Most of us look forward to a little R&R at quittin’ time on a Friday afternoon. But what do you do when you have a camera, an itchy shutter-finger and a massive chemical fire raging across town?
In November of last year I (Advocate photographer Danny Fulgencio) was in this exact situation when an armada of emergency response teams shot toward the Nexeo Solutions facility in Garland to deal with an industrial explosion. I opted to head toward the fire but was woefully delayed in leaving the office. With the sun dropping, I found myself grumbling through gnarly rush hour traffic, shooting from my car with an 80-200mm lens.
Even a mile from the fire, the air was heavy with acrid methanol fumes. I figured I had little chance of getting close to the fire since authorities had cordoned off several blocks for fear of secondary explosions. I dreaded having been too tardy to produce even a decent shot, annoyed with Robert Capa’s timeless advice: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
And then I saw the carnival.
Why not break a few rules? Don’t try to show firefighters battling the blaze. Don’t try to show throngs of onlookers. Instead, exercise artistic freedom by exploring mostly unpopulated space teeming with geometry, light and an ominous, distant plume of disaster. Yeah, that’s it, marry notions of entertainment with catastrophe. Or at least that’s how I justified parking, switching to a 20mm lens and photographing the backside of a carnival with a ride in the foreground serendipitously named “Fire Ball.”
After making a few frames I hopped into the car and managed to get within a quarter mile of the fire. But by then, with a waxing crescent moon overhead, the fire was mostly tamed and the golden hour was all but over. I shot with a 50mm for a few minutes before packing up to coast into glacial traffic, a CF card burning a hole in my pocket.
