Old Dog Photography

Since you never really know who’s reading your blog, I’ve thought it best to talk about travel only after I’ve returned home from it. So now I can start telling you about a family vacation we just wrapped up in Hawaii.

The lead-off shot — lava reaching the sea on the “big island” of Hawaii:

This shot was a bugger to make, in part because you can’t get very close to the action (due to obvious safety issues), and in part because of some limitations of the Olympus E-3 when it comes to night shots.

At any rate, this started as a 2 second exposure — then took some serious post-processing to get rid of all the noise in the image. As a result, the steam clouds rising off the water take on a sort of sculptural look — but I like it (hopefully you do too).

For comparison’s sake, here’s the original (SOOC) shot:

You may also notice some little streamers near the edge of the lava flow — that’s what you get when steam explosions blow some chunks of lava into the air.