Monthly Archives: July 2011

Not this year!

Two years ago, I made my first trip to Oshkosh for the EAA extravaganza that is Airventure. I have no idea why it took me so long to get there but there’d always been some work related reason why I hadn’t gone. I loved it. So much good stuff to see, plenty of space, even when shared with thousands of your closest friends, and more variety than you can imagine.

Last year it was sacrificed because I had made the quick trip to the UK for RIAT and, as it turns out, I missed the chance to get very wet. This year, timing was again tricky. It coincided with the last week of a consulting contract i have with a client so planning ahead was not easy. By the time it looked like I might be able to go, the chance of finding anywhere to stay within an hour of the event was minimal.

So, I am in Chicago, barely two and a half hours away but I am not going. This is a big disappointment to me but hardly something I can complain about. I have a bunch of friends there, (another reason for my disappointment) so I can hear how it all went but it won’t be first hand knowledge. No looking at unique aircraft, no watching some of them display, no chatting to people sitting under the wing of their pride and joy and no lounging by the lake at the seaplane base enjoying the tranquility that contrasts so much with the rest of Airventure.

Next year maybe. In the mean time, I will have to look back at some shots from two years ago.

The joy of spam

One of the delights of having a blog with comments enabled is spam.  When I first set up the blog, I had an email notification whenever someone posted a message.  This didn’t seem so unreasonable until the blog was found by someone’s spam system.  Suddenly the emails were coming thick and fast.  Needless to say, that notification was soon switched off.

I now get two types of spam.  The smaller quantities are scattered around any type of post and they are of the sort that says they are interested in my opinion and are looking forward to what I write next.  They also happen to be a link to some crummy site or other.  It will be interesting to see if I get one of those for this post.

The more common type is a massive amount of text with keywords for whatever people must search for on a regular basis.  Lots of film titles for download show up along with some rather bizarre pseudo short stories.  The easy thing about this is that they are all posted on the same comment thread.  This is actually associated with the picture of me from the bio page.  No idea how they even found a way to comment on that but they did.  Of course, this makes spotting them as spam unbelievably easy.  Thanks guys!

Of course, getting lots of spam has one downside.  I am enthusiastic about deleting them.  Spotting the occasional genuine comment is a little tricky.  Hopefully I haven’t got rid of anything real yet.  If I have, send me a comment – I will try not to delete it too!

Offline for a bit!

If you are a a regular reader of this blog (and thank you if that is the case) I owe you an apology.  I have had a bit of a gap in my postings.  There are a couple of reasons.  First I have been tied up with a couple of other things that have meant I wasn’t always able to get back to writing something.

However, the bigger problem was that my desktop started to show signs of impending death.  The OS must have been corrupted somehow and so a reinstall was called for.  Never had to do that before and trashing the system to start again was a bit nerve wracking.  Of course, it didn’t go totally smoothly but, courtesy of some good backups I got most things back up and running.

I also took the chance to think about what I really needed on the machine.  Yahoo! Messenger has not made it back on.  When do i ever use that these days?  The priority was getting the most important stuff back up and running so writing blog posts was relegated.  However, things seem to be back to normal (mostly) so hopefully I will be a bit more reliable in future.

Building an article

Originally I started drafting this post while I was in the middle of putting together an article. Since the article was due to go to press in a magazine, I was circumspect about exactly what I was writing. That made it hard to write anything that was terribly interesting since I was always trying to avoid saying anything specific.

Since the piece has now been published, I can be a lot more open about it. The article is in the latest edition of Warbird Digest and, if you want a copy, you can go to their website at www.warbirddigest.com to get the latest issue and back issues (I think!). The topic is the great operation at the Warbird Heritage Foundation based up at Waukegan IL, people who have appeared in a bunch of things I have done.

In putting together the article I spent some time with the people who are the subject of the story getting their perspectives on what they do. This can be such an interesting process. When you are working with people who are so into what they are doing, you can’t help but get swept up in the whole thing. In writing about them, I obviously wanted the piece to reflect well on them as well as me but when you find out how willing they are to be helpful to get what I need, you do feel very grateful.

Getting people to sit down and talk about things is often a little more challenging. Not everyone is a self-publicist but the heart of the story is the people involved and so their story is what I was after. It is surprising how quickly people will open up when given the chance. We were also trying to get a little bit more of the background to the team included so I hope they are glad to see the way their role is portrayed.

Since it is a combination of text and photos, were were able to show the aircraft at work and the people doing what they do. Some of my shots were sued but WHF also had access to many other shots that had been taken by others. If time (and aircraft availability) had worked out, there are some other shots I would have liked to take to illustrate the piece but you can’t get everything every time. However, it still came out reasonably well and I hope they are happy as a group.

Unusual Thunderbirds

I have been running through a bunch of older pictures while trying to clear out a bit of space on the hard drives. I came across some shots of the USAF Thunderbirds from a few years ago when they were performing here in Chicago for the Air and Water Show.  Friday before the show is a day when they carry out a nearly full practice for the show.  This is a day that I am often going to be down there as there are less people and, for some reason, the weather often seems better.

