Ambient

I shot a raccoon this morning. First thing. No coffee, no breakfast, no second cup of coffee. Composted it after attending to my needs.

Aside from that, I’ve been trying to make something of the photos I took today, one burned field holding some potential, but the end product lacked. The color was off, the sun was wrong, and the sky is full of smoke.

There is a large wildfire on the other side of the Cascades, a good sixty miles from us, but we might as well be in Los Angeles with the haze that surrounds us. And it only got worse.

I had to go into Salem for a couple hours, and by the time I was heading back east, the grass seed field fires had started. I wasn’t sure at first, for from fifteen miles away, all I could see were white clouds poking above the haze. They could have been large cumulus clouds on the other side of the mountains as there was a forecast of thunderstorms over there this afternoon. Yet, as I neared home, I began to see the plumes, four or five to the north and to the south. By the time I arrived home, visibility was down to 1/2 mile or so. The air smelled of smoke. I kept the house closed up.