Aamir Zakaria Photography

Kilauea Vol­cano, Hawai’i

I have a con­fes­sion to make: liv­ing in Ore­gon has been detri­men­tal to my pho­tog­ra­phy. Don’t get me wrong — there’s lots of nat­ur­al beau­ty here. But I had to trek out to Hawai’i to get inspired again.

In ret­ro­spect, I prob­a­bly could’ve used a grad­u­at­ed fil­ter for this shot. I had to real­ly over­ex­pose the vol­cano to get the stars and Milky Way. I’ve got­ten used to using soft­ware grad­u­at­ed fil­ters. But the prob­lem with that is you have no way of deal­ing with over-expo­sure. They’re great for fine-tun­ing, but fall short in these extremes of con­trast. I’ll have to dig one out of my box of tricks for my next visit.

Anoth­er les­son learned — bring a wider angle lens next time. Or bring the 5D Mk III body. I’ve been using the 7D Mk II almost exclu­sive­ly for sev­er­al rea­sons. It has a built-in GPS, which is real­ly nice. It has a bet­ter auto-focus for video. And for tele­pho­to shots, I get the 1.6x boost from using a cropped frame cam­era. That was key for get­ting some real close­ups of the vol­cano. But for a shot like this, I would have liked to have got­ten more of the night sky. Hope­ful­ly next trip.…