North Shore | Malaekahana Moonrise

One evening, Sly and I walked a couple miles or so into town, passing by a field of ponies munching on dewy grass and guided half-way by a friendly golden retriever. We could have just as easily driven the short distance, but the night was cool and breezy and we felt like stretching our legs. There was a brief stop at the grocery store to buy a deck of cards decorated with hula girl graphics, a book of crosswords, a 10-pack of my favorite mechanical pencils, and a few snacks. We weren’t really hungry but we still ate a plate meal and a bowl of vegetable saimin from L&L for dinner. Somewhere during our journey, ice cream may have been involved.

By the time we slipped back into camp the ocean was luminous, beckoning. The moon shone as bright as I’ve ever seen it and the water looked like silvery shards of glass, broken and glimmering under a puffy line of cotton-like clouds. At once our humble beach shack transformed into a magical place that felt both real and surreal at the same time, as if we were tiny actors living within a cellulose movie reel.

The moon played hide-and-seek with the clouds and I knew that if I wasn’t quick, the moment would disappear altogether. I didn’t bring my tripod to Hawaii and was unable to find any make-shift stands to steady my camera so I opened my lens up as wide as it would go, manually focused it to the furthest point, increased my ISO to the maximum, held my breath and clicked the shutter.

The resulting blurry and grainy photos almost have a pinhole camera-like quality to them, as if they were taken with film while crouched low, peering into a diorama. While technically imperfect, these ephemeral snapshots illustrate both memory and reality with an accuracy that I have rarely ever captured; the cool distance between what I actually saw versus what I actually photographed no longer two separate entities. Somehow these dreamy photos, seemingly ripped from a book of dark fairy tales, feel “real” to me, or at least as much as any moment captured in a photograph can be.