This whitespine surgeonfish is a resident of the Maui Ocean Center. There were also plenty of them in the water at Kapalua Bay, though they are a lot harder to photograph, especially with the 20D. I am looking at getting a waterproof housing for my girlfriend’s S500 as I think that would work much better than the disposable film cameras like the one we took on our snorkel trip.

By the way, the Ritz Camera store in Whalers Village was the cheapest place we found to buy the Fuji disposable film cameras on Maui if you are looking for one, and the photos we got were good, it is just difficult to swim and shoot through the small viewfinder at the same time!

Following the sugar museum, we decided to spend the afternoon at Maui’s aquarium: the Maui Ocean Center. While perhaps not as large as the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Maui Ocean Center is nonetheless impressive. In addition to a section full of tropical Hawaiian fish, there were green sea turtles, hammerhead sharks and a walk-through tube in a tank filled with sharks, stingrays, puffer fish and many others.

The turtles were only too happy to swim over and investigate any humans standing alongside their tank, as you can see from the photo (you can see another photo in my Flickr area).

While on the subject of turtles, I was looking for a smaller print of a turtle photo by Victoria McCormick that I saw in a few places on Maui, but I can’t even find that photo on her website. Instead, I bought one called Ocean Light by Monica & Michael Sweet which I liked almost as much. I also liked the one called Covered in Sand – picking just one was a difficult choice.

Finally, a word of warning to those visiting who are also members of the Pacific Whale Foundation: there is a 10% discount for members, but the staff on the ticket counter did not tell us this even when asked directly about it.

This little fellow was found on a flower at one of our stops on the Hana trip. Somewhat surprisingly he came out pretty well, although the photo has only been cropped down (not scaled) so he was very small in the original image. Click the photo to get the popup larger version so you can see him clearer.

Taken in the water on the black sand beach, this is a close-up shot of a wave just starting to break. Moments after this it was rushing around my legs. I have a number of shots, all taken crouching down in the water at the edge of the beach as the waves come racing in. This is the only one where I managed to catch the wave cresting, but not actually breaking already.

In the garden area at Iao Valley State Park was a beautiful white hibiscus plant. It took a while for the wind to die down enough to get this shot; in fact, the wind was perhaps the biggest problem I had getting photos of flowers in Maui. Everytime I got the camera out to take a flower shot, the wind seemed to pick up 🙁

The Hawaiian flowers we see on our trips are always spectacular, and this trip was no exception. On Oahu when we were there last year we saw a lot of red and yellow hibiscus plants, but on Maui there seemed to be many more variations in colour. Of course, the reds and yellows were there, but there were also white, pink and more complex red/yellow combinations.

I am a big fan of photos where the water has been made to seem soft and fluffy but the shoreline features remain sharp focussed. This was one of my first experiments with the technique in Maui (previously I have only done some test shots using a waterfall feature in the lagoons around my apartment complex).

Overall, I am quite pleased with this one, especially since I did it without the tripod (I had left it in the car not expecting to need it).

At the top of the Haleakala crater are these strange, and very rare plants called Haleakala ahinahina or Haleakala Silversword. This photo shows clearly where the name came from, but not why I called the plant strange. For that you really need to see what it looks like when it is flowering.