A New Perspective of This Amazing Natural Phenomenon

Having the best tools never guarantee the best results but it sure helps. I travel light, by myself, and am gone for long periods of time – so everything I have in my bag must be extremely reliable – if not bulletproof! The days have drastically changed since film and it is still hard to remember a time when your biggest investment and hassle was to carry, protect and process long rolls of fragile films. Nowadays, whether it is with my 64GB SanDisk Extreme PRO memory card in my Canon 7D or with the 8GB SanDisk Extreme Pro microSD card in my GoPro H3, I can spend all my energy on pushing my photography to new places. My fingers will be frozen, my feet will be burning, the sun will scorch or the wind will roar, yet I know I don’t have to worry one second about where my work is being stored.

Recently, I went to the Big Island of Hawaii to photograph the lava. I was interested in presenting this amazing natural phenomenon with a new perspective. I had always seen the same kind of “volcano” photography and believed that there had to be more.

Having the best tools never guarantee the best results but it sure helps. I travel light, by myself, and am gone for long periods of time – so everything I have in my bag must be extremely reliable – if not bulletproof! The days have drastically changed since film and it is still hard to remember a time when your biggest investment and hassle was to carry, protect and process long rolls of fragile films. Nowadays, whether it is with my 64GB SanDisk Extreme PRO memory card in my Canon 7D or with the 8GB SanDisk Extreme Pro microSD card in my GoPro H3, I can spend all my energy on pushing my photography to new places. My fingers will be frozen, my feet will be burning, the sun will scorch or the wind will roar, yet I know I don’t have to worry one second about where my work is being stored.

My goal was to create an abstract and artistic representation of the lava’s intensity. Compared to the free flow of lava, active and fast, these clefts are the result of a constant but slow force. One fracture at a time, earth is moved forward to form new landscapes, erasing old ones behind. Invisible at day, their presence and intensity is only revealed at night, cracking the dark world open, light a lightning splitting the sky in pieces.

For more than a month, twice or three times a week, I would leave shortly before sunset and walked the lava field only to come back several hours later, surrounded in darkness, only with my headlamps guiding me back home.

No more than a 10 or 15 feet away from the lava, the heat would sometimes be so unbearable that I had only time to take one photograph before turning away and walk back to cooler places.

Amazingly, my SanDisk Extreme Pro never failed me. It is incredible how so much power and reliability can be stored safely in such small objects.