Time-lapse video shows Yosemite's Rim Fire burning through forests

Flickr photographer Jeff Sullivan created this time-lapse video from footage he captured near the Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park prior to dawn on Aug. 28, hours before a section of Tioga Road CA-120 closed.

He writes on his Flickr page: "I had been thinking of heading to Yosemite to shoot the Rim Fire for a few days, but on the 11 o'clock news Tuesday night, I heard that Tioga Road CA-120 with the best access would close at noon the next day! So I immediately packed up, headed out, and started shooting the Rim Fire a little after 3 a.m. I shot until morning twilight, caught [the] sunrise at Tenaya Lake, then returned home." Sullivan was about three miles from the fire.

For those interested in production elements, here's how Sullivan describes it: "I drove at night to reach the fire before the road closed at noon. Arriving around 3 a.m., I visited over the next two and a half hours and shot three time-lapse sequences with each camera, for six total. I had two Canon cameras shooting using intervalometer timers. I used a Canon 5D Mark III with a 16-35mm lens and a Canon 5D Mark II, using an 85mm and a 70-200mm lens. Using wide apertures, I was able to bring the exposure time down to five seconds per image, and the next image started one second later. So every six seconds I'd capture a shot, 10 per minute. Those images were converted to video at 24 images per second, so every 2.4 minutes became a second of video. Compressing those 2.4 minutes or 144 seconds into one means the time-lapse video covers the fire 144 times faster than simply watching it."

The project is comprised of six time-lapse clips, set to "The Time To Run" by Dexter Britain.

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