Coffee day

Today we visited the Kauai Coffee Plantation. I am a fan of fine coffees and enjoy plantations visits. The Kauai Plantation is the largest in the U.S. with 3100 acres of coffee in cultivation.

The size of the plantation requires a very mechanized approach. Coffee is harvest using the machine shown below which was originally used to harvest blueberries.

I must say that the samples were great and I made some purchases to be consumed during the rest of our trip. I will have to decide about ordering.

My other experience with coffee harvesting and processing was on the Big Island. There Kona coffee was harvest by hand and we were able to view how the coffee was processed. Very different approaches - hand labor vs. mechanized - to accomplish pretty much the same thing.

The difference between scale and craft seems to be a major division in the way the world is moving.

Lion King Tree

I think I am taking the same pictures I took years ago. These trees are magnificent, but you need to find them isolated for the full effect. Lion King Tree (baobab).

I have started to accumulate some of my better photographs as a public Flickr album. If you are interested, have a look.

Big guys dancing

We attended a luau last evening. It was spendy but spectacular. The show (the Hawaiian story) was sufficient that I would recommend the experience to anyone.

There was lots of impressive singing and dancing. I assume you think it was the hula girls I would find most interesting. They were fine, but I was most impressed by the male dancers. Imagine defensive linemen dancing around but in a fairly graceful way. Let your mind just imagine what this would look like for a little while. Quite a show.

A preference for chickens

I take my photography fairly seriously. I own a couple of nice cameras with some nice lenses and I know the basics of their use and of composition.

I tend to get one complaint from relatives. They like the photos but criticize me for my lack of people pictures. This has happened several times. Just to self-check, I went to the photos I have uploaded to Flickr from this trip. I can see some truth in what they claim. There are a couple of pictures of Cindy (taking pictures). This is a tradition. Other than that, no pictures of people. It turns out I have far more pictures of chickens and avocados. I could speculate on my photographic preferences, but that would likely get me in trouble.

Mark - with blurred background

I have heard concerns (at least one actual person, not concerns expressed by mythical people as referenced by Pres. Trump) that I do not appear in any of my travel picks. I very seldom do selfies.

Cindy provides this image. She would like folks to know that it was taken with her iPhone in portrait mode. This translates as pictures with a blurred background. I admit that I am the subject of this photo and the background is in fact blurred. For those of you not in the possession of a new iphone, a blurry background results when a picture is taken with the focus on an individual and a shallow depth of field. If my camera technique facts are accurate this means a wide aperture and with the lighting of this image a quick shutter.