An Epic Campsite
I moved to the Big Island of Hawaii shortly after the lava stopped flowing into the ocean by Kalapana, so I haven't had much of a chance to visit flowing lava. I really hoped it would start flowing again during my time here, and it finally did. So last night I biked four miles down the closed-to-vehicles gravel road and then hiked another two across the lava plains. Rivers of lava were flowing down the pali (hill) and pooling at the bottom. It was a photographically target rich environment, and I nearly melted my camera and tripod when the lava started to surround it while I was filming timelapse.
After sunset, Raiatea and I hiked ~200 feet away from the lava pool and set up my tent, intending to take refuge in it from the frequent rain and then photograph sunrise. We were on a small hill and to the side of the path of the lava, so we were reasonably confident we wouldn't get overrun by lava during the night. Around 2 AM I glanced outside and saw that the clouds had cleared, so I set up this star trails photo.
The site we put the tent seemed quiescent, though in the morning I noticed that the nearby cracks were emitting heat and smoke. In the full-size version of this image, the star trails aren't perfectly aligned. The camera slowly drifted around during the course of the exposures. My tripod was reasonably stable, so at this point my only guess is that the ground was literally shifting under us during the night due to the lava. Yikes.
Shot with a Sony A6000 and Samyang 12mm f/2. 55 15-second exposures at f/2.8 were stacked for this.
A one-hour timelapse clip of the lava flowing can be viewed in 4K at youtu.be/8E_8rnCH8h8.
An Epic Campsite
I moved to the Big Island of Hawaii shortly after the lava stopped flowing into the ocean by Kalapana, so I haven't had much of a chance to visit flowing lava. I really hoped it would start flowing again during my time here, and it finally did. So last night I biked four miles down the closed-to-vehicles gravel road and then hiked another two across the lava plains. Rivers of lava were flowing down the pali (hill) and pooling at the bottom. It was a photographically target rich environment, and I nearly melted my camera and tripod when the lava started to surround it while I was filming timelapse.
After sunset, Raiatea and I hiked ~200 feet away from the lava pool and set up my tent, intending to take refuge in it from the frequent rain and then photograph sunrise. We were on a small hill and to the side of the path of the lava, so we were reasonably confident we wouldn't get overrun by lava during the night. Around 2 AM I glanced outside and saw that the clouds had cleared, so I set up this star trails photo.
The site we put the tent seemed quiescent, though in the morning I noticed that the nearby cracks were emitting heat and smoke. In the full-size version of this image, the star trails aren't perfectly aligned. The camera slowly drifted around during the course of the exposures. My tripod was reasonably stable, so at this point my only guess is that the ground was literally shifting under us during the night due to the lava. Yikes.
Shot with a Sony A6000 and Samyang 12mm f/2. 55 15-second exposures at f/2.8 were stacked for this.
A one-hour timelapse clip of the lava flowing can be viewed in 4K at youtu.be/8E_8rnCH8h8.