Bamboo, Areca, roof, sky. And a heavy hand on Lightroom's Black slider.
Last night I was talking to my neighbor Tom on the other side of the bamboo thicket Ruth and I planted in 2008 or 2009 about a coqui who's been taking up a (loud) residence somewhere in the bamboo for the last few nights. Tom, an island-wide coqui assassin legend, hasn't been able to take the frog out. Last night I tried, without success. If you're reading this and don't understand why anybody would want to take out small frogs, just google "coqui" and "Hawaii" and you'll have the answer. Or you can look at this HDI.
So this week the bamboo thicket is getting thinned and I thought I should shoot it in all its wild coqui-friendly glory before I got to work. I headed back there for what I thought would be an "all bamboo all the time" shot and I made a few, but they were boring.
When I looked up, I felt as though I'd been transported back to Bougainville, and it took me a while to realize where that feeling came from. Much of what I did on Bougainville, in the Nagovisi region, involved walking out of dark places (such as the forest) into sunny ones (such as gardens). This image, to me, captures that feeling.