Centuries of Lava Flow
JonaBeth Russell
Registered Users Posts: 1,065 Major grins
Just outside the coastal region of Volcanoes National Park, lay a sprawling, seemingly barren wasteland of hardened black lava. These flows have taken out housing subdivisions, added significant coastline, and surprisingly, given way to many resilient plants and animals, including humans.
After chatting a while with a local land owner (Hotfoot Photography), learning about the history of the most recent large scale flow (1990's), I was moved to attempt some aerial capture. Gary, the landowner, gave permission to fly from his property, just outside the park, and this is what I came away with.
The wind was high, roughly 15 knots, gusting around 20 knots, and the flight from Gary's lava stilt house to the cliffs was about a half mile. I would've stayed longer, but the 4:30am lava boat trip had me fairly exhausted, so I limited it to a single battery life.
The last two images are the result of a large photomerge, 32 individual photos in total, worked in both LR & PS. In the distant coastline, you can see the steam plume from the ocean entry lava vent.
Mahalo for viewing!
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Comments
Breathtaking shots! Interesting how the plant growth has already taken over the new land in the middle of the lava field. You may know already, but the second and third shots have some merging artifacts in the upper middle below the puffy clouds.
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky
Mahalo for pointing that out, I missed it! Guess I need to run through PS again with the blending brush. I'm glad you caught it before I order a metal print!
The force of life and growth on this planet is truly remarkable. To see plants pop up from rocks at 10,000ft, or humans rebuilding their community in a place where the air is riddled with sulfur and water comes solely from rain catchment is absolutely wondrous to me.
Brilliant! First one is like abstract and second one really shows vast expanse!
That first one is really great.
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