Category Archives: photo

Cannon Beach

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Cannon Beach was quite a way north of where we were staying in Oregon.  However, it was on our route home so we stopped off to wander along the sands for a bit prior to hunting down some lunch.  We were not the only ones enjoying a sunny day on the beach but, given the expanse of sand available, there was plenty of space for everyone to spread out so it wasn’t crowded.

The huge flat sands were most impressive and the rocks that sit out in the water look very cool.  It is hard to gauge their scale when they are out like that as they are so separated from the people that you don’t have enough of a reference to work with.  It is safe to say that they are pretty big though.  There was a bit of sea spray in the air which made everything take on a slightly more misty look when you were looking south towards the sun.  Looking north this was a lot less apparent.  I could see why a landscape photographer would come here to spend some time in the early and late hours.

Lufthansa A340 and His Buddy

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Heading back to Hawthorne after my flight over LAX, another plane was coming in to the southern complex.  I had forgotten it was due and, after moving to the south of the field, we could have got a good shot of it landing.  Never mind.  This Lufthansa A340-600 beat me but I was able to get a shot of him from a distance as we headed in and, since there was a parallel approach on the northside, I got his little cousin in the shot too.

Swans on the Lake

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When I was still at college (and because I am an old git, I was shooting on film), I spent some summers in Huntingdon, a town in Cambridgeshire that my mum lived in at the time.  The river Ouse ran through the town (actually separate Huntingdon from Godmanchester) and there was a park along the river that I walked in frequently.  One afternoon I was walking there when a swan took off on the water alongside me and I grabbed a single shot of it that was one I was really happy with.  (After I write this, I will go back through my stuff to see if I have a good scan of it to add to the bottom of this post.)

Ever since I have been shooting digitally, I have wanted to get shots of swans flying.  However, I haven’t lived in places where swans were very common.  That has changed since moving here.  There are some wetlands north of here that are heavily populated by swans and I shall be checking them out before too long.  However, we do get some swans in Juanita Bay.  Nancy and I were out for a walk a while back when three pairs of swans took off from the water near us and flew right by.  You can probably guess that I wasn’t carrying a camera that day.

A week or so later, I was back at Juanita Bay with the camera this time and there were swans hanging out in the same area.  I thought that, this time, my planning would pay dividends.  Sadly, that was not to be.  They seemed very content where they were and all I got was pictures of them sleeping, swimming or occasionally stretching their wings.  I shall be back for another attempt though.

One of My Better Encounters with the Dreamlifter

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I have had some mixed luck with the Dreamlifter.  Light failing at the wrong moment or the sun setting just before departure are two examples.  On this occasion, though, things worked out pretty well for me.  I was visiting Future of Flight so I was on their viewing deck when the jet departed.  I watched them start up (including some nice puffs of smoke as fuel and oil burned off at ignition) but they were partly obscured by a hangar.

Pushback made everything easier and they then taxied right towards me.  It is true that you are looking into the sun at this point but it was still not a problem to get shots of the plane without a problem.  They taxied out past the parked IL-76 and then held in front of us for a moment.  The wind was good for northerly departures so they taxied across the threshold and then down Alpha to the other end of Paine Field.

Take off had to wait for a couple of Cessnas and then they lined up and headed our way.  I was definitely not alone on the viewing terrace at this point!  Little areas of snow alongside the runway were apparent when the outboard engines disturbed them.  Then they were rotating and climbing towards us.  Finally I got some decent conditions for some shots.  Now, I guess, this will happen a lot and I will wonder why I ever was bothered about not shooting the jet in nice light.

LAX is Attracting the Neos

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The A320neo (and more recently the A321neo) has been a big seller for Airbus.  However, introduction has not been smooth with both of the engine suppliers struggling to meet their commitments for powerplants (Pratt and Whitney definitely having the worse time of it).  Despite this, the neos are turning up in service in a lot of places but I had not seen a lot of them.  My trip to LAX changed that a bit.

Here I got to see a few operators with the neos in service.  The far larger fan diameter of the new generation engines makes the neos reasonably easy to spot and I like a big high bypass engine so I appreciate the change.  It won’t be too long before they are around in huge numbers and won’t be worthy of comment but, on this trip, I was pleased to see so many.

Beaches in the Mist

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The moisture in the air along the Oregon coast can catch you out at times.  On one drive south out of Yachats we rounded a bend in the road where we looked down from quite a height along the beaches stretched beneath us.  It looked most impressive, but we were then on the way down a twisty road and had missed the pull off.  I made a note to come back another time.  This I did but the conditions had changed a lot.  There was now a lot more mist in the air and the beaches were disappearing into the glare from the sun.  Even so, it was still a very pretty location.

Qantas Celebrates Aborigine Art Again

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Qantas has decorated previous aircraft with liveries that encompass aborigine art.  Their Wunala Dreaming aircraft was well known around the world and, in an age when airline liveries tend to be rather bland, these colorful jets are a welcome change.  They have taken a similar route with one of their new Boeing 787-9s and I saw it at Paine Field during test flying.  It came in from the south and executed a go around from relatively low level.

Then they caught me out by heading north to turn and make an approach from the opposite direction.  This required some rather swift repositioning by me.  In fact, I got to the parking lot as they were on final approach and, rather than park, I just pulled to the side, ran up the bank, grabbed the shot and then got back in the car to park properly.  It was tight but it worked out okay.

My First Attempt at Focus Stacking

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I first read about focus stacking a long time ago and I have been meaning to try it for ages.  The premise is to take a series of shots with the focus set in different positions throughout the scene and then to use software to blend the images together to create on image with focus all the way through the shot.  This seemed like a simple thing to have a try with but I never got around to having a go.  Then I came across a situation that looked like it might be a good example to try.

I was visiting a model show at the Museum of Flight.  I was taking a few photos of some of the more expertly crafted models on display.  I was shooting with a longer lens and using a relatively small aperture to try and minimize the shallow depth of field that you get when shooting small objects close up.  I decided to shoot a model of a Fairey Gannet and the shallow depth of field triggered something in the deep recesses of my brain about focus stacking.  Of course, I had not planned for this so no tripod and just an effort to get focus on different parts of the model without moving the camera too much.

I took the shots and got on with my visit.  When I got home, I almost forgot about the stacking experiment but, fortunately, I did remember.  I exported the images to Photoshop as layers of the same shot.  Then, since they were hand held, I did an Auto-Align action to get them in place.  After that, Auto-Blend was selected.  It seemed to realize that they were a blend stack rather than a panorama – quite clever – and the software quickly did its thing.  Despite not taking too many shots and do it all hand held, the result came out pretty well.  The top shot is the finished product while the lower two show the extremes of the focus range for the original shots.  If I had managed a shot focused right on the back of the fin, the result may have been a bit better still.

Pegasus Testing with the Hornet (and it’s not raining)

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My luck with KC-46s and bad weather broke recently with a Pegasus launching out of Boeing Field on a glorious day.  It was carrying out trials work with a US Navy Hornet.  This jet was the subject of its own post.  The KC-46 followed it down the runway.  It rotated in a good location and the light was so much nicer than I have had recently so I was very happy to get shots of it as it climbed out and headed off to the airspace set aside for testing.