I have some new work being edited right now and will be posting some of the picks from that batch soon. In the meantime, here’s another one from the sizeable Costa Rica archives. I have a lot of photos which I’m very pleased with from those two trips and may even look into making a photobook out of the best 20 or so.
This is the Mount Arenal volcano, viewed from a bridge near the Arenal Observatory Lodge. It’s pitch dark on the bridge, but also crowded with people there to watch the volcano do it’s thing. And what a thing; big chunks of molten lava and red-hot rocks, rolling down the side of the volcano. We were there maybe 30-40 minutes and there were half a dozen eruptions like this before the cloud cover rolled in and we called it a night.
Getting this photo was an achievement all by itself. It’s a 16 second exposure on a camera which gets very noisy after about 1 second. Focus was set manually to infinity. Framing was almost entirely by guesswork as I couldn’t see anything on the LCD and could barely make out the shadow of the volcano in the (very inaccurate) optical viewfinder. I had to do some major selective noise reduction work in post, including spotting out dozens of hot pixels which had clipped out to full brightness.
Or I could have decided that the camera I was carrying couldn’t possibly get a photo worth bothering with, and this image would never have existed. I’m glad I took the “why not?” approach.
