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Local Landmark Shipwreck in California Burnt Out for Instagram Photo

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Perched on a sand bank in Tomales Bay, CA, the ship nicknamed the “S.S. Point Reyes” has sat for a great number of years, left to rot and decay naturally.  The exact number of years it’s been there is something of a local secret, adding to the mystery of the wreck, which has been a significant local tourist attraction.

Sitting in the bay, and not the Pacific Ocean is the reason why the wreck has remained around for so long, and has been of great interest to photographers visiting the area, which has a long history of shipwrecks.

On Sunday night, it became of particular interest to one unnamed Instagram user who thought it’d be a great idea to start spinning red hot wire wool behind the boat for a photo.  As one might expect, this caused a fire which went on to consume about half of the wreck, and was still being battled by local fire fighters into Monday morning.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

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Using Color Balance to turn Dust And Particles into Fire, Ice And Magic

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Time to dust up on your Color Balance Adjustment Layer. Here’s a quick Photoshop trick that will add some more magic (or magical fire and ice) to your composites.

This technique works wonders using dust particles shot against a back background. You can shoot this yourself or use a pre-made dust resource if you don’t have the energies to vacuum all the mess such a shoot creates.

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Was This The Most Inappropriate Selfie of 2015?

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As millions of people around the world were gathering to watch the New Year’s Eve fireworks extravaganzas, a fire broke out in a Dubai skyscraper near the iconic Burj Khalifa – the world’s tallest structure and the highlight of the city’s upcoming fireworks display.

As the fire spread so did the photos and videos spectators posted online, but one couple decided to take it a step further and took a selfie with the burning building in the background.

While most viewers spoke out against the couple and some gave them the benefit of the doubt that perhaps they don’t know the difference between a burning skyscraper and a massive fireworks display, the online community did not appreciate the smiling selfie.

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How To Shoot The Dark Phoenix (And Hack A Broncolor Movel In The Process)

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French photographer Frederic Amadu recently shot a series starring Marvel Universe’s Dark Phoenix (oh, make a movie already!!). The Dark Phoenix ( or Jean Grey) has elemental control over fire. So fire was a main part of the shoot. Easier said than done. Frederic had to hack A Broncolor MoveL unit twice. A Different hack for each shot.

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Photoshop Power Tip – Using Screen Blending To Spice Up A Portrait

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Here’s a quick, yet powerful, tip on how to move a portrait from great to awesome fairly quickly. While this method is quick the results can be very impressive if done right. You would need a fire on black pattern like the Fire Pack from the texture store (either the commercial package, or the CC-BY license, but then you have to link every image to the store) , a copy of photoshop and of course, a portrait, preferably on black.

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Drones Under Fire: Officials Offer $75,000 Reward Leading To Pilots Who Flew Over Wildfire

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If your motto is, “Have drone, will fly over wildfires,” you could find yourself in some hot water.  Earlier this month, we reported how private drones were delaying firefighting efforts in California’s San Bernardino County.  Now, the heads of those drone pilots could be on the proverbial chopping block.

Obviously, people weren’t happy.  Officials, who credit the drones with grounding firefighting aircraft and allowing the fires to spread, are offering a $75,000 reward for information leading to the pilots of the drones.  But, it doesn’t stop there.

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Private Drones Delay Firefighters From Deploying Helicopters To Save Burning People

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There is no doubt that drones have brought some otherwise inaccessible news, but with that aerial access comes the dangers of uncontrolled airspace.

Southern California is suffering from a pretty wide fire and airplanes and Helicopters have been deployed to fight the fire. Specifically, some of the worst incidents are happening around Cajon Pass where a house and several cars were burnt.

After being deployed the aircrafts were forced to land after 5 drones were sighted.

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Fire Wings Light Painting Captured on Smartphone

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Smartphones are not naturally meant for light painting. Mostly because they (mostly) have small sensors that do not handle long exposures well, and accumulate noise like a TV set on a dead channel.

The engineering team at Huawei came up with a clever concept to overcome that limitation and they handle light painting in a very similar way to how astro-photographers capture the night skies, by stacking many images together. But where sky photographers stack many 30 seconds shots to create several hours’ worth of exposure, the Huawei P8 does it on a seconds scale.

To demonstrate the concept, Huawei commissioned photographer Benjamin Von Wong (previously) to shoot a light painted angle with fire wings.

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Freebies: Get 866MB Hi-Res Images Of Fire And Sparkles For Hot Editing

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Sometimes, when sorting out old crap on your hard drives, you can find a little treasure. You might remember that fireproof housing for my D800. We tested a lot on this day and some of the shots were really cool.

I’ve converted all the files to JPG without cropping them. So these files are quite high resolution and the package is over 800MB to download.

It’s all stuff from little fire, larger fire and sparkles up to “inferno”.

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