The Scene of the Fire

Darlene and I drove over to where she grew up since she was doing some research for a piece she is writing. We hiked up into the hills a ways above her old house, not too far, just enough to get sweaty a bit. On the way back, I noticed that a fire had burnt through a field near where we parked. The stark line between life and death, burnt and unburnt patches of grass and limbs of tress and the starkness of the landscape sparked my imagination.

 

An amazing similarity between researching a story and framing a photograph occurs to me. When I shot the burnt tree in foreground and the pine tree off to the right, part of the story is the charred ground and part of the story is the far off hills, but the main character is the tree that has survived the recent fire.

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