwa we stopped at a locally grown coffee mill, its name cheekily playing upon Hawaiian dialect, Fine Ass Coffee resembling the words Finest Coffee. We took a tour and were introduced to live, growing coffee beans – usually coffee beans grow in dyads within one shell and occasionally are found on their own (one coffee bean within a shell). Singleton coffee beans (called peaberries) produce a potent coffee as they receive the nutrients that would feed what should have been a dyad.

What was also striking as we moved past Haleiwa was encountering wind turbines juxtaposed against big sky, cloud work, volcanic rock and farms. On our second drive to North Shore, we had done some shopping along the old Haleiwa road and came out of one shop to discover that a farm building one kilometre away was on fire – a brown-white plume of smoke rising into the air. And, just as in our remote communities distance to the blaze from fire departments determines rescue time and determines what physical assets can be saved. We followed our curiosity toward the fire but gave up on the endeavor realizing that the gas was toxic and that we’d likely be clogging the route toward the fire.

At that point along the roadway, I got my camera and tripod out and in directing the camera back to the way we had come discovered the wind turbines from a new angle … an extraordinary sight; I was able to catch the wind turbines within a rainbow. There were other shots in the Golden Hour where sun, landscape, cloud work and rainbows did culminate into extraordinary compositions, but being able to stop the car safely for a shot limited the possibility in the endeavor. Still, I saw what I saw – that’s good too.

Listening to – Bill Cutler’s tribute to Jerry Garcia with ‘Starlight Jamboree’ on CKUA Radio (streaming online).

Quote to Inspire – “Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.” – John Berger