I have visited this beautiful beach on the north shore of Oahu several times during this year. The Laniakea Beach is one of the favorite resting places of the Green Sea Turtle (Chelonia mydas), or honu as called in Hawaii. Unfortunately, I wasn’t really lucky during these trips. Sometimes, there were too many people around the turtles, other times the turtles didn’t come to the shore. Finally, last week I got lucky, because there was a resting honu on the sand and there wasn’t too much crowd on the beach at sunset. Miserably, the turtle chose a place for resting next to a large rock, which would have hidden the honu if I had tried to capture it with the setting sun in the background. I wasn’t really desperate for this situation so I turned my camera to a different position and composed some palm trees and the gray clouds in the frame. Since the gray sky isn’t very flattering, I waited for twilight. During twilight, more blue light is passing through the clouds than any other colors, so photographers call this period of the day „the blue hour”. I like the blue hour, because it can add some dramatic effects to the pictures. I use a long exposure of 10 seconds to blur the waves of the ocean as a soft, velvety impression, which emphasizes the tranquillity of the scene with the sleeping turtle.

Gear: Canon EOS 7D, Canon 17-40mm F/4 L lens, Tiffen Polarizer, Manfrotto tripod