When Ed White reached around the small of his wife’s back in March, bending her backward while leaning forward to deliver a kiss near a hill of oozing lava, he was simply being spontaneous. He didn’t expect the world of photography to gape at the moment captured by his wife’s camera during a millisecond of flash power.
White and his wife, professional photographer Dallas Nagata White, had already snapped off several shots of friends as well as themselves on that dark night. But in the middle of a misting rain on the Kilauea lava flow, White wanted one more photo.
"We were about to stop and I said, ‘Wait, wait,’ and I dipped her," Ed White said. "I’m a hopeless romantic."
The resulting photograph — a silhouette of the couple framed by a halo of backlit rain — has become an online sensation. Dallas White submitted "Lava Kiss" to the 2012 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest, and from there the image was featured on The Atlantic’s photo blog In Focus, Huffington Post, Glamour magazine, a photo site called PetaPixel and a gadget site called Gizmodo.
The image is so stunning that at first glance it might appear as if the shot was manipulated by combining images with a photo-editing program, and some might question how the couple could have gotten so close to the lava — about 15 feet away.
Dallas White insists the photo is authentic. She had framed and focused the shot before snapping, setting up a wireless flash in the hands of a friend positioned behind them and asking another friend to set off the camera. Then it was just a matter of digitally enhancing the color and detail of the nighttime scene.
"I straddle the art-photojournalist line," she said. "The art people say it’s not as conceptual. The photojournalists say I edit too much."
Although the lava was molten, there was no furnacelike heat where they shot — a bit downslope from Royal Gardens, the subdivision near Kalapana that was consumed by Kilauea’s relentless lava flows, Dallas White said. The couple had hiked four miles from the end of the road with an organized tour in hopes of finding a star-studded sky above glowing lava.
But it was cloudy and raining, and the area around the lava was so cool that Ed White was able to poke a small pool with a stick. His wife has the photo to prove it.
"It was comfortable to stand next to it," Dallas White said. "It was super-slow-moving, super-cool. It was mostly cool at the surface, black, and little bits of orange would slowly ooze out."
The 25-year-old graduate in studio art from the University of Hawaii has been taking photographs for about eight years. Her husband, a 27-year-old former Army sergeant and systems analyst, is also a photographer but serves more as technical support on his wife’s shoots. Together they have shot weddings, fashion models, landscapes and one of Dallas White’s favorites, lightning storms.
"No one ever lived an adventurous life being perfectly safe, right?" said Dallas White, who grew up on Maui climbing all over Haleakala.
Ed White calls the dipping kiss an iconic pose. His stolen smooch wasn’t his first.
"He does it a lot," his wife said. "I was like, ‘Oh, here we go again.’"
Ed White dipped his wife on their wedding day two years ago at Kakaako Waterfront Park and later in front of a C-17 cargo plane on the tarmac at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
But "Lava Kiss" is one of his favorite photographs and one he has thought about a lot. More than just a moment frozen in time, it was a combination of natural elements. And a hint of passion.
"For us, we like to make art from moments," Ed White said. "We are looking to maximize the emotional impact of the photo. We want people to feel what we felt at the time."
