I'm in the San Fernando Valley, a large suburb of Los Angeles, visiting family for the holiday, and driving around here brings to mind the main reason I left 20 years ago. In October, 2003, after many months of drought and high temperatures, fires raged over many parts of Southern California including where I lived. The Porter Ranch fire came within a quarter mile of my house. The photograph I've uploaded here was taken from my driveway with the equivalent of a 135mm lens on a full frame digital camera (I used a medium format film camera, the Mamiya RZ 67, with a 250mm lens). I call picture this the mushroom cloud from hell. Shortly after I took this, and just before people starting evacuating, the winds changed and push the flames back away from our homes. Six months later, I'd sold the house and moved to Tennessee. The settings were unrecorded, but my educated guess is they were probably 1/125, f/4.5, and 100 ISO.
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