Category Archives: aircraft

Hawgsmoke 2014

Every other year, the A-10 community in the US Air Force holds a competition called Hawgsmoke. This year it was being held in Arizona. The aircraft were based at Davis Monthan AFB in Tucson and the Goldwater range complex was where most of the exercise was taking place. With the possibility that the A-10 might be taken out of service hanging over things, I was keen to get down there in case this was the last time the event would take place.

I covered the event for Global Aviation Resource so you can see the article I produced here. Rather than repeat that, I shall provide a little of the back-story. Arizona in July is not the coolest place in the world. Head out into the desert and it is even warmer. Get taken there in an Air Force bus which has air conditioning that doesn’t work properly and you will be pretty toasty. If the young guy driving the bus appears to be falling asleep all of the time, you are feeling a bit more alert than might otherwise be the case in that heat.

Our time on the range was a bit short. One of the TV crews from a local station obviously decided he had seen enough and told the organizers that he would miss his deadline if we didn’t leave. He had been given the same schedule as the rest of us so I suspect he was talking crap. However, while we were on the range for less time than expected, we still got a great experience of the A-10s running in to shoot the targets. The close proximity as they fired was something else as was their break over the top of us after each pass.

It was a good bunch of guys on the trip and we all headed out to shoot around Davis Monthan when we got back. This gave me a chance to get some more shots of the A-10s that would fill out the article a little. By the end of the day, I was shattered. I had been drinking liquid all day but I think I was just keeping out of trouble rather than being properly hydrated. Still, it was really worth it. A little longer and the benefit of the sun coming around would have been nice but it was still cool (but hot!). Below is some video that I shot for GAR while I was there too.

Coast Guard Bell 47

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I always seem to find something aviation related when I am out and about. San Ramon is the next town up from us and it was having its Art and Wind event. This combined a bunch of art stalls with some excellent kite flying displays and was an amusing play on the more common Art and Wine festivals that many towns around here have. As we wandered around, we came across a Bell 47 helicopter. They are not terribly rare but this one was a bit more interesting as it was in service with the Coast Guard Auxiliary.

I had no idea that Bell 47s were still in government service. The crew were standing by and talking to a selection of kids that came to have a look. Our timing couldn’t have been better because just after we arrived, they starting moving people away so that they could take off. It would have been rude to leave at this point so we sat down close by and watched them start up and depart the field after a brief moment turned towards us to say goodbye. Nice!

Collings Foundation

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The Collins Foundation carry out a tour throughout the country with their vintage aircraft showing them off to many communities, sharing a message about what people did in the Second World War and providing an opportunity to ride in some historic machinery. I have seen them in the past while we lived in Chicago. Their tour this year brought them through the Bay Area with stops at Moffett Field and Livermore. Since the latter is close to home, I went along to see them.

The part of the collection that they bring on tour includes a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, a Consolidated B-24 Liberator and a North American P-51 Mustang. I headed over to Livermore ahead of their planned arrival time and plenty of people had already gathered to see them come in. We all waited for a while and then the B-17 appeared over the hills. It made its approach and landed a short while before the B-24 showed up and followed suit. The P-51 was last of the three making a nice pass before landing. What I hadn’t anticipated was a B-25 Mitchell was also following them in. A quick turnaround and the three main players were soon launching off for flights with expectant passengers.

At this point I headed off as I had other things to do. Later in the day I came back and managed to catch an evening launch of the B-17. The following evening I had more free time so came back again. Another evening launch and recovery as the light got better and better. Then, as everyone packed up, the Collings team was kind enough to let me take some shots around the ramp. A local P-51 was parked up while the Collings P-51 had disappeared somewhere. As the sun set, I shot around the various aircraft and included a cracking 1937 Oldsmobile that one of the volunteers had brought along. With the light fading, the ramp lights came on which gave me a whole new bunch of opportunities to get some shots. I shot a lot until it was pretty late. At that point I headed home. The following day they also departed moving on to the next stop on their tour. If they come your way, make the effort to get out and see them. If you have the money, take a ride and support the continued operation of these great aircraft.

