Strombolian eruptions photography

  

Photographing Strombolian eruptions is quite a challenge. The bursts are sudden and unpredictable, so even if your reaction is super swift you’ll still miss the start. And they are over in a second or three. That’s the one challenge – timing. The other is the difficult light. It’s dark until the bright burst comes, so for the camera to get automatic exposure, white balance and all that right is a gamble .. mostly a loosing one. And then there’s the distance. At the 400m viewpoint you are really still quite a long way from the action, so some zoom is inevitable.

 

I pitied all those other hikers who relied on their smartphones to capture the volcanic action. Their photos will probably be just fuzzy orange blurs. If they videoed they might have had a slightly better chance. But let’s face it, this is a case for proper equipment.

 

The professionals, whose glorious pictures you may have seen online and in books, will use proper SLRs with long zoom lenses (300-600mm), a good tripod, and a cable remote shutter release and put the camera into burst mode after first having focused on the crater rim (set to manual). You then need to wait and be quick to react and press down the shutter button on the cable until the burst is over. That way you can use a somewhat lower ISO as well as longer exposures (2-3 seconds). The results will be those typical light trail images of an eruption (like you can see in the relevant photo gallery on volcanodiscovery – external link, opens in a new tab). Very pretty. Except, that’s not actually what the human eye sees. (It’s a bit like those soft-washed images of waterfalls taken with longer exposure times – also very pretty, but not at all what you see in reality).

 

I contemplated getting a long lens for my pro dSLR specifically for this challenge, but was put off both by the enormous costs and by the fact that it would mean schlepping that heavy lens in addition to everything else, as well as my tripod, on that strenuous hike up to the viewpoint. Too much effort, and too expensive.

 

I knew that the lenses I do own for my Pentax K1 dSLR (namely a very bright wide angle and a standard zoom) would be insufficient, but I’d still try on the standard zoom’s max 7x reach and hope that cropped images would be usable (in the end only a tiny handful were). But to get images closer up I went back to using a “superzoom” bridge camera.

 

I actually got into proper photography through superzoom bridge cameras with manual zoom lenses made by Fuji, starting with a 10x one back in 2007, and then had three models of such manual superzooms in succession (the latest offering a whopping 50x zoom reach). All three cameras have meanwhile reached the end of their lifespan and are no longer usable (even through material fatigue – the plastic has eroded and become soft and tacky so you can’t handle them any more). Sadly, Fuji stopped making bridge cameras like that years ago (the company has shifted its focus to mid-format and mirror-less cameras).

 

So I looked around to see what I could still find on the market in that (dying breed) niche category of superzoom bridge cameras. And it became clear pretty quickly that there was only one suitable option left (other than second-hand cameras, of course), and that was the Panasonic Lumix FZ82D. It offers a 60x zoom, albeit only with motor zoom, a compromise I just had to accept. Of course image quality would also be compromised given the camera’s small sensor, but it offered one feature that was just made for this challenge: it can take 4k videos out of which you can later extract single frames as 8MP still images (big enough for me). That proved to be a pretty decent compromise solution.

 

So what I did at the 400m viewpoint was just video away aiming at the sputtering crater at ca. 20-25x zoom … waiting for the bursts to come – which they eventually did. I captured several bursts that way and the next day was able to extract still frames such as those that you can see in the Stromboli chapter’s photo gallery. They are by no means professional quality (certainly not good enough for prints) but good enough for my purposes (especially for this website).

 

The superzoom showed it limits as the evening got darker. At dusk it worked fine, even a bit after sunset, but once it got real pitch-black dark in between eruptions the camera increasingly struggled to find a focus (in autofocus – manual setting was too cumbersome to find in the dark, and I wasn’t yet fully familiar with the camera). In 4k video mode the focus went in and out of focus the whole time in the end, so that there would be hardly any usable frames in focus.

 

So I gave up on the superzoom and resorted to my trusted dSLR, set to continuous shooting mode (and in RAW), manual zoom and high ISO (6400 – the Pentax K1 with its 36MP full-frame sensor is still pretty good at that high a setting). The zoom wasn’t long enough (7x), but I still managed to get a few images of bursts that were OK. And with a bit of cropping and adapting white balance in RAW processing afterwards they yielded fairly usable results (the last two eruption photos in the Stromboli photo gallery are the best examples).

 

Of course, a tripod would have helped a lot in these conditions. But first you’d have to schlep it up with you and then set it up – which takes time. And time is precisely what you don’t have on these volcano hikes. You are given a maximum of one hour at the viewpoint. By the time you have everything set up properly you will have missed half the action.

 

In the end I was happy with what I managed to capture with my two cameras, hand-held but with support from the wooden railings (so not fully freehand).

 

See if you agree.