Aside from the bike jumping and the pig racing, the rest of the Alameda County Fair was fun to look around. One thing a fair like this has (other than a ton of things to eat) is livestock. We wandered through the halls to see the various animals that were competing (although they didn’t seem terribly aware that they were competing). There were plenty but here are a few of the cuter ones!
My buddy Paul was in town and we had a day of shooting and exploring planned. However, we wanted to have a go at star trails in the evening as well. Consequently, we set up at Schellville as the sun went down to shoot the trails around the Douglas DST parked on the field. I set up two cameras at different angles and with different lenses to try and maximize what I got. The sun was still going down when I started so the exposure was varying a bit more than I was prepared for but a little tweaking in post got things back together. We also did some light painting on the airframe in a couple of frames to make the scene pop a bit more.
The biggest thing I learned during this was to start when it is darker and to take mosquito protection. I got badly bitten during the early part of the shoot and the bites reacted quite severely! Also, doing this in the winter so you don’t have to wait so late for it to get dark might also be a good plan. However, it went reasonably well and I have a few things I will know to do differently next time. I might also try a trail on one camera and a time lapse on the other.
I have a lot of negatives and transparencies from my days of shooting film and various of them have been scanned at times either for projects or just because I wanted to have them as part of my digital library. For a long time, I have made use of a Minolta Scan Dual III film scanner. While it doesn’t appear to like modern operating systems, a few tweaks to the config files make it run with Windows 7. However, it is not a totally smooth process and the scanner has a habit of hanging at odd times which requires a lot of fiddling to recover.
When I built my latest computer, I didn’t bother to install the drivers and the box is sitting on a shelf. I was figuring I would come back to it if I needed to. Recently, I needed to scan a single strip of film and wondered whether I had an alternative. I do have a flatbed scanner that has a film scanning capability. I had previously dismissed flatbeds for film scanning since they were seen to be inferior to dedicated film scanners. However, my film scanner was pretty old and gave me mixed results and my flatbed is relatively new. Therefore, I figured I ought to give it a go.
First, the limitations. It will scan a strip of film of shots but you have to move a small device between each shot between scans. No scanning a full holder of film or slides. Big scanning jobs are therefore a lot less practical. As for the image quality, I have yet to find a way to have much control. A preview scan is done but if it comes out with a poor exposure, for example, I have yet to find a way to adjust it. The dedicated film scanner allows all sorts of tweaking. Then there is the speed. If I go for the highest resolution, the scans take many minutes for each exposure. I can wander off and do something else but, if you have more than a couple of images to scan, this is a slow and inefficient process
As for the output quality, it is a mixed bag. The scans are not too bad. Despite the lack of control, if the original is a straightforward image, it comes out okay. Large areas of a similar color such as a sky are subject to banding. I suspect this is a problem all of the time but most pronounced on large areas of one color.
So, am I going to make do or is the film scanner going to be resurrected? I think I will get it back off the shelf. The time and quality issues are sufficient to make the flatbed not helpful except for odd individual scans. It does a nice job on documents but that is it. Now I shall have to find a location for the film scanner and sort out the config files again.
Earlier in the year, I took a trip to Ano Nuevo State Park to photograph the elephant seals. This was a photo tour early in the morning in the middle of the mating season and you can read more about it here. Nancy and I decided to make a second trip out there more recently. This was a normal day at the park but there were plenty of males back on the beaches including both immature ones and some of the larger guys.
Most of the action was taking place on the beach furthest from the center. While a few seals were dozing on the beaches closer in, a lot had gathered to play. They were sparring both on the beach and in the water. Initially, it looked as if they were fighting but, as you watched further, it became clear that they were really going through the motions. Having seen the real fights, there was none of the true violence in these encounters. Moreover, one of the docents pointed out that males of very different stature were sparring with each other. The large males would never even bother to engage the smaller males if it were for real. However, in this environment, they were all just getting some practice in.
Out in the bay is an island that is no longer occupied by humans. I made a panorama of it but I was hoping to see some of the wildlife that is out there. At that time of year, Steller sea lions were out on the island. Sadly, they rarely come ashore but the males of this species are absolutely huge. We could actually see the outline of some of them out on the island. They looked like huge boulders but then you could make out their shape. Quite an impressive creature! I also shot some video while I was there and you can see the result of that below.
I have posted about the County Fair already. Another favorite of the fair is pig racing. This is exactly what it sounds like. A small course is set out with a starting gate in one corner and a series of little jumps around the horseshoe shaped track to a finish line. The piglets and lined up in the gate and released and they charge around the course leaping over the hurdles as they go.
This is a very popular event and I suspect Nancy was a little embarrassed by my enthusiasm for it. Getting a good view was tricky since a lot of people had got their kids to the front and it would have been unseemly to try barging my way passed the children. I took some shots over the top with a certain amount of guesswork and some people left before the last races so I could get a better view for those.