What I had completely forgotten was that, during the Friday practice that year, the Thunderbirds were undertaking some photography work of their own.  Aside from the six display aircraft, a seventh F-16 was taking part.  it was flying along and around the formations photographing them at various points in the display.  I have a bunch of shots of the formations being shadowed by this aircraft.

There is nothing much else to say about this but I found it interesting so thought I would put up a small gallery of some of these formations.  Enjoy hopefully…

Time to get brutal

When I first started shooting digitally, I didn’t delete any pictures. I’m not sure how this started but, as time went by, I found old shots that benefited from more modern processing and software capabilities.  It was sometimes surprising how a shot that previously I didn’t think was any use could actually be turned into something better.

Of course, this was a tiny proportion of the shots.  Most of the crappy shots were still crappy shots whatever the software that was used.  Being horribly out of focus or even something taken accidentally like the floor or the inside of a camera bag is never going to be fixed with some miraculous software.  However, for a while storage was cheap so I didn’t care.

At various times additional drives have been added to the computer and the back up NAS has been rebuilt with ever larger drives.  (I have lots of spare drives if ever you need one!)  The problem is that I keep taking ever more pictures and the cameras have ever larger file sizes.  Besides, how many pictures do I actually need?  Each time I re-shoot a subject I get a few new shots that are keepers and some of the previous shots of that subject go down the priority list.  Am I ever going to need a thousand different shots of a Strike Eagle?

Consequently, I have finally grown up.  I am getting rid of stuff.  (I should point out that I do have BluRay backups of everything made early on so, if I really wanted to, I might be able to drag out any file!)  I am now getting brutal with stuff as soon as it is shot.  Meanwhile, I am progressively going through a lot of older stuff to get rid of the crap.  This is a two stage process.  First I am going through to take out shots that are clearly not good – blurry, poor focus etc.  If I spot that half of the subject is missing at the same time those will go.  However, zooming in to spot the duds sometimes means you don’t see that the shot is also crap.

Those will get picked up in the second phase.  Then I shall assume the shots are basically useable but remove the ones that just look bad as well as weed out the obvious duplicate.  However, phase one is taking a long time so phase two will come later.  Also, this is a great crappy winter day job and now it is summer.  I am spending more time doing fun things.

Will anyone else see the benefit of this.  Certainly not the hard drive manufacturers but hopefully I will.  The shutter actuations on the cameras won’t reduce but at least I will try and make life easier for Lightroom!

First Flight – for a while at least

My friends at the Warbird Heritage Foundation in Waukegan have been working for a long time on adding another aircraft to their already excellent collection. The newest aircraft is a P-51 Mustang called Baby Duck. It is many years since Baby Duck last flew and she has gone through an extensive restoration since being recovered from a storage location near Philadelphia.

The work has been undertaken at Tap-Air in East Troy WI. They have been putting her back together after a thorough restoration of the whole airframe and engine and the whole process has been coming to a climax with the approach of the first flight post restoration.

After some engine runs and taxiing tests, the date for the first flight was set. Paul Wood, the owner of the foundation, kindly invited me up to see the flight and I headed up to East Troy on a gorgeous day. Pilot for the first flight was Vlado Lenoch. Vlado is a highly experienced pilot of Mustangs. He has his own aircraft, Moonbeam McSwine which he displays all around the country. However, he has flown many other aircraft. I think he said that this was his 25th!

After some final checks on the airframe, Vlado fired her up and taxied off for departure. I headed to a spot up the field to be ready for the first wheels up moment. While it was a lovely day, it was warm and sunny so heat haze was a big deal. However, you don’t get to choose when these things are happening so you go with it and get what you can.

The first flight went very well. Vlado took her up to altitude, cycled the systems, undertook some handling checks and basically made sure things were good. Then he brought her back for a flyby – a good sign that he was pleased with the aircraft. There then followed a debrief about e issues that he had found. The Tap-Air guys then took the opportunity to try and fix a few of the issues that could be dealt with immediately while we had a bite to eat before Vlado took her up again.

This time he had a longer sortie and pushed her a little harder with some basic aeros. All went well and again he showed his comfort with everything with another flyby. After landing, another debrief with the guys and a list of tasks to be worked on. There is still some work to do but, hopefully she should be making her way to her new home pretty soon. Probably not soon enough to make it to Oshkosh this year but there is always another year!

As a finish, I animated some of the shots together to make a pseudo-video.  Here is the result.

Getting a jump in the woods

I recently read a very interesting book on flash photography specifically for Canon shooters. The book was by Syl Arena and he obviously has put a lot of time and effort into developing his technique and understanding the way the Canon flash system works. I don’t know whether a similar book exists for the Nikon shooters out there but, while a lot of the specifics in this book relate to the Canon technology, a lot of the techniques and concepts are equally applicable and might make the book worth a read.

