This past October, Southern California experienced a slew of wildfires that tore through most of San Diego County. On the first night of the fires, we were pretty sure that our house was far from danger. With the exception of extremely strong winds and a couple of power outages, the night was mostly uneventful. Halfway through the next day, however, the fires started coming close to where we live. The air got thicker, and ash began to fall. To be entirely honest, I love it when this happens. It actually brings some excitement to the somewhat dull mega-sprawl existence. By nightfall, we were evacuated to a relative’s house near Mount Helix, east of downtown San Diego.
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to spend a few days in Washington D.C. Loaded with all my camera gear (which fortunately also included a new Tamrac case), I took to the city. Aside from a protest I got the chance to cover (I’ll save that for a later post), it was a pretty uneventful trip. I found that, at times, the most interesting things to photograph were the people in the city. Millions of tourists had already taken billions of photographs of the city’s famous landmarks. Why did I need to add to the stockpile?