Getting repetitive here. My never ending quest to capture and demonstrate the unusual gear articulation of the Boeing 777-300ER gets another outing. Similar animation of some stills as before. This time the light was good and the distortion was limited so here we go again. I won’t bother with the technique aspects this time. Instead, here is the animation with the rotation about the rear axle pretty easy to see.
The active volcanoes are cool to see but the landscape on the Big Island is dotted with plenty examples of where the earth has had a previous effort at disgorging its contents. The mountains of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea look exactly like you would expect a volcano to look with a nice big flat conical structure. However, the eruptions have not all come from the top of the mountain. There have been regular eruptions from weak points along the surface of the mountains and these eruptions have left their mark in more ways than just the lava flows scarring the slopes below them.
When the lava breaks out, it hardens as it reaches the surface. The deposits around the opening grow and you create a mini version of the mountain. These are called cinder cones. They are scattered all around the landscape and each was the site of a previous eruption. The center is hollow where the lava flowed out and sometimes the weakest side may have collapsed to leave the cone a little more exposed. The color of the rock can be pretty dramatic too. They look so benign now but at their most active peak, these places would have been spewing forth huge quantities of red hot molten rock. They would not have been a good place to be.
Changing the colors of an airline is usually something that happens infrequently. It always gets a lot of comment when it happens but brand continuity is often a big deal. This is where Spirit is different. They flew for a long time in their gray scheme that had a digital block pattern going on. They changed to have something that was far brighter with a white fuselage and a blue fin with some color accents. When I saw a yellow jet at Oakland, I thought it must be some special livery. It turns out that it wasn’t and that this was their new “new” scheme. I’m not sure what the problem was with the previous one but obviously it didn’t last. I wonder whether they even had time to repaint the fleet?
Watching the surfers trying to catch the big waves was cool but, even when they didn’t make it, I wasn’t disappointed. The waves themselves were fantastic to watch. The color of the water as the waves built up as they came into the shallows and then became unstable and broke was fantastic. The spray from the breaking wave would fly back up the face of the wave and over the crest. Sometimes you would briefly see into the tube and the wave rolled towards us. Fantastic stuff and so powerful!
Our trip to Vancouver was not one for me to spend time photographing aviation. However, I did manage to sneak some shots in while I was there. Watching the floatplane operations was a lot of fun but it meant I didn’t get to go to the heliport further along the shoreline. This was fine by me but I did still see some of the Helijet S-76s as they departed and arrived since they came across the harbor albeit at a distance. I grabbed a few images for now. I guess I have multiple reasons for making a return trip to Vancouver before too long. I know Nancy won’t object to returning! Better not mention the helicopters just yet though.
While I have experimented with video a fair bit over time, one thing I haven’t done is put together a video with a presenter in it. My mum was recently staying and she had an idea for something she wanted to do that involved her doing a presentation on video that could be shared at a later date. My own experience and some information I had seen online made me think that the key to getting a good result was not going to be the video but was instead the sound. The microphone on the camera is of okay quality but it picks up the sound of everything around it. The voice is isolated and any video online that does not take a careful approach to audio is very obvious and sounds decidedly amateurish.
The ideal solution would be to have lav mikes, the small mike you see attached to the clothing of TV presenters. These are actually pretty accessible and cheap but I didn’t have the time to sort something out. However, a surprisingly good alternative was readily to hand. I have an app on my phone for sound recording which I use when interviewing people for articles. Instead of using the plugin microphone, I used the headphone/microphone cable. By running it inside the clothing and just leaving the microphone up near my mum’s throat, we were able to make a very good sound recording. The closeness of the mike to her mouth meant the sound was very localized and clear so the background noise was lost. The room we used did not have bad echoes either so the audio ended up being pretty clear.
Then it was just a case of having a conspicuous clap on the audio track and the video file to allow me to synch the sound and audio together and we were off to the races. I shot everything with two cameras – one head on and one from the side – with the idea of cutting between them. However, when I did the first edit, the side camera didn’t seem to fit with the style of presenting to camera. I imagine it works better for an interview style piece. I reverted to the head on shot with some images cut in periodically to illustrate the piece. Overall, it worked pretty well. We did a number of takes and mum got progressively more relaxed in each one. I had thought I might cut the best bits together but the final take was really good so I didn’t need to do so. I hope her audience likes the result.
Qantas comes into SFO most days. They bring a 747-400ER in and, while most of the, are on the standard colors, I happened to see one that has special colors. I assume it is related to some sporting association but I don’t know what team it is. However, they have Team Australia markings on the side along with some graphics of a boxing kangaroo. It arrived early so the light was harsh but it was cool to see. Interestingly, when it was further out on the approach, the sun was reflecting off the graphics so they were impossible to see.
With the big waves coming in at Santa Cruz, the surfers were working in a way we had not seen before. They were split into two groups, both of which were further away from us than normal. I assume that being closer in to the rocks with such waves was not good for your health! One group was further in to the bay and I assume that they were the less skilled/adventurous surfers. They seemed to be doing okay with the waves that were coming their way.
Another group was a lot further out. They seemed intent on picking up the biggest waves as they came in. Getting on to these big waves was not a straightforward exercise. Plenty of the surfers started paddling as the waves came in but they weren’t all able to get up to speed. The big waves with their long wavelength must require a different technique. Once up, some of the surfers were getting a long run as the waves didn’t always break right away. Other times the wave would break and they would head either towards us or away from us. When they went away, we often couldn’t see much of what was happening to them unless a board flipped up in the air. When they came our way, we had a far better view.
The trip to photograph Eric’s Clipper that I described here included a bonus (as if the flight wasn’t bonus enough). Eric had talked to another Clipper owner, Scott, and he had brought his plane across to Sonoma. Scott is not a formation pilot but Eric landed after the shoot with his plane and jumped in to Scott’s plane with Scott in the second seat. We orbited overhead until they joined up and then we got a bunch of additional shots.
Since it was a bit later in the day, the light had got a bit better. The colors of Scott’s plane were particularly receptive to the evening light and, while it was a totally stock aircraft and therefore not possible to get too vertical with (see the roof mods in Eric’s plane in the other post), we could still get some great shots. Thanks Dave and Eric (and Scott for bringing your plane).
At the bottom of the Devil’s Slide trail, there are the remains of a building. This appears to have been a lookout location. There were a number of military installations here at one point. Just south of the tunnel entrance and up on the headland is the concrete core of what was once one of the buildings. The ground has eroded away at the base of the structure and the walls have gone in some places but the concrete core is still there. It has been covered by graffiti artists over the years and is still popular with the more adventurous types. A couple was climbing into it while we were there. It looks pretty cool on a sunny day. On a cold and foggy day, I suspect it will be a bit more depressing.
