Washington Fires (1st Creek)

Never really shot these types of photo's before. Not sure the best way to position myself. (That and it's really important to stay out of the way--- Land and Lake)...

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nice shots.

the first with more dramatic lighting is pretty cool.

the second two are okay, but i imagine the smoke has blocked the sun and made the light pretty flat.

last is great but i think your processing has made the black parts grey. With some practice you can bring up the middle tones while keeping the black areas true black.

WOW!! How cool is this - someone else here on POTN is photographing these fires!

I am right up in Omak, and have been photographing the Okanogan Complex.......which I think they have now merged with your Chelan complex (from a management standpoint).

I can attest to the fact that shooting wildfires is extremely tough. EXTREMELY tough!

You have road closures and area closures keeping you out of all the best vantage points.

You have smoke - often heavy smoke - obscuring the light and obscuring the view of your subject.

You usually have such low levels of light to work with, and yet flames dance and shift so quickly that you need fast shutter speeds to capture them accurately. A slow shutter speed pic of a flame and the flame will look fake and "plastickey".

OK - you're looking for critique......

#1: Pretty well composed as it is. But perhaps you could have gotten another, different image of this scene by zooming in closer and turning the camera horizontal, and waiting 'till the chopper cleared the evergreens in the foreground. This would showcase the cottages on the far shore, and also result in the chopper being bigger in the frame. Who knows - maybe you did get an image like that!

#2: Was this the most interesting moment during the helicopter's route? I can't help but to think that maybe if you had shot the heck out of that route at 6fps, you may have been able to get the chopper as it was just emerging from the smoke, or maybe as it was dumping the water on the fire. Timing is so important when photographing this stuff, as one moment may result in such a more dramatic photo than photos taken at any other moment.

#3: Some of he scene is in shadow, some of the scene is in light. You shot the chopper when it was in the shadow. I think if you had waited until the light was on the chopper it would have resulted in a better photo, because then your primary subject would have light on it. Additionally, photos are normally more effective if the subject is coming at you, rather than going away. It helps when shooting this stuff to try to get a feel for the repetitive routes that the helicopters are making, and then look to see how you can position yourself to get images when the chopper is facing you. The fact that they fly the same route over and over and over again makes this possible.

#4: I really, really like this image! The way the pine trees are silhouetted at the bottom of the frame is really well done; what a visually pleasing composition! A couple of small improvements could be made via editing:
You could increase the contrast, so that the blacks are darker (as L.H. Brisket mentioned).
You could remove the wake that is to the left of the centermost pine tree, as well as removing the lights that are visible thru the top of the tree's foliage. I suggest this because the wake - and it's source - practically disappear behind the top of the tree. If the image had been taken several seconds sooner, or several seconds later, then the wake and it's source would have added to the composition and increased the overall interest in the image. But having that wake draw your eye to the tree top, and then not seeing it protrude out the other side, is a little disconcerting.

Good stuff.
Stay safe out there.

So sad to see the devastation....

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