Saturday, August 1, 2009

Blackcomb Wild Fires






Helicopter dropping water on a wild fire on the slopes of Blackcomb Mountain, at Whistler.

My wife and I were driving home from doing some errands in the whistler Village, when we came around the bend at Green Lake and saw a huge fire burning on Crystal Ridge. I ran home and grabbed my cameras and the longest lens I could find, and shot these pics. A few minutes after shooting these, global Television in Vancouver called me, and I spent the rest of the day shooting video for them, both of the Whistler fire, and of the big fires in Pemberton.

Tech Stuff:
I used an old manual focus Nikon 300mm f/2.8 lens with a 1.4x teleconverter, on my Nikon D2x camera, which has a 1.5x conversion factor, so the the focal length was equal to a 630mm lens on a 35mm camera. I supported it on a sturdy Gitzo Monopod.

The smoke and heat waves washed out most of the colour and about half the fine detail. Rather than try and fix the colour, I just converted it to a sepia toned B&W, and then cranked up the existing contrast.

Camera: Nikon D2x
Lens: Nikkor 300mm f/2.8 (manual focus) with a Nikon TC-14 teleconverter

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