Monthly Archives: May 2014

Waves

There is a shot that I am on a quest to get right one day. I don’t know whether it is from growing up by the sea or not but I can sit and watch waves crashing ashore for a very long time without getting bored. One thing I particularly like is the way a wave that is just starting to break has a smooth shape to the top and backside that, as the light comes in from the front of the wave, glows a green color.

This appears for a brief time and then quickly disappears as the wave collapses in on itself. The smoothness and the color contract with the normal appearance of the sea and the waves and maybe this is what I like so much. I was down on the Pacific coast a few weeks back and the waves were pretty good with quite a swell coming in. The green glow was showing up a lot but this time I actually manged to catch some of it before it went away.

It still doesn’t replicate the image I have in my head from watching the waves but it is a lot closer than I have managed before. I will keep working on it so, if I get something better, don’t be surprised if it shows up here. The one below is from head on so doesn’t show the effect but it does give an idea of what it looks like from underneath.

Bale Grist Mill

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Sometimes you find yourself doing something that you hadn’t planned but that turns out to be far more interesting than you had envisaged. That is certainly the case with Bale Grist Mill. We were taking a day trip up to Napa Valley with my Mum while she was staying. As we drove down towards St Helena, Nancy remembered seeing something about this place so, as we came upon it, we decided to stop in and have a look around.

It is a restored water mill that is used for grinding wheat and corn. It is a state park controlled location with a great selection of volunteers helping to keep the place working. The mill wheel is a huge affair fed by an aqueduct that used to come from the mill ponds up the hill. Now they are under someone else’s control so the aqueduct has been shorted and they feed it with water in a continuous cycle. Not quite the same thing but nothing to complain about.

Inside the mill, they give a great tour explaining the history of the mill itself and the guy it is named for. They demonstrate how the farmers’ crop would be delivered and the processes it would go through to clean it, grind it and then hand it back to the farmer. All of this culminates in a live demonstration of the grinding process. The mill wheel drives a series of belts and gear throughout the mill that control all of the processes whether it is the cleaning of the grain, the grinding, the elevators to move it around or the sifting that separates the different grades of milled product. You get to see them grind some corn (as it was when we were there) and adjust the stones to get just the right texture of product.

Interestingly, while they sell the flour or polenta in the mill, they mark it as not fit for human consumption. Since there is bare wood in the process rather than stainless steel everywhere and they let public members watch it being ground, they do not conform to the food hygiene laws. Therefore, they cannot sell it as food. That does not, of course, stop you from using it as food. We bought some flour which has made some excellent bread. The volunteers all eat it too so you can make your own choice if you visit.

Tokyo Views

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I have talked about the Skytree in Tokyo so now it is time to show a little of what it looks like from up there. It was a very nice day when we visited but there was a certain amount of haze in the air. Seeing Mt Fuji was out of the question but there were still great views of the city itself. We restricted ourselves to the 350m viewing area. You can see an awful lot from that high. If this had been the only thing we were doing that day, I would have paid the extra to go as high as possible but it wasn’t a good plan to use up all of our time on one thing. Besides, when you are trying to get an experience of a city, looking down on it only tells you so much!

There are actually several levels as you walk around the 350m area. The glass is leaning out so you can get quite a view downwards. Combine this with the structure gradually getting wider lower down and you can get an interesting perspective on where you are. Tokyo is a busy city with a combination of old and new buildings to be seen. You can see the parks including the Imperial Palace grounds as well as the many rail lines crossing the city.

There is a lot of water. The big port area is easy to see as are the rivers that cut through everything. I didn’t know much about Tokyo when I got there (still don’t of course but I am slightly more aware) so this was very interesting to me. As with all high places these days, they have provided a place with a glass floor. We had to check this out. It was actually tower glass panels separated by a few feet so it felt a little more detached than some of these places but still pretty cool. After checking out the gift shop which had more Skytree themed items than would seem possible (but not the one I wanted), it was time to head off and see more of Tokyo.

Monterey Aquarium Again

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Not so long ago, I posted about a trip I made with my nephew to the aquarium in Monterey. More recently, my Mum came to stay so we took her there for a day out too. It was a lovely day and we wandered around cannery Row a bit before heading in to the aquarium itself. I don’t have much new to say about the place other than it is very cool. Instead, I shall just let you see some of what we saw.

Shinkansen

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One thing that Japan is famous for is their high speed rail network. The Shinkansen has been in service since the 1960s and has expanded to cover far more of the country while also becoming more popular and faster. I was heading from Tokyo to Toyohashi which meant taking a ride on the original line that runs to Osaka. This is the busiest line both from the perspective of passengers and frequency of service. The trains are very modern and comfortable running at speeds of close to 200mph. The speed is not the most interesting thing for me. Plenty of countries have fast trains these days. What is impressive is just how many of them are running.

There are fast and stopping services along the line. My first trip was on one of the stopping services. We would get to a station and stop for several minutes and would have one of two trains blast past us. Then we would be on our way again. One of my colleagues checked out the timetable and noted in one hour that 21 trains passed through Toyohashi. Our return leg was on one of the minimal stopping trains and it made the journey back in about one hour less than our outbound trip. Timing is everything it seems. The volume of trains traveling that fast was something else.

I did manage to get a few pictures of the trains while I was there. These were mainly as they pulled in to our station as we were traveling but I did get to see some of them come through at full speed. They really are motoring. They crest the hill and come into view quite a way off but that doesn’t give you much time. They are upon you in a heartbeat. I was stuck between wanted to get a picture and wanting to have an image that conveyed the speed. Unfortunately, with little time to experiment, I was pushed into making sure I got something.

I did also try to get passing shots of other trains while we were traveling. This was a crap shoot since they appear and disappear very fast. I was aiming to get a blurred nose on the view but, even at a high frame rate, this didn’t work out much. All of that said, here are a few Shinkansen shots.

I also got to see one of the original Series 0 cab cars while visiting the company we were seeing. They built it and have it as part of their collection. I was aiming to get a shot of it the day we left but the schedule got busy so that one will have to be a memory only.

Tokyo Skytree

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One of my current projects recently took me to Japan for a few days. As with many work trips, the chances to take a look around were a little limited. However, I did get a bit of spare time to play with on the day I was flying back to the US. A colleague of mine showed me a little of what Tokyo has to offer before we headed back to Narita to fly home.

We headed out to explore the Tokyo Skytree. This is a huge tower that has just been built and, while it is a popular attraction, we timed our visit well and were able to head straight in. First, a few stats about the tower itself. It opened in 2012 after a four year construction period. It has a main viewing area about 350m up. (That is about 1,100’ for those of you not working in metric.) There is a secondary viewing area at about 450m if you weren’t high enough before. The top of the tower is 634m. This thing is not small.

As an engineer, it is an interesting structure. It is a tubular framework which transitions from something close to circular near the top to something more triangular near the base. The transition is very subtle and it took a while to even see it as I looked from the ground. The elevator to the first viewing level was both fast and smooth. You were hardly aware you were moving apart from the occasional ear popping! It really is something very impressive and I shall post more about my visit there shortly.