A view from the Royal Hawaiian – Honolulu, Hawaii

When I saw this doorway at the Royal Hawaiian, I thought it would be perfect to frame Waikiki Beach. The rectangular openings also work well with my wide-angle Cinematics.

The Royal Hawaiian is Waikiki’s second oldest hotel, built in 1927, and it’s aways one of my favorite places to shoot. This grand old hotel, with the distinctive pink exterior, is certainly a throwback to the days before plane travel. The well-heeled arrived here by steamship. I’ll feature more from this place over the next series of posts.

While the six rectangular openings give an atypical view of the beach and is a good example of a photography technique called frame within a frame, there are also highly technical components to this photograph.

I made sure to center the openings as precisely as possible, but also framed in a way that I could, in post processing, extend the crop to include the sides, which were actually cutoff in my original LCD framing. I then used Capture One to tweak the horizontal and vertical distortion correction. Finally, I post processed to warm the image and add contrast and saturation.

The resulting work transformed a rather dull original image into a photograph that I envisioned when I first saw this scene.