Anyway, having read this book once through and picked at it a number of times for specific sections, I have become quite enthusiastic about experimenting with high speed sync and making the action pop out of the shot while de-emphasizing the background. Some of his examples had included skating and there is a skate park not too far from me that I am interested in trying out at some point soon.

However, the start of my experimentation has actually been some biking. A little way north of me in the city is a park called Clark Park that has some routes laid out by the local cyclists. The area is called The Gardens and is a partnership between the riders and the city. The routes include jumps and berms and I decided to try and check it out to see whether I could get any good shooting opportunities and to see how well I could implement some of the ideas in Syl’s book.

I contacted one of the guys who helps organize things and he was very welcoming about me coming down. I headed down one Sunday when a bunch of them were getting together. Unfortunately, the weather had not been good that week and the ground was wet under foot. Everyone was grabbing shovels and working on developing some of the runs. I grabbed a shovel and a wheelbarrow and got to work too. It has been a while since I did anything at could be considered real physical labor and the blisters and aching muscles that I had the next day were a testament to my easy lifestyle!

There was no riding that day and in the following weeks the weather was not helpful tending to dump a ton of rain every few days making it hard for anything to dry out properly. That combined with my own other activities meant I didn’t get a chance to go back for a while. However, finally the stars aligned again and I got to head back.

A bunch of guys were already there when I showed up and were starting to get some runs in. The jumps are very dramatic to look at and I suspect more dramatic when you riding toward them. There are a sequence of jumps along a run so the guys get up some momentum as they go. It all looks really cool.

I had a couple of flash units that I was triggering with an IR controller. This is something that is considered unreliable outside but, since we were under tree cover, it proved to be reliable provided I was pointing the right way. I did bring a long cable connection as a backup but didn’t need it on the day.

The guys were happy to try a few things for me as I experimented. I shot a lot of flash on the jumps and around a berm along with some ambient light shots. The tree cover meant those needed the ISO cranked way up but, even then, it was hard to get a good shot. However, some of them gave a good sense of the motion. I shot in manual with the exposure dialed down to make the background less apparent and then used high speed sync at about 1/400th of a second to illuminate the rider. This seemed to work quite well although I did end up taking the flash exposure compensation down to -1 stop.

I balanced the two flashes 2:1 with the foreground getting the greater proportion of the light in the rider’s face and the fill coming from behind. Next time I shall experiment a bit more with this. One of the tricky elements is finding a good spot to locate the flashes since the jumps are steep and slightly broken up at the edges. I had one flash on a Gorillapod and the other on a bean bag. The Gorillapod was the better solution and I will have to get another one at some point.

One other thing I experimented with while I was there was mounting a GoPro video camera on the hot shoe and shooting some video at the same time. This worked out okay but the sound of the shutter firing on the camera below tends to be a dominant sound. Some editing will be necessary with the music to blank that out.  When I have done that, I shall put something up here.

For additional shots, go to the gallery at this link.

What’s the best camera?

I suspect you have heard the phrase, the best camera is the one you have with you.  Well, I am a bit of an idiot as I went out to a location the other evening for another reason but didn’t stick a camera in the car.  We headed to Moreton Arboretum out in Lisle.  We are members and go there pretty regularly to wander around.

This time they were running a cheese and wine type of event.  Tables were set up outside, there was a bar and a tapas menu.  A very pleasant way to spend an even out in the warm as the sun gradually headed down.  The photographers amongst you are thinking golden hour.  Why didn’t I think of that.

There is a lake near the visitors center which I will have shot a number of times from different directions, usually in the harshest light of the day.  This time I was there when the light was great and as soon as we took a stroll around the lake, I was kicking myself for not having brought my camera with me.

Plan B was my phone.  The camera is okay but not special.  However, it was the best camera I had with me so it would have to do.  It doesn’t handle too much contrast well so a little angling to try and get what I wanted was in order.  Not stunning results but it’s what I got so here you go.

This last shot was something we saw when wandering around.  I might explain more another time…

Lego Masterpieces

An event was held recently that I had never thought of visiting before.  It was a Lego convention of some sort held up in Wheeling.  I had no idea what to expect at this – was it going to be a lot of vendors selling stuff or exhibitors of their creations.  It is safe to say, it was a lot more fo the latter.  I don’t know whether I was being unimaginative, but the quality of the work was astounding.

There was a lot of variety.  Quite a few Lego fans obviously like fantasy themes and so there was plenty of work like this.  I wasn’t as interested in that as I was in the creations of normal things that people had put together.  They obviously have a lot of imagination – and a lot of Lego.  One guy (who admittedly worked for Lego) had come from Australia.  I had seen a previous creation of his online.  It was a Qantas A-380 and was stunning.  This time, he had recreated the Love Boat and the captain from the series had coincidentally been in the day before and autographed it!

There was far too much stuff to fairly represent here but below are just a few shots of things that I was really impressed by.  (By the way, I know I said the fantasy stuff isn’t my thing but the Lord of the Rings display is included since it was quite incredible!)