Gallery (35 images): Hawaii 2023 - Days 1 & 2
In mid August of 2023, a week after Emily and I got married, we were off to to the Big Island of Hawaii for our honeymoon. Following will be an excerpt from the above linked blog post about our wedding...
For a few days at the start, my father joined us since he'd been wanting to revisit the memorial for my mother one more time, which is on the outskirts of the village of Miloli'i, on the Kona Coast, where my mother's ashes were scattered in the ocean back in 2008. A night shot of the memorial that I took in 2019 can be seen below. I am sad that my mother never had a chance to meet Emily. She was an artist herself and she and Emily would have had many fascinating discussions no doubt!
Being 92, travel is becoming more of a challenge for my father and that may well have been the last opportunity for him to visit the memorial with Emily and I. For more on this memorial, see this blog post of mine from 2019. Once my father flew back home we started our honeymoon proper, spending a few more days on the Kona Coast, then over to the east part of the island, staying just south of Hilo at a wonderful little private set of three walkway connected bungalows in the jungle.
Now back to this new posting! The first day of our trip was just spent relaxing, but on the second was our first excursion down to Miloli'i where my mother's memorial is. It was Emily's first time in Hawaii and obviously the first time she visited my mom's memorial as well. We had originally planned to get married at the small church by Miloli'i Beach Park that can be seen near the beginning of the gallery. It was to be symbolic since my mom's ashes were scattered in the ocean off the coast there back in 2008, and we thought that in some way, it would have been as if she were attending our wedding had we held it there. However the logistics of holding a wedding at that location, and the significantly increased costs for our wedding guests meant we abandoned the idea and got married in Vancouver instead.
While at the memorial, we added a fresh bouquet of red roses and fixed the white coral a little. I took several photos and Emily took a nice one of my dad and I, photo 6 in the gallery. Note that there was a large distracting area of red painted coral "grafitti" immediately to my left, which was visually very distracting. I utilized Adobe's "AI" Generative Fill function in Photoshop to remove the area and patch it with some very convincing rock detail, which it even generated slightly out of focus to match the existing background. I almost didn't use the photo since I thought it would have been a huge amount of work to manually fix that area seamlessly, but since it was one of the few of me and my dad on the trip, I decided to give Generative Fill a try in Photoshop, and it worked brilliantly.
Going forward, if I ever use AI to significantly alter an image of mine, like I did here, I will disclose it in this blog. I personally don't condone large scale "AI" alteration of photos without disclosure.
After our time at the memorial and visiting the beach park, we drove north again to visit Pu'uhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park. Sadly the day was mostly overcast, but nonetheless, it is a beautiful location with a wonderful grove of palm trees on a sandy beach and better yet, is a significant Hawaiian cultural heritage site as well. It started to rain unfortunately, so I didn't take as many photos there as I otherwise would have liked.
Read: All the blog postings from my 2023 Hawaii Trip
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