Category Archives: photo

What Are These Stretches of Concrete

I had a lot of time to look around while I was at Rainbow Canyon. As the day wore on and the sun came around, I started to have a clearer view to the south. In the morning, it had been quite foggy in that direction but that was burning off and I could see the above view. It looked a bit like there was a runway out there but it was so far away, I couldn’t be sure. When I got home, I looked on Google Maps. Sure enough, there are some long stretches of what looks like concrete but no indication of what there are. Do any of you know? The place is called Millspaugh if you want to look it up.

Volga Dnepr Arrives and Departs in the Crummy Weather

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The presence of the IL-76 in the Pacific Northwest showed up in a previous post of mine here. I wasn’t aware of one being back here until I was up at Paine Field and one was parked up at the Boeing facility. It had come in during the night and didn’t go back out again until I was at work. I actually saw it fly by my window as it headed out. I figured it was done but I was wrong.

The message got out that it was due back in to Paine Field during the weekend. The weather forecast was not great (again) but it was too good a chance to pass up. I was not the only one either. A lot of people had shown up to see it come in. The cloud base was pretty low and the plane was quite close in before it popped out of the murk. As it came down the approach, it was easy to see. Aside from the plane itself, the trailing vortices from the flap system were streaming behind the aircraft with the moist atmosphere making them very conspicuous.

As they floated across the threshold, the vortices were still very conspicuous and they floated a good way down the runway streaming all the way. In fact, even after touchdown, the vortices were still visible. They taxied back in to the north entrance to the Boeing ramp where the waiting committee were ready. That will be work another post of its own.

A day later the departure was scheduled. Of course, the weather was still pretty crappy. Nevertheless, I wasn’t going to pass it up. The flight was only a short one though. They were heading to Dallas and I don’t think they were carrying much. Consequently, they were lightly loaded and got off the ground quickly. The climb was steep and they were up into the cloud base before too long. Still, I managed to get a few shots of them as they went off. I wonder if I will get to see an IL-76 in the sun at some point?

Hangar Structure Remnants

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Tillamook in Oregon is well known as a home of cheese production. It is also home to an airfield that was once a base for naval airship operations. Two massive hangars were built to house the huge airships in the days before they went out of favor as a patrol vehicle. One of them remains and is the home of a museum amongst other things. The other hangar is long gone. However, traces of it remain.

The structure of these large hangars was predominantly wood but there were some concrete elements. Each end of the hangar had huge rolling doors and the posts to support that system were large concrete structures. Meanwhile, the arches along the length of the hangar were rooted in concrete bases. While the wood from the hangar has been taken away, the concrete sections remain. Whether they were too difficult to remove or just not worth the cost, I don’t know. What I do know is that they are still there and other things have moved in to operate within their footprint, in this case a lumber yard.

I include a picture of the remaining hangar for reference so you can see where the various structural elements exist within the finished building in case it is not immediately apparent. When we first passed by this location on a trip about ten years ago, it took me some time to work out what these strange items were.

Forgotten F-22 Pass

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There are a lot of air shows that I have been to over the years. You think you remember them well and then something shows up in your archive of images that you have completely forgotten about. I am a member of a Facebook group that has a different challenge each week and, when I get the next challenge, I work through my catalog to see what I have that might contribute. It is an interesting exercise in finding stuff that I had forgotten about.

This wasn’t one of those challenges but I was looking for something else when I came across this shot of an F-22 pulling vapor and shockwaves as it did a fast pass at the Rockford Air Show. Rockford was a great show that I used to go to when I lived in Chicago. They always got great static displays and performers for the flying display. The only limitation was that you were pretty much shooting in to the sun.

This F-22 made a fast pass and was clearly pulling a lot of vapor as it went. I don’t know why I forgot about this sequence but apparently I did. I had a go at processing them again to see what I could make of the shots this time compared to my technique in 2009. Not an easy shot to make work but the plane is dramatic enough to make it worthwhile I think.

Rainbow Canyon Earns its Name in the Afternoon Light

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Many of the aviation people reading this will immediately know what Rainbow Canyon is. For the rest of you, it is a canyon in Death Valley. It is part of a low flying route used for military training and it is a popular spot for photographers to get shots of low flying jets either at eye level or below you in the canyon. Today it is not going to be pictures of the jets though. The canyon earned its name because there are many layers of rock in the walls that are of different colors.

I was there in winter so the sun angles never got too high. This avoided washing out the colors of the rocks quite effectively. Even so, as the day wore on, the angle of the sun certainly improved from the point of view of getting the color out of the rocks. There was plenty of time with nothing flying so I was able to enjoy the views around the canyon a lot.

One thing that you struggle to appreciate at a place like this is the scale. I read about the Spanish first arriving at the Grand Canyon and totally failing to appreciate the scale because there was nothing to give them a reference. Rainbow Canyon, while a lot smaller than the Grand Canyon (obviously), still is deceptive. The distance across felt very small until a jet flew through and you realized how far away it still was and it was not even close to the other side. A quick look on Google Maps with the scale showing makes you realize it is actually a long way across.

