I should preface this story with the fact that my first visit to Volcanoes National Park three years prior was a bust in terms of no lava flow, so needless to say, my pulse was racing a bit faster as I first viewed the molten beast on a recent trip to Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island of Hawaii with my friend and teaching partner Gary Hart.
But the show really began in earnest once the night sky, complete with stars and a gibbous moon, appeared. We were fortunate in the fact that there was no rain (amazing in an area that receives 140 inches annually). I choose this image as my favorite (though there were other worthy candidates) as it completed my vision of the old and new lava merging under the moonlit night. If you check the metadata, you will see that I had to shoot wide open at f/2.8 with my 16-35 mmL Series II lens. I simply played with my focus point and was pleased at the amount of depth-of-field I was able to get at that wide an aperture (gotta love wide angles)! With a timed shutter of 30 seconds, I was able to also get the look of frozen stars but had some motion in the stratus clouds that allowed for some visual movement.
This is really as close to photographing on another planet as I will ever get; to say the least, I was thrilled with the experience and the results. Timing is everything in life and photography is no exception. The guards had told us they had waited months for a night like this. Needless to say, Gary and I were the last two spectators they asked to leave as they had to reset the boundary markers (I could have stayed all night). Personally I would have loved to have walked closer than we were to slow-moving beast, but we were not allowed. From where we were located, we could feel the heat. We were sitting on top of dried a'a lava which was extremely smooth and somewhat glass-like. It was dubbed Pele's Art. I know it will be a night that I will remember for the rest of my life.

Canon 1DsMKIII, 16-35 mmL Series II at f/2.8, 30 second timed-exposure, 800 ISO

July 2010