No great assessment of sports shooting technique here. Just something that looks a little amusing. Hope it cheers you up as much as looking back at these shots cheers me up!
Something I hadn’t seen before was the Boeing 747 that Rolls Royce own and use as a testbed for the Trent 1000 engine on the Boeing 787. Appropriately registered N787RR, this was parked up close to a road. I actually spotted it first just as we landed. It was already dark and I saw the outline of the plane but had no idea what it was or why it was there. However, after picking up my rental car I came out near its parking spot so took a pass by. Being dark, there was nothing much to be shot but I decided to check it out again when it was daylight.
Apparently, this airframe had been sitting without the test engine for a while but there is now an engine fitted. Whether this means that they have been flying recently or are planning to soon I do not know. Unfortunately the test engine was on the side away from the road so was harder to show well in a shot. However, I still managed to get a few shots.
My trip to Arizona to shoot the shooting A-10s was a lot of fun and something I have already covered. One aspect of this shoot that caught my interest was the cannon shells in flight. I have seen images from other people that allow you to see the A-10’s shells leaving the muzzle or flying to the target and when I got something similar, I was quite pleased. However, a shot that really caught my eye was one of them that had a background with some clouds visible.
This background provides a mechanism to see any discontinuities in the density of the air as is experienced in a shockwave. This is the effect that is used in Schlieren photography in wind tunnels. The refractive index of the air changes as the density changes. Normally you don’t see this. However, if the background is not continuous, the refraction of the background results in the shockwave being visible. One of the shells showed this up and I thought it was cool. Therefore, I am sharing it here just in case you think it is cool too!
There are some airlines in the US that I have spent a lot of time with and there are others that have only been an occasional feature of my travel. USAirways is one that I did not use a great deal since I didn’t live in one of their core markets. However, I did sometimes find myself on one of their planes and I have certainly seen plenty of them around.
Their fleet has included a lot of the A320 family but for a long time the 737 was a big part of operations with the 737-400 a regular sight. Now, their time has come and the last flight has taken place. This prompted me to dig through the collection to see what I had of them. It seems that most of my shots come from the Washington DC area but it was nice to have older and newer schemes on the jets.
Here are a few of the jets that have now either gone to another home or have ended up as spares for the rapidly diminishing fleet of what became known as 737 Classics (although the 100 and 200 series jets might cause an eyebrow to be raised at that description).
Alameda County Fair is a pretty substantial event and it is held in Pleasanton, a short hop from our home. It runs for a few weeks so we made the effort to get down there during one weekend. It was a hot day but a nice one. There were a number of cool things to see and I shall have some further posts coming up. However, the first post deals with the first thing we saw when coming in the gate. Three motocross riders were performing jumps to entertain the crowd and they were certainly being successful.
When I first took a look at the small area cordoned off for them and the size of the ramps, I figured that things might be quite toned down compared to something like the X-Games stuff you see on TV. I am sure it was a lot less aggressive but I was still very impressed with what they could do. They got phenomenal height from a short run and were able to carry out some quite dramatic moves while airborne.
Initially I sat in the bleachers to watch but, as soon as it became clear how good they were, I got down to ground level to move around and get a variety of shots. (It also happened that they were jumping again as we went to leave so I managed a few extras then. Forget good planning. Go with luck!)
Each guy would do a number of jumps individually. They would be off the bike and contorting themselves in all sorts of ways or back flipping the whole thing. One crowd favorite was the Captain Morgan pirate pose in midair which did look cool. The grand finale involved all three of them coming up the ramp in sequence and providing a stream of tricks together. That was quite something.
Weekends are a great time for coming across events that you had no idea about. Our jaunt to Sonoma for the long weekend yielded just such an event when the local Porsche Club showed up in the town square to show off their cars. Nancy had a few things she wanted to see that left me a bit of time to wander around. It wasn’t a huge turnout but the quality of what was there was impressive. The majority of the vehicles were 911s of varying vintage but there were some 928s and a 924 or two. Some Cayennes also showed up but that seemed like cheating to me!’
The owners were generally happy to discuss their cars and what they had done to them. They also didn’t mind the occasional photograph being taken. A number of the cars caught my eye but two are worthy of a special mention. One is the restored racer in a metallic blue which was in beautiful condition and had an interesting racing history.
The other was a 911. The name for this type varies depending on your country but back in the UK they were known as Flat Noses. I wasn’t sure that I had ever seen one other than in a magazine so was really pleased to see it. I am not particularly a Porsche guy (not that I am any brand of car specific to be fair) but I do appreciate a nice car of any sort and these certainly counted. Given that Sonoma has a fairly healthy number of people of means, I had hoped a Carrera GT might be there but sadly not. Only seen one of those before and that was driving down a street in Chicago – a brave thing to do with a vehicle that valuable!
