wildfire

When photographer Jim Stimson and I started our Winter in the Eastern Sierra photography workshop at Mountain Light Gallery we knew the drought conditions would provide a challenge for us to come up with “wintery” scenes for our clients.

A major storm was rolling in and much of California was under flash flood watches. We were under a high wind advisory with rain and snow to follow. A power transmitter was blown down in the strong erratic winds and soon a wildfire was raging out of control.

This last weekend, photographer Josh Newton created some of the most memorable wedding photos we have ever seen. Set against the backdrop of a raging wildfire, Newton's dramatic, striking photographs of April Hartley and Michael Wolber's outdoor wedding are sweeping across the Internet today at an unbelievable clip.

When it comes to natural disasters like hurricanes or wildfires, not even standard aerial photography can really cut it. To capture something that occurs on such a massive scale, you need a massive view, and so these disasters are often best visualized by NASA's satellites.

Cool use of social media in the US to crowdsource imagery and monitor recovery from fire #morganfire02 pic.twitter.com/Zy952bzz9k

— Shiny Red (@Shiny_Red) May 20, 2014

Hashtags are nothing more than a novelty byproduct of the 21st century, right? Wrong. At least that's the case in the minds of the scientists behind a new project that takes advantage of photography, hashtags and social media to help crowdsource a time-lapse documentation of fire damage recovery.

Over the course of 2013, the beautiful state of Colorado has been ravaged by many fires and, most recently, devastating flooding as well. When it comes to capturing this kind of mass-scale destruction in photographs, the best option is to take to the skies, which is exactly what aerial photographer and Colorado resident John Wark has been doing.

As wildfires and flooding took their turns on the Colorado landscape, Wark captured it all from his Husky A1, compiling all of the photos into two series titled Colorado Flood of 2013 and Colorado Wildfires.

After scorching over 18,000 acres and burning down 346 homes, the Waldo Canyon fire near and around Colorado Springs, CO has left scars that are both literal and metaphorical in nature. And while it would be impossible to capture an image of the metaphorical scarring left by the most destructive fire in Colorado history, NASA's Terra Satellite was able to get this false color image (which includes both visible and infrared light) showing the very literal scar the fire left in its wake.