Hawaii photographer
www.holladayphoto.com Hawaii Personal Photography by Mark Holladay Lee of Holladay Photo. www.holladayweddings.com
I have been married 12 years today. Our first year of marriage a stranger walked up to us out of the blue and said “you guys were made for eachother”, and I strongly believe that we were made for each other. Patria truly completes me and strengthens my weaknesses. Patria is by far the most beautiful woman I have ever photographed. I still get butterflies when I look at her. Often I feel like I am living a dream, and being married to Patria is the best part of it. I love you.
Fitting for Father’s Day weekend, I’m a proud papa today. For the last two years we’ve been a Punana Leo ‘Ohana, meaning that our kids have been in the Punana Leo Hawaiian Immersion preschool program. It’s been an incredible experience for our family. Ruby graduated from the preschool last year and today Atticus graduated after two years in the program. Here are only a few photos and some video of our kids speaking Hawaiian (and a clip of my wife even though she will cringe. We are full of admiration and respect for the kumu who taught our kids so much. We also have so much love for the other children and families in the program. We feel lucky to know them all and call them friends. The decision to give our kids the opportunity to learn Hawaiian may not be understood by all but we call Hawaii home and Hawaii would not be Hawaii without the home language and culture and the culture and language cannot be separated. Allowing our kids to learn about these things without the filter of our haole interpretation has been one of the best decisions we’ve made. We have so much more learning to do but the last two years have been life altering.
My sons first time snorkeling. This is but one of the many reasons we live in Hawaii.
My good friend and talented documentary film maker, Nathaniel Hansen, has a start up project that he is promoting on Kick Starter – independent film makers can show their project and raise the funds they need to produce the film. There are just a few days left for his project called The Elders. The film will “examine what it really means to live, by coming of age.” You can learn more and donate by following this link: the elders
By the way in which a society behaves toward its old people it uncovers the naked, and often carefully hidden, truth about its real principles and aims.
–Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age
To the mother of my children, I Love You.
THIS SATURDAY COME OUT AND SUPPORT OUR LOCAL HAWAIIAN LANGUAGE IMMERSION PROGRAM! THIS IS A FUN EVENT FOR ALL FAMILIES- FOOD AND ENTERTAINMENT. TICKETS CAN BE PURCHASED AT THE EVENT FOR $8 , AND THE PLATE LUNCH IS GOING TO BE ALL HAWAIIAN FOOD AND HUGE. PRAY FOR GOOD WEATHER, A LOT OF WORK HAS GONE INTO THIS EVENT, COME AND SHOW YOUR SUPPORT! SPECIAL HOLLADAY PHOTO OFFER FOR THOSE WHO ATTEND- IF YOU COME, FIND ME AT THE EVENT, (I WON’T BE IN A BOOTH, JUST FLOATING AROUND) AND I WILL SNAP A PHOTO OF YOUR FAMILY AND EMAIL IT TO YOU! YOU CAN ALSO BID ON A IN AND OUT OF THE WATER FAMILY PHOTO SHOOT WORTH $500, AMONG OTHER THINGS, AT THE SILENT AUCTION.
(POSTERS BELOW DONE BY YOURS TRULY)
A few weeks back Kamuela’ s mom Naia contacted me and said they wanted to do something a little different for their family photos. So we found a great beach on the North Shore of Oahu with some crystal clear water. We had a great time.
So I have decided to post a pic of the day. This was taken in Punalu’u on my way home from a job in town. Traffic was stopped on Kamaehamea hwy , and we were the 3rd car from the fire, I thought I was going to have to drive around the island to get home like so many times before.
I forgot to post this yesterday, a friend of mine shot this with his i-phone as he was watching the new. You know you live in Hawaii when…
Our crazy night started soon after we went to bed on Friday night. Our dog, who is always a good sleeper at night just couldn’t sleep. He was restless and antsy all night. At midnight he was running around. We kept telling him to shut it down and go to sleep. The phone rang at 1 am and we were too sleepy to answer it but I have a google voicemail application that puts the voice message into a text message. When I squinted at my blackberry to see the message alert it read “a salami is coming.” I told my wife what it said and we muttered something about nonsensical messages and went back to sleep. A little before 3 am someone pounded on our door. We woke up wondering why this night was so weird and I answered the door to our neighbor who said a tsunami was coming and everyone was evacuating. We immediately started packing up our van with essential items. We had a decent 72 hour kit and we threw more stuff in, including our equipment. I packed up computer hard drive and back up photo files and my wife grabbed her video equipment for work. After we packed and called our families to say hi we woke up the kids and got them ready. We piled into the van with our dog. By 5:15 am we had settled into a spot in our church’s parking lot up on higher ground behind our house. The evacuation alarm sounded for the first time at 6 am, by then the parking lot was about full. After an hour of hanging out up there we decided to go back down to the house since we had time before the wave was coming. We got some breakfast and parked our other car on higher ground before heading back to the parking lot where we hung out until about 1 pm when we saw that we weren’t going to have a tsunami. We were tired and relieved. If anything it was a good test run for being ready to run out the door if we have to. We had very mild discomfort compared to all the people suffering from recent earthquakes.
Photos below are of our dog, who we love, the Saturday sunrise and our parking lot camp. The last picture in the lower right corner is of the people we could see hiking up the mountains behind our house to get a view of everything.
When I am shooting in the studio I frequently use roles of seamless paper (140″ X 50″) for backdrops. I was on the tail end of a roll with only about 6 feet left, so the kids and I decided to make a boat and play pirate ship. I often make little boats for the kids out of scrap paper laying around, so it was fun to make one that they could play in. We ended up going all the way with hats, capes, eye patches, and swords/ paddles/ telescopes out of the tubing. Check out Ruby’s hat, she insisted in decorating it with hearts.
