MOUNT ETNA SMOKE RINGS

Hi Everyone

So there I was, walking up Mount Etna, at least the first part, the second I took the bus. And boom...smoke rings like you have never seen before.

It turned out that they are a natural result from what is a live volcano. The perfect circles were really quite distinct and able to be captured on a basic camera. The same day I was taking this shot it was covered on International News with an article on the BBC. Now a smoke ring, or three as below is easy to take but trying to get it with some foreground to give some idea of scale is a bit more tricky.... for the record these things are quite large. I would estimate 50 - 100m diameter, but my first photo does not convey this very well. I know because my mind remembers when I took the photo and this is the learning point. If you have a subject, try and get something else into the shot to give is scale. This is just the same on a big building, a few people walking by really helps to give the person who has not visited it before a feeling of size.

So my second photo I tried hard to get some foreground even at the expense of the quality of the smoke rings. The cable car cabins can be seen as really quite small and thus the size of the smoke rings is really a lot clearer.

All the best

A