Whether you live in the western US, all the way across the country or even overseas, surely you’re aware of the record number of devastating fires now occurring on the Left Coast. The smoke is drifting everywhere, and you can probably see it right now!
Here in SoCal, the past month has been pretty eventful, with fire season starting a bit early. Since I’ve been working from home for several months, my view of the world for days at a time is reduced to what I can see out of the west-facing windows. And there has been plenty to see lately.
For these particular type of shots I tend to grab an older Nikon Coolpix L810 non-DSLR camera (mainly because of its extreme 26X zoom range, the results of which you will soon see).
Here’s a view from the living room window in mid-August when this all began:
Fast forward a month later to early and mid-September, and raging conflagrations along with actual or threatened power outages were everyday life all along the West Coast. Residents and visitors in the US and Canada endured endless active fires and record-poor air quality. The greater LA area is shown several days ago in this air quality map (lower numbers are better, and none are to be seen here!):
On the ground, this fire and resulting acrid smoke translated into some eerie apocalyptic views, even if no flames were visible from my own location (but were near enough):
The light-reducing smoke and haze enabled me to safely get an extreme close-up of the setting sun as it struggled on its way to the horizon:
For some days later, this same type of view repeated itself (when the sun was even visible; sometimes it got swallowed up in the gray mud after making only a fleeting appearance):
An alterate frame from the same sunset, with some perfect clouds appearing in front of the sun just in time:
When I take these type of shots (handheld with the non-DSLR Nikon in low light at extreme zoom ranges through double-paned glass!), the results often need a bit of help in post. Here is a 100% crop of the shot above, before and after treatment with Topaz Sharpen AI (which both denoised the sky and enhanced other details):
I’ll leave you with a couple more parting images captured during this trying time (which, as I write, has greatly improved back into mostly blue skies with normal clouds – at least for now!).
First, the Sad Sun struggling yet again to set, and an earlier September view of the new Great Smokey Mountains of the West, this time captured with an iPhone:
