Firestorm

I think of this picture as the 'mushroom cloud from Hell'. I captured this firestorm as it crested the hill above my house in Northridge, California during the huge Porter Ranch fire of 2003. I took the shot from my driveway with the equivalent of a 135mm lens in the full frame digital format. My neighbors and I were just about to evacuate when the wind changed direction and blew the flames away from our subdivision. This was two years before I went digital, and all I could think about -- besides not dying -- was how to put my hundreds of thousands of 35mm and medium format slides in my car before evacuating. Fortunately, it didn't come to that, but I decided then and there to leave California. Within six months, I moved to Tennessee. I used a Mamiya RZ 67, a 250mm lens, and Fujichrome Provia 100 film. My settings were probably 1/125 and f/4.5.