photos

You may have noticed that I posted a link to some photos that I've put on Flikr. Some are mine, others are courtesy of someone else. If you want to see good photos, visit my brother's site or Paul Lantz's site. My site has some of their shots as well, used by permission.

I'm not much of a photographer. I just kind of point the camera in the general direction and push the button. When I was in Japan I used a very cheap Hanmex camera. I once made the mistake of telling someone that photography was my "hobby." "Really?" he says. "It's my hobby too! I have . . . " and he starts listing off his arsenal of fancy equipment, lenses, filters . . . When he finally took a breath I mumbled something like, "I guess the word hobby was a bit too strong . . . I just like taking pictures."

I would like to post more pictures of calls we've been to, but there are privacy and liability issues to contend with. It seems that someone might use a microscope to examine the photo of a train wreck and see some personal information. Then they'll say, "Hey, that's my train wreck. And I'm going to sue you and all of your nosy, Peeping Tom viewers for invading my privacy . . ." My point of view is that the train wreck (or car crash, or fire) happened very publicly, so what's the big deal? But no one listens to me. I guess one option would be to post a disclaimer saying "to proceed to this photo page you must attest that you will not look too closely at the photographs so that no personal information will be identified. If you agree to these terms, click 'Yes.'" Of course everyone always clicks yes, and no one reads the disclaimer.

So the real fire pictures are going to be few and far between. Not that training fires aren't real . . . and I do have a few of those. Photos from emergency scenes often tend to be lame anyway. Usually when the action is really good, no one is thinking, "Wow, what an awesome photo that would make!" Or if they are, their hands are too full of hoses, axes and ladders to do anything about it. So you'll have to be content looking at what I have to offer, or go to someone else's photo site, which isn't a bad idea actually. There are some pretty cool fire pics out there. Click here to go to my site, then click the arrow next to the search button and select "everyone's photos." Type "fire" into the search box and you'll get lots of nice shots taken by folks that actually know how to use a camera.