Eruption!

In yesterday's post, I showed the Sundhnúkagígar (don't try to pronounce this -- you might hurt yourself!) volcano from a distance. The roads that are close to the open fissure spewing molten lava are now closed, so the only way to get close to the action was by helicopter. This shot was taken from about 1400 feet in altitude, and my settings were 1/2000, f/5.6, and 800 ISO. I used the fast shutter speed to freeze movement due to the vibration of the helicopter, and the large aperture was fine because depth of field was irrelevant in this scenario. The larger the aperture, the lower the ISO had to be. We circled the eruption for about 25 minutes and had very good luck with significant volcanic activity. I had to shoot through the glass windows of the helicopter, but that was unavoidable and it didn't really degrade the quality of the images very much. I've wanted to photograph active vulcanism for a long time, and while this isn't a major eruption, it was still very exciting to see. This volcano had been dormant for the past 800 years; it started acting up in 2021.