In the last 2 months, three huge fires devastated almost-contiguous areas equal to the size of NYC. The most recent destroyed 1300 dwellings and was rated the third worst in California history.
A friend who lives near the area took me on a tour. She had spectacular hillside infernos a few miles away on two sides but her area was spared. In the areas that weren't, there would be a number of houses that were just piles of ash, with a few standing here and there, apparently undamaged, in their midst. To try to capture what it must have been like I combined some shots of the aftermath with some textures from burned appliances and cars. This is a simple shot with the texture in Hard Light mode, and only a few tweaks to local contrast.
This is amazing. Incredible. If I understand what you wrote, there weren't any flames in the shots you took, but it looks like there were. The image is very intense, as it should be, and captures what I can only imagine it must be like to be threatened by a fire like that.
Thanks, Dennis! Yes, this was taken about 7 weeks after it started. (It burned for weeks before it was declared under control, and traffic restrictions into the area were just lifted about a week ago.) The area is very hot and dry anyway, and has suffered excessively from the heat and drought out here. It is filled with tall, thin lodgepole pines, which are matches, on steep hillsides with a lot of dry undergrowth. On a scale of 1-10, this area is an 11 for fire danger.
Here are the two original images. The texture is from the door of a burned car.
Thanks for showing the originals, Diane. I'm even more impressed, now, than I was before. The distribution of the orange on the car door fits so nicely with the landscape -- just like they were designed to go together.
Thanks again! I'm constantly amazed by the serendipity of these overlays. I did a little enlarging and distorting of the texture layer from the original, but not a lot.
I make a game of almost always using textures from the same shoot or from a close vicinity. It always seems to have some good karma. And it saves trying to dig back through hundreds of older textures to try to find the best one...
So vividly portrayed with this blend of images! I, too, went through this harrowing experience with a huge fire in Colorado a few years ago. I was evacuated for 2 weeks and didn't know from day to day the condition of my house. Mine was spared, but many, many neighbors lost everything.
It must be a horrible thing to go through. When I shot these trees I was standing in the driveway of what had been a house. There was a huge pile of ash with the remains of a few recognizable items right behind me.
The Valley Fire
