Last April, I led 16 high school photography students and 3 chaperones for 3 days on Kauai. The highlight of the trip was chartering a boat and snorkeling off the Na Pali Coast. The dolphins, whales, glass clear water, sculpted cliffs, intense colors begged for all to either shoot constantly, or put down their cameras and just soak in nature's magnificence.

Although I shoot both digital and film, I like to show and share with the students my passion for medium format film and prime lenses.

I appreciate HDR when it is done in such a way that it doesn't look fake. I did not use a graduated filter as the pointed peaks of the Kokee Mountains were problematic for this. In the original my Kodak Ektar 100 could not handle the highlights in the sky. So the only compositing done here was replacing the blown out original sky with a sunset from the previous year's trip. I purposely did not want to deceive the viewer into thinking this was the actual sky, thus I chose a sky (shot with Fujichrome Velvia 100) that was obviously from a different time of day, yet worked aesthetically with the colors in the foreground.

Although this image looks like it was created from many layers, it is actually only these two and the incredible sharpness from the scanned medium format film with the effects of aerial perspective creates an illusion that this was composited of many layers; not just two. I believe that less is more, but that once I've created a "digital illustration", I am ethically obligated to reveal visually that this is a composite, but one that should work aesthetically.