Smoke
In the early morning hours of August 19th (2020, of course), a fire broke out at a plastics plant about 20 miles from my home. A friend of mine had posted to her instagram story about the smoke as she walked into work. In her video it looked like the output from hell’s own smokestack. So, I took off from my backyard to see what I could see.
These were made around 8:30AM, the fire had been burning for 8-9 hours at this point. It would go on to burn for around 20 hours in total. (There are some pretty cool photos and videos in that article from the DMN which you should also check out.)
This first image is from about 90 feet at the widest possible focal length on that drone. The smoke stretched west all the way past downtown Fort Worth, further than I could get in frame.
These images are from about 390 feet, as wide and as tight as I could get on that drone. That dome you see near the fire itself is the stadium where the Cowboys play.
I put a few images on twitter and got back to work.
Twitter’s search meant that it got a lot more attention than anything I have ever put up before.
My wife (who is a huge weather nerd) tweeted it along with a question at a weatherman for the local ABC affiliate and he used it to explain a concept called the “cap".
Then they used one of the photos in the 5PM news, which was pretty fucking cool for me.
I mostly look down when I’m flying a drone. Also, I don’t have a set of ND filters for this particular system so I am not completely happy with these.
