WWII-era fire apparatus, Australia (image by Kristarella)

WWII-era ladder truck. Image by Kristarella/Kristarella.com

We’ve got a few reasons for publishing this image: Kristarella, an outstanding web designer and software developer, is also a fabulous photographer, and we encourage you to check out her Photoblog for page after  page of images which will capture your curiousity, imagination and awe. But that’s not, strictly speaking, on-topic.  These reasons are:

  1. We’re about to run a series of posts about firefighting apparatus – which is to say vehicles, mobile firefighting equipment, as opposed to infrastructure (fire water mains, sprinklers, hand-held gear and, as important as the rest, prevention), and thought this mid-20th century piece would be a good reference point;
  2. Note the following screenshot: Kristarella is a leader in managing the metadata – EXIF   (Exchangeable image file format, Wikipedia entry; see alsoEXIF.org) which accompanies digital images. We hope to explore the ways in which EXIF data and images might be used to crowd source risk assessment, disaster planning, and disaster response. So we’ll be exploring Kristarella’s Thesography Plugin, and more tools that will exploit EXIF and other usable meta-data.