Hawaii Tsunami Panoramas

Well, today will be remembered for some time to come. For most people in Hawaii it will be another near miss. For me, I will likely remember today as a once in a lifetime opportunity. I decided to take a last minute photowalk to Ala Moana Beach ahead of an incoming tsunami.

Surprisingly, there were hardly any other photographers there. I guess good sense is not so rare among photogs after all. Anyway, these panoramas were taken about an hour before the expected landfall of the waves. I’ve Zoomified these pics so that you can look at the high resolution images without downloading a gargantuan file.

This photo shows the mass exodus of boats from the Ala Wai Small Boat Harbor. If you zoom in on the horizon, you can see the masts and outlines of a couple hundred other boats offshore.

Ala Wai Small Boat Harbor Evacuation

Ala Moana Beach Park looking towards the ocean and Diamond Head.  Click to see zoomified image

I’m fairly certain that Ala Moana Beach has never been this empty in the middle of a picture perfect day before. And I can’t imagine any other circumstance that will create a shot like this again.

Let’s play a game of Reverse Where’s Waldo. There is one sunbather on the beach in the photo below, go find him or her.

Ala Moana Panorama

Ala Moana looking towards downtown.  Long panorama.  Click to see zoomified image

HDR and HD timelapse video of Ala Moana fireworks

Fireworks over Ala Moana

My favorite pic of the night. I found three frames from the timelapse below that fit just perfectly together to make an HDR photo. The exposure settings of each of the frames are the same but the rocket explosion cast a wide range of illumination over the three exposures. Wide enough to piece together an HDR in Photomatix.

Photobug details of the time lapse: Shot with my Nikon D90 w/ a Nikkor 14-24 mm f/2.8G. ISO 200, f/4, 2 seconds per frame. Scaled the frames down to 1526×1080 and stitched together with Adobe Premiere elements at around 6 frames per second. The flash player below scales down the video to fit in the browser window. I highly recommend downloading the video and watching it in full screen 1080i.