The Lonely One

I noticed the tree on the way in to the hike and thought about it again on the way back out, which is usually how I decide something is worth stopping for. It’s a koa standing on its own in an open stretch of old lava with grass coming up through it, near the car park at Lapakahi on the Kohala coast, and there was nothing else of that size anywhere near it.

A few days earlier, a guide over at Volcanoes had told us that Kamehameha translates as “the lonely, lonely one,” and it had stuck with me. By the time I was standing in front of this tree I was in Kohala, which is the district Kamehameha was born in, a few miles up the same coast. Koa means warrior in Hawaiian and the wood has carried that meaning for as long as people have been making things out of it, and here was a single koa holding an open lava field on its own in the country he came from.

I shot it on an 8mm fisheye, which I only owned for a short while and which gets gimmicky the moment you overuse it, and then corrected the curvature afterwards. What’s left is the reason to use a lens like that at all: the tree seems to bend around the frame and hold the edges of it, which a rectilinear lens at that distance would never have given me.

The light was flat and even, midday under heavy overcast, and this was the last stop we made before driving to the airport to fly home. It’s one of the oldest photographs on this site — 2016, right at the start of my landscape work.