When a brush fire began raging in the shadow of the Hollywood sign on Friday, hundreds sprang into action with cellphone cameras, camcorders and digital cameras in hand.
One man captured the scene from atop the U.S. Bank building downtown, the tallest tower on the West Coast. Video footage that appeared on YouTube.com was made by people aiming their cameras at the fire with one hand and holding their steering wheels with the other.
A pilot snapped the dramatic column of smoke from his Cessna high above Santa Monica Airport.
Then there was Cheryl Groff.
She and her boyfriend were driving on the Harbor Freeway when they saw the smoke and thought the Hollywood sign was about to catch fire.
Groff turned off the freeway and tried to get closer, switching seats with her boyfriend at a traffic light so she could shoot the fire. Exiting her car in an alley off Western Avenue, she headed north on foot, climbing an outside stairwell of an office building so she could get an unobstructed view of the blaze.
"I thought this was going to be history," said Groff, a 28-year-old Torrance college student.
The Hollywood Hills blaze, though it turned out to be relatively minor, was an event made for this era of digital photography and image-sharing websites such as YouTube and Flickr.
Within hours, more than a thousand images had been posted around the Web, providing seemingly every conceivable vantage point of the smoke and flames.
Part of the reason is the location: A large fire in the heart of the entertainment industry, where "everyone's a photographer and everyone's a filmmaker," said Jeremy Emerman, 19, who took shots of the fire from Mulholland Drive.
But the mass documentation of the fire also speaks to the way technology is changing the way we view events.
"Who knows what our obsession for documenting will accomplish," said Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. "It may turn out to be raw historical material whose value doesn't become apparent until time passes."
The brush fire, which started behind the Oakwood Apartment complex near Universal City on Friday afternoon, charred 160 acres. Two teenage boys from Illinois could face charges. .
Capt. Antoine McKnight of the Los Angeles Fire Department said it was hard not to notice the Hollywood fire, with its spectacular smoke column.
