Night fire scene photography

Back in the old days … 2001 … I ventured out with my new digital camera and took in a very smokey 3-11 fire at 1974 N. Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago. I was prepared to conquer the world … digital camera in hand (Fujifilm FinePixS1Pro), tripod over my shoulder … I was going to set the world on fire (no pun intended) with the phenomenal new capabilities of digital capture.

Well, I learned a quick lesson. There is no one-step, all-inclusive, automatic method to get great night fire scene photography. It still involves the photographer, and in all but the most perfect of conditions, the human mind to intervene. Here’s what I got …

night fire scene with a Chicago Snorkel at work
A pretty decent image of Squad 2’s Snorkel at work. I had lots of room in the intersect not setup and compose the image … but early digital capture wasn’t designed for low light image capture. Larry Shapiro photo

Here’s the same image after some early attempts at editing with corrections for color and noise. A bit overdone ….

Chicago FD Snorkel Squad 2
Image created with a Fujifilm FinePixS1Pro camera after color corrections and noise reduction. Larry Shapiro photo