48.8

My favorite location to photograph sea turtles is at the Kaloko Honokohau National Historic Park on the Big Island of Hawaii. After a long day boating with my friends, I photographed this small sea turtle resting on the lava shoreline north of the small boat harbor at sunset. I was lucky that the sky lit up like this, because the vog and clouds often block the magic light at the end of the day in Kona. My friend and fellow photographer Stuart Westmorland was using a flash next to me, which fortunately added a bit of fill light to the otherwise backlit turtle. I normally dislike flash, but in this case the fill-light is perfectly balanced with the ambient light. I might have to buy myself a flash. I created this image with my Canon 5DmkII, Carl Zeiss 35mm f2 ZE lens, and 3-stop Reverse Graduated Neutral Density filter. This image is a single-exposure which required a minimal amount of processing using Aperture 3 and Photoshop CS5.