The Fireline at Night

Over the years I've gotten the opportunity to work some late night shifts, and even some overnight shifts on the fireline. These are some of my favorite times to fight fire. The temperatures are lower and humidities are higher, making it much more pleasant to be working. Often the work you are doing isn't as run-and-gun as it is during the day, and you are afforded some time to step back and enjoy the show (and possibly snap some photos). I find the way a fire looks as it is burning up a hillside at night very amazing and awe inspiring. The first time I got to experience a wildfire burning at night was the 4th of July, 2006 and I remember thinking to myself, that it resembed a slow motion fireworks show that lasted for hours and hours. Since then I've worked many more night shifts. The pictures here are a collection of the best views I've had while working on a fire at night. I took the above photo one night on a fire on the Lassen National Forest in northern California. I was the lead burner during this burnout operation, which means I was the most interior person (highest up the hillside) igniting this fire. Firefighters use burnout operations to reduce the fuels between the constructed fireline and the approaching main fire. This particular burnout picked up some steam right as night was falling and as we backed off to let it do its thing, I was afforded the opportunity to snap this interesting photo.

Burnout, Lassen National Forest, California

Watching a Burnout, Lassen National Forest, California

Ponderosa Pine at night, Lassen National Forest, California

Warming fire at night, Prescott National Forest, Arizona

Burnout outside of Castle Rock, Colorado

Street Graffiti

Often as I travel, I notice the colorful graffiti that blankets the walls of city buildings and sometimes even historic structures. I've seen some really intricate and creative graffiti in the strangest of places, sometimes right on a huge downtown city building in full view of any passing police officer or security personnel. Occasionally historic structures fall prey to graffiti, and these images often draw a pretty interesting contrast, in color as well as texture and setting, as the picture above demonstrates. This is an old church on the south coast of the Black Sea in Turkey, and it's riddled with tags, likely from some nighttime visiting rebellious teenagers throughout the years.

The street art often comes in the form of ultra-creative stencil jobs. I photographed this resident T-Rex in a lesser suburb of Argentina's capital city, Buenos Aires. He certainly speaks english very well for a South American.


We all know that graffiti can sometimes be downright strange and often somewhat disturbing. I photographed this awesome and unique paper posting of a handsome Turkish man in downtown Istanbul.

Graffiti can sometimes evoke emotions in ourselves with just a glance. I loved this cheerful face smiling at me from the side of this sky blue house so much that I just needed to stop and snap a photo of it.

On the contrary, street art can also reveal an inner sadness or some suffering that the artist possibly needed to vent onto the concrete with some paints and a brush. Lost love seems to be a common theme on this old wall running through a forest on the small Island of Buyukada off the coast of Istanbul in the Sea of Marmara

Whirling Dervishes

There really isn't much of a story to this set of photos, however I'll tell it anyway. My friend Garth and I went to visit another very close friend named Tyler who is currently living in Istanbul. We went to visit him for 8 days. We had a great time seeing all the sights that Istanbul, the Bosphorus Straight and the Black Sea had to offer. The whole time we were there I kept mentioning how I really wanted to go see a traditional Whirling Dervish Sema (Worship). Tyler interestingly enough had been living in Turkey for about a year and hadn't attended a performance yet so we decided to go. These photos were taken from this performance, which unfortunately was done as a tourist attraction and not an actual religious ceremony, but I don't think the Dervish religious worship is open to the public, so this is as good as it gets when you're an outsider. In any case, it was quite a performace (the men were all dripping with sweat after the close to 40 minutes of whirling) with very impressive lighting and conveinent black background. I tried a few different exposure settings, and unfortunately some of the photos are a little dark, but keep in mind I was hand holding the camera and none of this was done with a tripod! I think they came out pretty well for some on the fly shooting!

Old Nepali Man Series

I was wandering through an old (what I thought to be abandoned) courtyard near Durbar Square in Kathmandu snapping pictures of ornately carved door frames and pillars, when across the way I spied this amazing old Nepali man. Everything about him screams awesome! He was dressed in fairly traditional clothing, especially his colorful cap, which is worn by just about every Nepali man over the age of 40. I love his cane, and his "Gold Star" brand running shoes, the only Nepali brand of cross trainers in existence. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to take a few photos of him from across the courtyard. He didn't notice me, and luckily I was able to capture him in a few different sitting positions. I feel very lucky to have happened upon this situation on the final day of a 33 day trip, a mere 13 hours before I was headed for the airport to depart for home!

The Faces of Southeast Asia

I captured this Cambodian woman's portrait while traveling to the town of Battambang via boat on the Sangke river. It may look here like the river is very dirty and strewn with trash, but the local fishermen use plastic water bottles as makeshift buoys for their fishing nets.

I took this photo of a Cambodian mother and son on the same boat trip. I really enjoyed the photo shooting angles allowed by our position on the boat. Being so low to the water, and at eye and working level with the local people helped me capture some memorable shots. Using a fast shutter speed helped as well since at times we were zipping by at a fast clip!

I really love this photo and the story behind it: Liz and I were walking down a street in Hoi An, Vietnam when of course, a torrential downpour erupted from the sky. We frantically looked for shelter, and suddenly found ourselves under the tent of a local Bia Hoy (the Vietnamese equivalent of warm home-brewed beer) vendor. I snapped this photo of a school girl laughing on her bike while sipping on a 5¢ glass of warm suds.



















