Orange Wednesday

I have posted smoke-filled bay area skies year after year, but this is truly unprecedented. These shots are straight out of the camera, set to daylight white-balance. The first was taken inside the loft at 8:00 AM, but by 10:30 AM, it got even darker, so I went outside to take a few shots.

CA Fires Wreck Air Quality — Again

Scenes like this used to be pretty rare in the Bay Area. Now, it seems to happen every year. Here is the worst air day of 2008. Here’s a post from 2018, and another. 2019 wasn’t much better, and now, it’s 2020, and here we go again. Extremely rare August thunderstorms brought lightening to a…

Smokin’

We had a little time to kill before our first Holiday party of the season, so we visited one of the most interesting Golden Gate Bridge vantage points. Shots from this location are always beautiful. This one is unique because of the intense smoke. It’s bad. Much worse than it appears in this shot. The…

Fire!

After seeing the smoke on the commute this evening, I made the choice to walk over to the fire to see what I could see. That was a mistake. I should have gone straight to the roof of our building. If I had, I would be posting a very cool shot of a flaming house…

Fifteen Minutes of FLAME!

OK, here it is, more than twenty years after the devastating Oakland Hills Fire, and we’re still talking about it. Well, at least I’m still talking about it. This time I’m sharing my experience with the crew from yet another reality show — Deadliest Planet. Watch out! Here comes another urban fire video! It’s not…

Welcome to Wyoming

Here is my second attempt at recreating one of Ansel Adams’ masterpieces. A faithful reader points out that in this shot of Kelly in the the canyon, the mountain on the left (Mt. Owen) is 6000 vertical feet above Kelly and the peak is just one mile as the bird flies from that spot —…

Fire!

There was a small fire early this morning in our building’s new restaurant. It looks like a bucket of kitchen rags smoldered for hours before creating just enough heat to cause a sprinkler head to blow in the kitchen area of our favorite eatery. The fire and smoke caused far less damage than the deluge…

Smoke on the Water

Most of you are probably aware of the fact that there are currently 1,400 wildfires burning in the Golden State. It’s hard to believe there could be so many. Although the closest fire is many miles from here, we have been blanketed in thick smoke for weeks. This shot was taken in daylight – 7:06…

Far Out Flame Out

We made a promise to ourselves that we’d never miss another Fire Festival at the Crucible. The sights and sounds are just so cool, er, hot. So flaming-hot-stainless-pneumatic-alien-stilt-walker strange. So smack-you-in-the-face with a white-hot-stove-pipe cool. A billion BTU’s of climate-changing fun. You jus’ hafta see it to believe it. More pictures coming soon.

More From the Mystic Beat Lounge/Harmony Festival

As difficult as it is shooting under these conditions, you can occasionally get some wildly colorful shots. Motion blur is unavoidable as using an on-camera flash is not an option in an environment this dark. Luckily, a little motion blur can work in your favor by helping to convey the mood.

Your Basic Fire Opera

Have I mentioned how much I love living in the Bay Area? Where else I could find an event quite like The Crucible’s red hot Romeo and Juliet Fire Ballet? I’ll be honest here – I am not likely to ever attend a “real” opera. This sort of music/theater springs from a level of consciousness…

Fantastic Fire Arts Festival

Wherein Utilikilt-clad white male fire-worshippers from around the Bay Area converge on the Crucible in Oakland for their 6th annual Fire Arts Festival and play in public with very dangerous but mesmerizing big boy toys. Whoa. The things we saw there definitely fall into the “Don’t try this at home” category. This ain’t your Mother’s…

Another California Disaster

In case you missed this incredible satellite image of the enormous fires raging in Southern California, I’m posting it here. This high resolution image is ~600K in size, and pretty impressive. This and the fire images on tonight’s evening news definitely brought back some memories of the Oakland Hills Fire of 1991. That fire killed…