Tambora Sandwich

The gigantic caldera of mount Tambora, one of the most famous Indonesian volcanoes and one that produced the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, back in 1810. Before the eruption, it was a conic volcano, standing 4500m above sea level. Today, it's less than 2500m. Imagine an eruption so monstrous that it exploded through and destroy 2km of solid rock. If you're not scared, you're not imagining hard enough.

Anyway, today the volcano is quite dormant and you can easily climb up there, even scaling most of the way up with a 4X4, albeit in a crazy, hellish drive, but still. Noah, one of my workshop participants arrived early and joined me for the climb. I had unfortunately lost my Mavic II Pro due to.... ahem.... human error, and Noah was kind enough to bring me a brand new Mavic III Classic, which would prove instrumental for this image.

After the 4X4 drive to camp, we slept a bit and woke up at 2 a.m. to start our climb. The night was rainy and it wasn't at all certain we would be able to get up there or even see the landscape. 2 hours' trailless climb later and we were standing on top of Tambora, with plenty of time to go before sunrise. The sky was luckily (and surprisingly) clear. I hiked around a bit to get behind a large peak, and prepared my drone for liftoff. When I sent it away, I could see a wonderful cloud inversion on the far side of the caldera. Having the Mavic III meant that I had the reception and battery capacity to fly almost 5km away, and shoot the caldera with the cloud inversion surrounding me from below. This definitely made the shot, and made me feel very lucky to have lost my previous drone, even though I had to go through a lot of stress to get the new one. All is well that ends well I guess

This is a 3 row, 18 image pamorama with the wide angle converter, which goes to show you how gigantic this caldera really is.