Source: KXAN News; Photo’ Kerri West“
Please pray for those in the Bastrop area that have been affected by wild fires. It has burned more than 44,000 and destroyed more than 600 homes.
Many parts of Texas have not received significant rainfall in over a year. This has been a very bad year for wild fires in Texas.
The Dee Zone 
Rameriz takes credit for a photo he took from Kerri West
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Thank you for the heads up. See editor’s note in the caption.
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I am the photographer of this image, and I am currently having to do damage control for Ray Ramirez stealing my image and claiming it as his own. KXAN has corrected it already as you can see here: http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/local/monstrous-smoke-dwarfs-water-tower
The original set of photos that it belongs to was posted by susie. Thank you so much susie, whoever you are! This is a bit of a fiasco.
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I will make the change now. I was hoping you would claim the image.
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Oh, that is an amazing shot.
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Great, thanks!
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Took a bit of doing to get the link to work. WP changed how the photo caption tags work.
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Thanks again! Yes, WP is tricky. I have the ProPhoto plugin for my website (not launched yet) and it’s kinda confusing in itself.
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Check out today’s post if you have anything to add. Who is Rameriz & how did he get your photo?
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Will do. He’s a random volunteer fireman at Elgin VFD(fairly close to Bastrop if you’re not familiar with the area, but slightly closer to Austin really.) He just lifted it off Facebook from what I can tell by the quality. It has gone viral on there partly due to that perhaps – the most frequently circulated image on both Facebook and the rest of the net has had my watermark manually cropped out. (I can see objects in the image that are gone)
He got pretty angry when I caught him, and decided to post some harassment on my Flickr page as well, claiming to be another person from Elgin. He assumed I was a photojournalist from somewhere else, profiting from the disaster… in reality I’m a local that grew up in the Bastrop area, I am not selling the image, and I was just going out there to make sure my parents’ house was ok! Grabbing my camera was an afterthought for ‘just in case’ I saw something spectacular. Even when I took the photo, I assumed there would be hundreds like it on the internet – a lot of people were stopping to take photos with all kinds of cameras. (Novice to expert level.)
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I would be glad to swap it out with an unedited image. I vaguely remember where Elign is
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