Author Archives: Rob

Bears Training Camp

It is that time of year when large men start practicing to inflict pain on each other – and if you are a Bears fan – on us too! With the negotiations over, it is time for training camp. The Chicago Bears hold their camp at a university down in Bourbonnais Illinois. With some spare time now on my hands, I decided to make a trek down for one of the public sessions.

With the temperature in the 90s, this might not have seemed like the best idea but it was windy and that really made things feel a lot better – although I think some of the receivers might have been using it as an excuse! I went to the camp for the first time last year. I had checked on what camera gear they allowed and the person I had spoken too said nothing too big. That time I took a 70-200 as my biggest lens and got there to see a fair few honking pieces of glass.

This time I took what I wanted and I’m glad I did. Not only does it make shooting easier but people are amazingly accommodating when they see big lenses. While they were all fighting each other for a spot when they were shooting with their phones, as soon as I wandered up, people would drag their relatives out of my way without me ever having to say a thing. Great stuff. Don’t see that at an air show very often!

I didn’t stay for the whole session. it was a bit toasty and lugging the gear around to different spots to try different things doesn’t help to keep you cool. However, I was happy with what I saw and slightly happier in the car with the aircon cranked up! It is a great thing if you like football. The price of a ticket for Soldier Field is astronomical but this is free and you get to see a bunch of stuff. The staff were all universally welcoming and you felt good about being there. Plus, some of the shots came out quite well!

More Time Lapse Fun

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I have been messing around with time lapses for a while as regular readers will know. One of the things that I had been thinking about was getting a panning effect in a time lapse. I was chatting with Ken Sklute at ISAP and he told me that, rather than bothering with expensive motorized panning heads, it was simpler to use the full image size that a DSLR offers and let the video software undertake the panning for you by cropping in on the shots.

I am not a big video guy and have Pinnacle Studio as my package. It is fine for the basic stuff but doesn’t have the most impressive features. When I goggled this topic, I came up with After Effects techniques for doing what I wanted. I tried the free trial but struggle to come to terms with what was required, despite the detailed tutorial. Guess that says something about me as a self teaching student.

Then I got lucky, My friend Jo Hunter over at futurshox posted some video from Oshkosh of time lapses doing exactly what I wanted. I dropped her a message and she came straight back with the solution. The program is called LRTimelapse and it is a standalone program that makes Lightroom develop settings that you can then combine with a video output setting to make the final product. It is developed by a guy called Gunther Wegner and you can find the whole thing at his website. It is donationware and I have made one because it works and has solved a problem that had been troubling me for a while.

I need to get better at the effect but for the time being, here is a sample of the effect. For comparison, first I have the original time lapse and second I have the panning version. No change in the content but certainly a more interesting thing to watch I think.

Thunder Over Michigan

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I made a last minute decision to go to Thunder Over Michigan at Willow Run. For some reason, I have never been to this show before. I have seen plenty of interesting shots of the aircraft from previous years so why I have never been is a mystery to me. There are some practical issues about going but not that can’t be overcome.

Being just outside Detroit, it is the best part of a four hour drive to get to Thunder. It is also a time zone change so making the trip across early in the morning is not a practical proposition. Therefore, an overnight is required. I decided that two nights would make for a more relaxing time. In the run up to the show, the heatwave across the Midwest was still forecast to be in place and the chances of storms were mixed in with the high temperatures.

I booked the room since I could cancel it at short notice and then decided to wait and see. In the end , I figured I would take a chance. Nancy was convinced I was not going to make the trip and looked amazed when I finally walked out of the door.

It was definitely worth the trip. I met up with a bunch of people I either already know or have crossed paths with online including the team at Warbird Digest who recently published the article on Warbird Heritage Foundation I wrote. Greg was particularly generous as he had a photo pass I could use for the show. This was a welcome addition since it not only provided a good location but also included shelter from the sun and cold drinks!

The weather ended up being okay. The heat was pretty significant and the light moves round during the day making the shots a bit trickier. It also got cloudy when the Blue Angels closed out the show. however, it was the warbirds that I was there to see and they were a lot of fun.

I would include pictures to share with you but instead, I have written a piece for Global Aviation Resource which is illustrated so here is the link to that instead.

http://www.globalaviationresource.com/reports/2011/airshows-usa-thunder-over-michigan-review/index.php

Not this year!

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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

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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!

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.