Flying Out of The Bay Area

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I have been traveling a reasonable amount recently and on one of my trips we took off from Oakland and flew out over San Francisco Bay, past the city and the Golden Gate and up to the north. The first time, I had my camera with me but it was in my bag in the overhead locker. My phone was still to hand of course so I grabbed a few pictures with that. They were passable but nothing special. I also was fighting some reflections given the time of day and the position of the sun.

When I came to make the same trip again, I planned ahead and did two things. One was to have my camera with me rather than in the overhead and the other was to bring the Lens Skirt to try and cut down on the reflection issues. My methodology for having the camera to hand involves yet another camera bag but I shall leave the description of that to another post.

I should point out that on the first outing, I got interesting pictures both out and back. The second time, the weather was not so cooperative. On the outbound leg, the Golden Gate was shrouded in fog with the bridge just poking out of the top of the clouds. On the return leg, most of the bay was shrouded in cloud so the views of Oakland that I had got with my phone were obscured. Here is a selection of the shots. I will be making this trip again no doubt so will probably try and get a better selection. Shooting out of airplane windows is problematic and not usually the source of great images but airliners do get you in places that have views that are unusual and worth recording, even if they are not going to be published.

SFO Night Approach Time Lapse

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Many moons ago (pun intended), my buddy Paul was visiting and we decided to have a go at night light trails at SFO. However, we had not come well equipped so headed to Best Buy to pick up cheap tripods. They were very cheap and performed as might be expected. However, with Paul coming back, we decided to have a second go at this and to prepare properly this time. We also scoped out some locations that might be suitable to get good angles on SFO.

Two things conspired against us this time. First, SFO is having runway upgrades installed so the pair of 28 runways are the only ones in use. This cuts down on the possible angles for a while. Second, the great weather forecast turned out to include some low cloud over the location we had scouted out. The aircraft rapidly disappeared from view as they climbed. (It later turned out that they were still in the clear but above the thin layer of cloud which we were under.)

We went with a plan B and found a location along the lake-shore that would provide an alternative. It was not as good but it did work. I had actually brought a spare tripod in case Paul didn’t have his so I set up two cameras. One was running long exposures that I intended to blend together to get light trails. The other I point out onto the approach which was quite busy at that point and take a lot of shorter exposures for creating a time lapse. The blend is above and the time lapse video is below. Let’s hope for better weather next time. I shall also remember that warm weather does not include after sunset and bring something a bit ticker to wear!

Rainbow Phantom

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In going through my archive recently for a piece for Global Aviation Resource, I was searching through old shots of F-4 Phantoms. I noticed one that I hadn’t recalled taking but that seemed pretty cool. Occasionally jets pull ‘g’ when above you and the angle of the sun makes the vapor project a rainbow. This was one of those moments.

HDR Panoramas

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Another one of my processing technique posts today. For those of you interested in pictures of places, today will probably be one you pass on. You have been warned. This is about my first venture into the realm of HDR panoramas. I know at least one of you who knows exactly how to do this sort of thing and does it on a regular basis. You also will probably skip the rest of the post. However, you have some specialized tools for doing the job and I am playing with Lightroom and Photoshop so here is how it goes.

My initial thought having taken the shots was which order to carry out the processing. HDR first or pano first. I concluded that it had to be pano first. All of the pano exposures were consistent and would stitch properly while I wasn’t convinced that each of the pano frames would be consistent if I had done the HDR blending first. However, this left me with a second concern. Would the pano merge produce images that would align for the HDR merge. I use the pano tools built into Photoshop and, while I select the algorithm it uses, I did not have confidence that it would produce an identical alignment for each set of exposures. However, this was the route I tried.

Stitching the panos was straightforward enough. I created each of them from Lightroom and ended up with five panos with differing exposures. At this point I could have taken them directly to HDR Pro within Photoshop but, since I wanted everything to end up in the Lightroom catalog, I decided to save the files and go to HDR Pro from there.

