Day 267

He Is Watching, Still

This is now the third fire I have photographed (along with Day 5 and Day 74). I remember both of those previous photos were really difficult to edit (the first because I still didn't know how to use Photoshop except for the saturation slider apparently). I didn't really care with this one. It's orange, it's smokey, you get what you're looking at, right?

I drove around for over an hour trying to find a good vantage point where I'd be close enough to the fire to resolve it and high enough to get an unobscured view. Most of North Boulder was closed off (it's pretty flat out there anyway, so an elevated view would have been impossible to find), and the fire was burning on a northeast facing slope, making views from the south pretty minimal. This was taken from Flagstaff. I got a few from the big Arapaho hill just west of 75th with the smokestacks ironically placed in the foreground, but the wind was so bad that my tripod kept moving around during the long exposures. Also, I hiked into the middle of a field that I'm sure was full of snakes, coyotes, mountain lions, tigers, and murderers/rapists. It was scary. Thank Brad for the near-full moon giving me some light.