The El Portal Fire burns in Yosemite National Park in summer of 2014. There was a clear view of the blaze across the Yosemite Valley mouth from Tunnel View Road, and in the late evening darkness a thousand embers stared back at me through my camera lens. Peering into a forest ablaze was both sobering to see the power of nature but also beautiful in it's dance. A flicker of light, on and off, as the fire burned, repeated over and over on the hillside.

I was not allowed into the park by fire officials, so it was a challenge to find another vantage point of the fire threatening the Yosemite Valley. Photographing a 4 minute exposure from 3 miles away, I used a long telephoto lens to compress the view and bring the hundreds of burning trees into a single composition. I love both the simplicity and depth of this image, dominated by the orange tones of fire and the silhouettes of trees living and dead.

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