Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Burn Zone - Another Look
















Yesterday's blog piece featured a slide show of the aftermath of the devastating 2003 Cedar Fire that torched more than a quarter million acres in Southern CA. The photos were taken on my iPhone. This morning, I decided to see what would happen if I filtered out the color. These four stills provide a sobering view ...



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nicely haunting, well done John. It really represents the horror of what happened. Although it is a natural and necessary event fire suppression has cause the fires when the get out of control to be bigger, and burn hotter, causing more damage. But, we have developed the forested area, so now fire suppression can never be stopped. Controlled burns are small, not effective to prevent these types of fires and often get out of control themselves. Thanks for bringing this into the realm of your blogs. --- Paul Cumming

Lucy Talikwa said...

Photos: great eye for composition.

Subject matter: indeed sobering.

Filtering: brings the devastation’s message home

John McManamy said...

Many thanks, Paul and Lucy. It's amazing how deliberate distortion can often better portray reality than faithful reproduction. Visual artists, of course, have been aware of this since the beginning of time (think Picasso's Guernica), but I'm new at this and am only just catching on.

Nonfiction prose writing, by contrast, goes by entirely different conventions. These days, I find myself blending the two mediums in my blog pieces. As I said, I'm new at theis ...