As you may have heard, for the last few days large fires have been burning in the Santa Cruz mountains overlooking Adobe HQ. Quite a few of our colleagues live in or over the hills, but fortunately no one on the Photoshop team has (as far as I know) had to evacuate. Bryan Hughes didn’t sleep well on Thursday night, I know, with the fire half a mile from his house (shoes on, cats in hand).
I mention it because on my way to an air show yesterday, I snaked through the mountains via some back roads and was surprised to see a very large and imposing Chinook helicopter barreling towards our car, on its way to reload water from the pond right behind me. I pulled over and popped off a few frames that may be of interest to other aviation nerds. Included in the set is the swift, violent, helicopter-borne death of a white Jeep Cherokee. (Yeah, it blowed up real goood!) Plumes of smoke from the mountains are visible in a few of the shots.
As for other fire-related photography, I honestly can’t compete with things like this.
I missed something… why was the Jeep dropped?
[“Because it was there.” 🙂 The gag was that it was parked in a fire lane, and the PA had paged the crowd beforehand asking that the owner of the Jeep move his or her vehicle. –J.]
And boy, that’s a skinny helicopter!
D.
[Indeed; check it out. –J.]
I’m surprised that so little a helicopter can lift so heavy a Jeep. Pure entertainment. At this point in my work day I needed to see something expensive destroyed. Thank you.
wow.. it’s pretty hard to tell the size of the k-max in those pictures. It’s a lot bigger than it looks 😛
Very nice pix, John! But I wanted to let you know that, in your slideshow, every time the “loading” widget did its thing, it was surrounded by a tiny flock of white pixel-y artifacts. Maybe it’s ’cause I’m using the public beta of the Flash 10 Player.
Anyway, other geek data: Dual 2-GHz G5, Mac OS X 10.4.11, Safari 3.1.
Victor
Chris Figenshau has the best wildfire portfolio you will likily ever see:
http://www.figenshau.com/fire/source/01_flamingtree.html
Your blog is my first stop for PS and graphics clicks. Now I find out you are an aviation nerd. It doesn’t get any better.
I’m a pilot in a flying club with a bunch of folks. We own three airplanes. A few years back, one of our members put in an enormous number of hours keeping the planes maintained. To show our appreciation, the rest of us decided to give him a framed picture of our three airplanes. We really wanted to have them flying in formation.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough experienced formation flyers to (safely) fly a real formation. I volunteered to get the three aircraft close to each other using PS.
I was only six months into my transition from Elements to the “Real thing.” I was flattered, therefore, when one of our guys who did not know the image was out of PS, took a look at the result and criticized us for having the aircraft too close during the flight.