I think most people who know me have seen this shot. I spent some time reworking it, however, and it seemed like a natural for a blog entry. On June 4, 2008, lightning sparked a fire at the Magellan fuel depot in Kansas City, Kansas. My wife called me upstairs when she saw the story on the news. I grabbed my camera gear and ran out the door, knowing this was a huge event. I believe this tank held about 1million gallons of petroleum. The fire was so large that the fire department could not put it out and decided to just let it burn out. This took about 18 hours before all the fuel burned.
The fire was sparked late in the afternoon, and by the time I headed out it was starting to get dark. As I headed toward the fire, I could see lightning in the sky, and I knew I wanted to get a shot that captured both the fire and a lightning strike in the same frame. I headed to some bluffs where 169 Highway intersected with 9 Highway. This location had an elevated view where I could very clearly see the fire across the river. Lightning storms were continuing to roll through about 10 miles to the South, but I was very fortunate not to have any serious weather where I was shooting from. I set up my tripod and took several test shots to figure out which settings would work best. I finally settled on 3.2 second exposures at ISO 200 and around f/11. I took over 400 exposures and captured several lighting strikes, but this was the best one.
I submitted this photograph to several local news stations who put it on their website. I also submitted this to CNN and they also put it on their website. This was very exciting for me because of the number of people their website reaches. You can see my photographs on CNN's website at http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/weather/06/04/tanker.fire.irpt/index.html.
If you go look, you will see that this version is very different. I cleaned up some dust spots and adjusted the color balance to tone down the red and make the lightning more natural looking.
This is also the first photograph that people have approached me about purchasing. Several people have said they wanted to turn this into a wall size poster or framed photograph. I am toying with the idea of making a limited edition print of say 100 copies (including certificates of authenticity) and selling them. The question is how to market them.
To the best of my knowledge, no one was killed or injured. While the event was a disaster in terms of financial loss to the folks at Magellan, I was very glad to have the opportunity to document it in pictures.
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