The First Surprises 

The recovery after the burn holds one surprise after another.  The first surprise was how quickly the thistles started growing back.  They didn’t even wait for rain.  It only took a few weeks and they were sprouting.

 The second surprise was how quickly the grasses came up with just a couple of inches of rain.  And they’ve been nurtured with additional rain and are growing rapidly and spreading.

With the grasses growing the color combination of the hills was rapidly becoming green and black, not a combination of colors that I found particularly appealing.  The colors looked harsh.  I longed for the more familiar greens and browns typical of Southern California hillsides in spring (at least when we’re not in the midst of a drought year).

Well, as they say, be careful of what you wish (or long) for.  You just might get it.

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Last night marked two months since the fire came through our ‘back yard.’  Since then we’ve had about four inches of rain.  In fact, there was more rain in one storm than all of last year.  As a result the scorched hills are starting to turn green.  We’ve seen crop duster planes flying over the foothills and mountains seeding the slopes to help control erosion.

Last night’s sunset was spectacular!

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Boy, it worked out just fine, the Christmas cards I mean.  I got the card stock from Red River Paper and worked through the issues of my printer recognizing the odd paper size - 7X10.  And got the right ICC profile for the paper.  We ended up selecting their premium matte paper.  It is two-sided so I can print both the outside and inside.  Here’s how it turned out.

Well, as anticipated, I didn’t particularly like the print from last night.  I seem to be having a problem with creating images that are way too cool in the shadows.  So, how best to warm up the shadows?

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What I’d like to do is keep a journal of the steps I go through and the decisions I make when creating the Zion Canyon print.  It was shot on 11/24/2007 near the Great White Thrown turnout.  I was there the day before closer to sunset and realized this shot needed to be taken about an hour earlier.  So I came back at 4:15 the following day.  The shot required both stitching (vertical panorama shots) and HDR (three exposures bracketed at +/- 1 stop) for a total of six shots.

The image was shot down by the Virgin River although it’s not in the picture.  The foreground is a meadow in the shade with two cottonwood trees.  The middle ground is a Navajo sandstone cliff jutting in from the right, also in the shade.  The background is a tall cliff, also Navajo sandstone, that is still catching some sunlight.  The sky is cloudless and blue.

Here then are the steps I’m going through to take these six shots from RAW to a finished print.  It will probably not be completed today.  Sorry I can’t show the before and after of each step.  That would be interesting.

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There are several miracles related to the fire.  One is an apple tree at the stables.  It’s about five feet tall, just a small thing.  But it produces tiny apples every season.  Rumor has it that it was planted by a grieved person who lost a beloved horse.  What better gesture than to plant an apple tree.

So we all had a big question in our minds after the fire, “What happened to the apple tree?  Was it destroyed?”

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The idea of creating note cards is taking shape.  Tonight I printed a series of Christmas cards on sampler set from Red River Paper in Dallas, TX.  For a first cut, they turned out very well – after I figured out how to get my Epson 4800 to accept such small paper (7×10).  That only took about an hour of fumbling and stumbling around.

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The fire really changed an important part of our life in an unexpected way.  We were leasing a horse at the stables not far from our house.  When the fire roared through Monday night it continued on and burned through the stables.  The big wooden barn burned to the ground. 

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The rain this weekend wasn’t as bad as expected.  It was cold by Southern California standards.  But that doesn’t affect runoff.  We were treated to snow and ice atop Santiago Peak (over 5000 ft).  All the radio towers up there glistened in a sheath of ice.  Modjeska Canyon was under mandatory evacuation again due to the fear of mudslides.  But rumor has it that only 30% of the people actually evacuated.  When it was all said and done, there wasn’t much mud on roads this time.  There are signs of minor erosion in the hills behind our house but no gaping chasms.

The 2007 Santiago Fire was about seven weeks ago now.  The fire left the hillsides behind our house bare and covered with ash.  There were two kinds of ash.  There was the black ash that pretty much covered everything.  Then there were patches of white ash where a larger shrub or small tree had once stood.

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