If you're going to hide from your wife the fact that you're jumping inside the mouth of a fiery volcano, you'd better come back with some stunning photos.
That's precisely what Canadian digital artist and filmmaker Michael Dalton-Smith has done, capturing stunning up-close shots and footage.
The project was part of a new film titled Volcanoes 3D, which premiered at Melbourne Museum's IMAX cinema this week.
When asked just how close he got to the edge, Dalton-Smith said he and his crew were "sometimes right in them" despite being "terrified of volcanoes".
"Depends if my wife would be listening — usually if she's around, I tend to stay quite far away. But we get quite close in what we do," he said.
"We could be a couple of hundred metres from the eruptive crater, and within the fallout zone of the stuff, and it gets a bit hairy.
"I'm actually a big chicken on a volcano, and I'm glad for tripods because otherwise the camera would really be shaking throughout this film because of the nerves.
"There's always a level of danger. You can never fully predict what a volcano is going to do."
Travelling on the heels of intrepid explorers Carsten Peters and Chris Horsley, Dalton-Smith said it was often difficult — not to mention expensive — to get insurance for such high-level endeavours, and he had lost more than one drone to the mouth of a volcano.
His team often slept in 15-minute blocks near the craters they were capturing on camera.
"We go up at night because the incandescent bombs that are thrown out of these things — you can actually see where they're landing," he said.
"We're working our way up the side of this volcano and all of a sudden it does this big burst and you see this thing the size of a school bus comes crashing down about 150 metres away from us.
"I kind of stop there and we're all quiet—we don't scream or anything, but I look up at the guys, they just kind of shrug their shoulders and keep going … and I'm like: 'Does anybody want to talk about what just happened here?'"
Volcanic beauty and terror
Dalton-Smith said he was one of just a handful of foreign journalists in the thick of the devastating volcanic eruptions on Hawaii's Big Island last year.
"Everything around us was on fire, burning … everything was destroyed," he said.
Despite the damage the torrents of lava did to homes and property, people who had lost everything were still "talking about the beauty of it, not the destruction", he said.
The locals he met had tremendous respect for the forces around them.
"This beauty, the Earth in its dynamic nature, is right there in front of you and it's an incredible experience to be a be so close to something so powerful," he said.
He said the rumbling and bubbling of lava lakes were not a concern, but when volcanoes became dead silent, that's when he knew the pressure was building.
While volcanoes are revered like deities in many countries, Dalton-Smith described them as more akin to the engine rooms of the Earth.
"We know that they have helped basically in the development of humans, of life itself on Earth, and we also do have that mystical feeling with them," he said.
"There many cultures today that still worship them.
"We started to realise the benefits that they created and we realise how integral they are to life on Earth."
ABC