Here I encountered my first hiccup. As expected, the panos produced were not identical. There were very close but not identical. HDR Pro only works on files that are the same dimensions. I imagine some more specialized HDR applications might be able to handle this but I was stuck with Photoshop. Since the panos were thousands of pixels across and only a few pixels different, I opened them back up in Photoshop and changed the canvas size to be identical in each case. HDR Pro is able to manage alignment of slightly misaligned shots anyway so I wanted worried about the positioning. Also, with such small changes in dimensions, I didn’t fear that I would have distortion.

With this change made, Photoshop went to work and created the HDR file. Amazingly, it worked just fine. I didn’t have any problems with the files being distorted relative to each other and it did a great job of blending them. All that was left was to crop everything in to clear up the empty corners from the pano creation (I didn’t get rid of those in the first instance since I was trying to keep the pano files identical in size and alignment) and then a few tweaks back in Lightroom had the job finished. I was pretty pleased with how it worked and, with the experience of this time, should be able to turn them around quite quickly next time.

Boeing Field

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No great story for today’s post. I got some time to shoot at Boeing Field in the evening after a day of meetings and travel. Some of the interesting subjects got their own posts. Here are just a few shots of the other traffic that was coming in to the field. The evening light was fantastic and it was fun to watch the movements including some of the Boeing production traffic. Mongolian was a new airline for me. Sadly my timing was off and I didn’t get to see the Indian Navy P-8 on test. Never mind.

Dream Machines

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Half Moon Bay on the Pacific coast hosts a great little event each year called Dream Machines. It is a combination of an aircraft and car event. I took a trip with my buddy Hayman to see how it was this year. The weather did not start out favorably and it looked like it might be a bit of a dull day. The clouds early certainly stopped a few visitors from making it in. However, the weather got a lot better as the day went on and there were still lots of great things to see.

Dream Machines is not an airshow so there are no displays. However, some aircraft get airborne and might do a few flybys. I covered the event for Global Aviation Resource and you can read my coverage in more detail at http://www.globalaviationresource.com/v2/2014/05/05/aviation-event-review-dream-machines-half-moon-bay/. There are a couple of sad notes associated with this day. The Sanders owned Sea Fury, Dreadnought, was at the event and departed in mid-afternoon. It was closely followed by a Cessna support plane. Unfortunately, en route to their base, they collided over the water and the Cessna was lost along with its pilot. Dreadnought suffered damage but returned to base. Also, as it was his home base, Eddie Andreini was part of the day’s proceedings including flying his Mustang. On the static line was his Stearman and this was the aircraft he was flying at Travis a few weeks later when he crashed on the runway and died. Both losses are very sad and our thoughts are with the friends and families and all involved.

SeaTac

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I had an early flight out of Seattle on my way back to the Bay Area. It was a nice morning and the planes were departing to the south. The terminal that Southwest operates from is towards the southern end of the airport so you get the aircraft passing you as they get airborne. I had given myself some margin for getting to the airport, checking in the rental car and getting the shuttle to the terminal and everything had gone smoothly so I actually had a bit of time on my hands. Also, on the shuttle I had seen an Alaska 737 in 75^th anniversary markings on a gate so I thought I might have a chance to get a shot of it if it wasn’t going straight out.

There is a kink in the pier as you head to Southwest’s gates that gives you a good view across the field and is not obstructed by jet bridges. Moreover, it isn’t a busy part of the terminal so waiting there and getting some shots is practical. Of course, you are shooting through some thick glazing but, even so, I was pleasantly surprised that the shots were not too badly compromised. The only problem was that the Q400s that Horizon operates from the central part of the terminal throw of some exhaust distortion which ruins what could be some good angles.

I had to make sure I didn’t forget my own flight but I did get some nice shots. The Alaska anniversary jet did time its departure well for me and I was even more pleasantly surprised when one of their 737s came by sporting the new scimitar winglets from APB. That was the first time I had seen some for real. A nice bonus before heading home.