Sure, Wait for the Storm

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When the weather starts to turn, you can assume that whatever you are waiting for is likely to show up just after it gets bad. In this case, a KC-46 Pegasus was on its way back to Boeing Field and the clouds were rolling in. Things were getting darker and it looked like the clouds would open. Meanwhile, the KC-46 was still a distance away.

Sure enough, the skies opened. By the time the jet was on final approach, the light had disappeared and the rain was belting down. I got some shots of it but, even with a bunch of exposure compensation, the jet was more of a silhouette than anything else. A little post processing help brought out the detail but this was not an ideal shooting situation. A dark grey jet in dying light is just what you want!

The Chase is On!

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Sometimes you find yourself in a position that yields a shot that you hadn’t anticipated. Normally shooting stuff over a long distance doesn’t do much for you because atmospheric distortion means the shots are of no use. However, sometimes the conditions are clear and things show up better. In this case I was shooting some jets on final to SeaTac. The position meant I had a good view of jets that were climbing out on departure. The departure path from SeaTac to the south is straight for a long time so you could get two or three jets climbing out in sequence. In this shot I got the three of them.

Montlake Spite House

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I saw something online about people building houses in unusual spaces. Sometimes this was because that was all the space that they had available. Other times they did it to spite someone who had the adjacent property. One of them turned out to be in Seattle so I decided to check it out when we were over there running some other errands. It is located in Montlake.

The house is a wedge shape. If you look at it from the main road, it looks like a relatively normal frontage. Nothing too special. From the wide end, it seems like a single room width property. There is a garage underneath and rooms above. Go to the other end, though, and you see just how much it narrows down. There is space for a door and that is about it. A trip to Google Maps will show you the footprint of the house and you can see how it has been squeezed in. A weird place for sure but apparently a popular house to own judging by the price it has sold for in the past!

A Caravan on Floats (Despite My Previous Comments)

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When I watched a Cessna Caravan on floats landing in Vancouver Harbour, I was rather critical of its water handling characteristics. It wallowed horribly and didn’t look like it was supposed to be there at all. However, the Caravan is not a bad plane and it is quite a rugged workhorse so I don’t have a gripe with it per se. Another float equipped example took off from Paine Field while I was awaiting something else and the combination of the afternoon light and the closeness to the plane meant I was rather pleased with the shots that were possible.

Lightroom Keyword Approach Update

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I have been using Lightroom since the first version came out many moons ago. For most of that time, I have been actively keywording my photos. It is a bit time consuming, but it does provide for good searchability and it also is useful when providing images to stock agencies. My initial keywording was a little light, but I have got a pretty good level of information in there now. The only problem is that I have to try and remember all of the different words I use for given types. I almost always forget something when doing this.

The solution to this is using a hierarchy system for the keywords. Lightroom allow you to have these hierarchies in the keywords such that, if you add one word, a whole sequence of other words will automatically be added. For example, if you want to add AH-64, it would also add Apache, military, helicopter, Boeing etc. This does require you to set up all of the words properly of course. I took a halfhearted go at this many years ago and it didn’t work out well. Recently, I decided to have another go.

This time, I wanted to do things in a more organized way. However, editing the words and the hierarchy structures in Lightroom seemed a bit slow going. Then I realized you can export and import keywords. I exported the words I currently have and it created a text file. Where I had tried creating hierarchies before, these were shown as tabbed indents from the words above them. Therefore, I figured I just had to create a text file in the same structure and then import it.

I spent a fair bit of time creating the file. Setting up the structure I wanted required a bit of thought and I had to change things a few times as I realized certain groupings would work more efficiently. I also changed a couple of times to have the one word that was likely to be used as I keyworded be the top of the hierarchy. For example, I am going to add 787-8 reliably but not Dreamliner. Therefore, if I have 787-8 at the top and Dreamliner below, it will get added without me thinking about it. The same for F-22 versus Raptor.

By taking a couple of weeks to create the list, I got it pretty well laid out. I remembered to add stuff as I went that I had initially forgotten so the final list was pretty comprehensive. I will have still missed out on some stuff but it didn’t have to be everything. All of the existing keywords are still going to be there, and I can add more stuff later if it seems valuable. Finally, I imported the file to Lightroom and boom, all of the new structures were there. Next time I add a bunch of stuff, we shall see whether it makes a significant different to the process.

One thing to note, if you have the keyword box set to Enter Keywords, this hierarchy approach doesn’t work. Much frustration ensued when I first found this. However, some good guidance was provided and by changing to Will Export, things work as intended. No idea why that is necessary but, now I know, things are okay. I am also going to progressively clean up the old keywords to get rid of the non-hierarchy ones to ease entry even further.