Oksana and I spent a month traveling around Costa Rica and one of the highlights for me was our stay at the base of a volcano. I don’t think Arenal has really blown its top since the late ‘60s, but it’s still active enough to send half-cooled balls of lava crashing down the mountain face. We arrived during the wet season, though, and there was a big question as to whether the clouds would clear long enough for us to see any activity.

This photo was taken the first morning that we were in La Fortuna, the town closest to the base of Arenal. After we dropped off our packs at the hotel, we wandered around the central plaza and waited to see if the clouds would part. If I remember correctly, it was about, oh, 9:32am, when we first saw signs of the volcano’s peak. There wasn’t a completely clear view of the mountain from town, and this photo was my best attempt to integrate the local surroundings into the composition.

Throughout our week-long stay in the area around Arenal, the mountain came out from behind the clouds fairly often, but I never knew if the view I had would be the last. Consequently, I have dozens of pictures of the volcano, but besides the few that show some smoke and stream venting near the top, none are very engaging.

We did luck out one evening when we decided to take a cab up to the lookout near the base of Arenal. The low-hanging clouds parted long enough for me to prop my camera on the roof of the minivan and take a few open-shutter pictures of the “lava.” Unfortunately, the night was so dark that the red lines were the only things that exposed the film. Guess what. Lava, by itself on a field of black, does not an interesting photograph make.