The other day, on the way to the grocery store, I saw they were burning a field near my house. From the road, the scene looked amazing: apocalyptic, desolate, freaking on FIRE. I wanted to photograph it, immediately, but I was on a grocery mission and didn't have the camera. I hurried through the store and headed home to see if I could squeeze a shot or two in. It was just about to get dark, so like a good husband I left my wife to put away the groceries and drove back with my camera. The field was off the road a few hundred yards, and there didn't appear to be any access or parking except right through several people's property. The darkness was falling fast, and I figured it would take too long to go to someone's door and ask permission to park and walk through their yard, and my beard isn't exactly conducive to first impressions at dusk, so I decided to head back without a shot...
The next day I could still smell the smoke from my house, and given the size of the piles of wood they had been burning, I figured it was still on. This time, I checked on Google Earth to see where the field was in relation to the woods near my house, and as it turned out, I saw that I could b-line right through the woods to the backend of the field. So I did, around 4pm. I used a hiking GPS unit to mark the exact edge of the field, because the woods back here are thick and run on for hundreds of acres in some directions. You'd think someone bright enough to do that would be bright enough to bring his headlamp too. That's a lesson I've preached on to many people before. After running around this war zone of a clear-cut pine stand for an hour or so, avoiding the detection of a bulldozer through the smoke screens and wood piles, it was dark and I was in the smoke-laden woods with no light. Luckily the GPS showed me exactly where I had walked, so I retraced those steps back through the forest, and only got tangled in barbed wire enough to fall over once.
This is the last one I got before I headed back into the woods. Looks light enough to walk home by, but that's because it's a 20 second exposure, Mr. Smarty Pants.
-llg