Your goal for this assignment is to communicate your feelings about a wahi küpuna*. In addition, pay close attention to control of depth of field. Make it work for you.
Wahi Kupuna*
• This assignment requires you to visit an ancient Hawaiian cultural site: a loko i‘a (fishpond), a heiau or ko’a (fishing shrine), or an area with lo’i kalo (taro terraces). Such places might appear at first to be just piles or rocks, if you look too quickly, without thought or feeling. Approach this place with respect, and half an eye on the past, on those who put the stones together; try to imagine how the site was constructed and why it was laid out as you see it. If you look carefully, you can see intelligence, beauty and another world.
• If it is a large heiau, it was probably constructed under the supervision of a traditional priest/architect, a kahuna kuhikuhipu’uone. This kahuna may have chosen the location and orientation of the site based on a dream, or other signs. It is a smaller site, it may have been built by a family. In any case, think of those who picked its location, those who laid it out, and those who carried its stones, perhaps from far away. Very large sites, such as loko i‘a and heiau, would have been built by the population of an entire district, passing stones from person to person in a very long line.
• Take your time. Do not begin taking pictures right away. Instead, spend fifteen minutes looking and thinking. Walk around and notice all the parts of the site, trying to identify the areas that are best preserved and those that have deteriorated. Notice where the light is coming from, so that you can plan your shots. Do you see native plants? Sometimes ti and noni plants can be found at religious sites; they were planted in ancient times by those who built or visited the site.
*Wahi Kupuna — ”Any building, structure, district, area, natural feature, or site (surface, sub‐surface or underwater) whose historical or cultural significance can be traced by oral or written accounts to Native Hawaiians 100 years or four or more generations removed from the present generation of öpio (youth).” — from the KS Land Stewardship Policy, 2003. [Note that there needs to be a kahako over the first “u” to indicate that “kupuna” is plural.]
Reminders
To maximize depth of field, shoot at the smallest aperture possible. In order to shoot at a small aperture, you will need to use a slower shutter speed. However, remember to keep your shutter speed high enough to eliminate camera shake. Anything below 125 is dangerous unless you brace the camera. Find the right balance between aperture and shutter speed.
The very smallest aperture is not always the sharpest. Pictures taken at f/22 are not as sharp as those taken at f/16, f/11 and f/8. Those three apertures usually give the very best pictures a lens is capable of (assuming the lens stops down to f/22). The same is true of the other end of the scale: pictures taken at f/2 can be quite blurry — unless you are shooting with a f/1.4 lens. Never shoot at the smallest or largest apertures.