Burnt Grass

[Delta Blue]

I am kind of in limbo right now waiting for my permanent FAA certificate card to arrive, for the beautiful spring growth to come out, and to find some neat places to do some flying/shooting at. But I wanted to share a shot I did happen to recently capture that is a bit interesting, or at least it was to myself, because I had never seen the likes before from above. My nephew has a huge back yard and got tired of mowing the whole thing so last summer he let parts of it grow fully. About a month ago when it was still cold out and the long grass was totally dried out, he set fire to it and burned it all down. It would burn nicely until it reached the edge of the shorter grass where he had kept it mowed. You can see the green paths of short grass that did not burn where he mowed. The black areas are the burned up long grasses. I got there just a couple days after to record it.

 

[WildDoktor]

Nice! Amazing that it didn't burn the trees, or jump over the mowed paths.

What camera settings did you use? The picture is a bit blurry. I haven't been too impressed with the "still" shots from this camera yet, but it's probably (hopefully!) because I haven't figured out the best settings yet.

 

[Delta Blue]

Hi, WildDoktor. This is actually one frame from a video, and I did a little digital processing with software to intensify the colors a bit, resulting in some blurry effects. The original was very boring as far as color. I have found that I like using my video editor program and then I can pause on any frame and save it as a separate image to mess with. I have taken some still photos with the X-Star but I favor using the video camera more. I do want to experiment with using long shutter speeds sometime with the still camera though.

The grass was weird. It was cold so the grass only burned if there was enough wind to blow through it supplying enough oxygen. When I was there he had a little patch left to burn and the wind was light making flying favorable but he had to use his leaf blower on the patch to get it to burn with the added oxygen. As soon as the fire got to the edge of the tall grass it had nowhere to burn and went out.