Several weeks ago my “Electrons are Cheap” post mentioned a contest held by the Christian Photographers on Facebook group. Our group hosts a weekly competition in which the admins announce a theme and members submit a photo that they believe fits the theme. The theme a couple of weeks ago was “Out of Place.” Pictures included a digital lock on a massive, wooden medieval castle door, and similar out-of-place things, whether subtle or jarringly anachronistic . Here was my entry:
The speed limit you see above stood at the side of a road through Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The sign is still in good shape, but a lava flow engulfed the road several years ago. How long ago? Long enough for weeds to take root in this area of the now-cooled lava flow. If you inspect the photo carefully, though, you can see a steam plume arising from the ocean in the distance. Apparently not everything had cooled, so we hiked to an overlook to see the following view:
The photo above shows the source of the steam plume: red-hot lava flowing into the Pacific Ocean. We had to walk across land that was only a few weeks (a month or two at most) old to reach this vantage point. Our route crossed the lava tube or tubes feeding these entries, and the rock was hot enough that we could smell our shoe soles overheating. I shot this photo almost 20 years ago, and although this particular eruption finally ended a few years after our visit, another eruption took place several miles east of here since then. It, too, stopped after a time, but you never know when the next eruption might start. Think I will close this post and go to the USGS pages to check the status.
Did you win? Your entry was EXCELLENT, and if it won, I’m fairly sure you’d be too modest to admit it to your readers…
No, a lot of people liked it, but it did not win.