I met this young boy inside the walls of a small monastery in Pakse, Laos. He was the apparent ring leader of a band of 4 boys who spent their afternoon shooting their slingshots at rival gang of similarly aged Lao girls playing across the river. He let me take his portrait only under the conditions that, A) he not smile (to appear tougher) and B) I show the image to him before we bid farewell.













I photographed this Cambodian mother with her two children from the back of a moto-bike cruising the dusty back roads outside the town of Battambang. I passed many friendly locals throughout the day, but no shot came out better than this cute waving family.













Again we find ourselves dust-covered and parched on the outskirts of Battambang, Cambodia. While stopped to admire a very large pig wallowing in the mud, this group of siblings wandered up and eyed my camera. I asked if they would like their picture taken. Answers ranged from excited to wary to uninterested, but in the end they all glimpsed the screen on the back of the camera and trotted away giggling.














This pair of Cambodian schoolgirls were walking through a monastery, and as is typical of curious kiddos their age, shyly began to wander closer and closer to me as I took some photos of the temple. I offered to snap their photo, and they promptly threw their arms over eachother's shoulders to strike a pose. I just love the differences in facial expressions each girl decided to show. Of course they were delighted to see their photo afterward. This was a very memorable capture.

Macchapucchre (Fish Tail Peak)

This incredible mountain is named Macchapucchre, which means "Fish Tail" Peak. Dave and I had been hiking all day long on what was a very foggy day 20 of that 25 day trek. We had just arrived at our destination for the night when the skies began to clear. I looked up, and immediately saw the moon rising over the top of this beautiful peak. What I wish the photo could depict is the immense speed at which the wind was moving the fog out. The fog in this picture was clearing rapidly, but I was happy to have snapped this shot with a little left in the bottom of the frame. I think it adds a little something to the shot.


This second photo is also of Macchapucchre, however it was taken around 5:30 AM the following day. Dave and I rose early so that we could catch the stunning sunrise on our hike up to Annapurna Base Camp. Annapurna is one of the 14 peaks in the world whose elevation rises above 8,000 meters (known as the 8,000m peaks). It is the 8,000m peak with the fewest ascents (meaning the least amount of people have stood on the summit of this peak than any other 8,000m peak, including everest, or K2!). Hiking to the base camp of the majestic Annapurna was one of our ultimate goals for this trip. What I find a funny about this story was that when we actually saw Annapurna (see photo at right), we weren't as impressed with how it looked compared to the awe inspiring beauty of its lesser, almost un-known sister peak, Macchapucchre, a lowly 6997 meters above sea level!

Gangapurna

I snapped this shot on my 2006 trip to Nepal. This mountain is called Gangapurna. This was easily one of the most amazing places that I have ever been to. My friend, Dave DeFranza (the guy in this photo), and I were just about 11 days into a 25 day trek into the backcountry of the Annapurna region when I took this picture. I'm almost embarrased to say that it was taken with a little Sony digital camera. I've since invested in a Nikon D40X 35mm SLR, but in Nepal, that little point and shoot didn't fail me.

Dave's one of my best friends, and I jumped at the opportunity to meet up with him in Kathmandu in November of 2006. Dave had been heading westward from Japan after the end of an english teaching job and we coordinated our meeting date and time. Lucky for me, Dave is a great adventure traveller who can pretty much "make anything happen." As the story goes, he was travelling through Tibet on his way to the Nepali border when he found out that no foreigners were allowed to cross the border checkpoint at all. Dave acted quickly and hastily made friends with a local Buddhist Lama who wanted to practice his english (and who conveniently was also travelling to the border). When it came time to cross the border, the Lama vouched to the military guards that this "white man" was part of his travelling group. Whether or not it was that or the wad of money Dave handed the border guard on his way across, I'll never know, but he did make it to Kathmandu 2 days later to meet my arriving flight.

The Beginning

Hey guys and welcome to my Blog. I'm pretty new at this kinda thing, so bear with me. Sooooo, I decided to start a blog, because, I've heard about them and read them for a while and, well, I think the idea of blogs are neat. They are kind of like a digital diary for the world to read. I don't keep a journal or a diary of my own, I never have. Instead, I have always enjoyed taking pictures of places that I have been to, rather than writing about them and I was never one to write out my thoughts or feelings on a day to day basis. My goal here in this blog is to try and remedy that, and to attempt to show the world what life is like through the eyes of a grad student/wildland firefighter with a passion for travel and photography.

I'm a very (read: very) amateur photographer, and I love taking pictures. Most of my photos are from my travels, and some of them are from my job as a firefighter. one of the things I intend to do in this blog to tell the story behind some of, what I consider to be, my better photographs. All too often I find myself looking at a photograph and wondering what the back story was. A lot of people now-a-days post pictures to their facebook or flickr accounts, but those sites don't really allow for you to find out much about the picture other than the location it was taken. I like to hear about the trials and tribulations the photog might have gone through to squeeze off that cool looking shot, or what is is like in that part of the world and maybe you do to! I will be posting some of my more memorable pictures throughout this blog with all the behind the scenes info. Other than that this blog will be about anything and everything I find interesting about life, and my journey through it.