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.…