Category Archives: photo

Need to Find Another Way Around

The seafront at Cowes moves from the Parade to Princes Green via a path that runs around the Royal Yacht Squadron. During the races, the cannons that signal the racing are mounted here (along with a lot of ceremonial cannons that don’t get used much. At this time of year, everything is gone. With the high tide, that path was a bit gone too! Th water level was high enough to mean that the path was underwater most of the time. It might have been possible to run through during the gap in the surges but no one seemed to think it was a good idea.

Where to Park Your 747?

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Evergreen Aerospace Museum has a couple of 747s as part of the campus. They are retired freighters from the now-defunct company that provided a lot of the backing for the museum when it was established. One of the 747s is sitting out in front of the main museum building. The other one is slightly more dramatic. It is parked on top of a water park that is next to the museum. The waterslides come from within the fuselage. Getting the plane up there must have been quite something to watch. Now it is an eye-catching way to let everyone know where the water park is.

Stitching a Moving Ship

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This is less of a technique post and more about the capabilities of modern software. In a previous post I discussed a visit to Vancouver to meet up with family members that had come off a cruise ship. We were down on the waterfront when the ship that they had come in on departed. As it got further away, I shot a few frames with the longer lens to try and stitch together in a panorama. The problem with this type of shot is that the ship is moving so the background is not consistent between the frames, even if you try and do them quickly. However, I handed them over the Lightroom and it did its stitching thing and the attached shot resulted. I think you would struggle to know that there was an issue based on the output. Quite impressive software performance!

Kenmore Rush Hour

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The floatplane activity of Kenmore Air is busy on Lake Union in Seattle. The end of the day means a lot of planes are moving from Lake Union back to the home base at Kenmore. It makes for a rush hour of planes coming back in good light. I wandered out to the pier at Log Boom Park which gives a great view of the incoming planes. Then I just waited. You know they are all going to be back before sundown so it is pretty predictable.

The inbound traffic is a combination of Otters and Beavers. De Havilland Canada’s finest show up further down the lake as they come across from Lake Union and then they head up the lake. On this occasion, the wind was from the north so they made straight in approaches, landed and continued straight in to the base. On another day I was there without a camera and the wind was a southerly. They then overflew the base and made a tight turn coming back onto the lake with the evening light on the nose. I will have to try and get that before too long!

Nairn Falls

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Waterfalls seemed to be a popular part of our trip to Canada. We did a short hike to the Nairn Falls, a short drive north of Whistler. We chose a rainy day to make our walk but a combination of the right clothing and the tree cover the trails enjoyed for the majority of the walk meant this wasn’t a problem. The rain certainly didn’t hurt the amount of water flowing over the falls.

The falls themselves are in stages. The first section drops down into a gully which then reverses the flow out in the opposite direction. This flow seems to involve going under some rocks so floating objects like logs get stuck whirling around on the surface but never getting downstream. You can head down to a lower level to see more of the falls. The rocks down to this level were a bit slippery given how much it was raining but there are some handrails for old geezers like me to stabilize myself with. It was worth the trip. The bottom of the falls had some strong flows crashing down and they really got your attention.

The downside to exploring the falls was that you were out in the open and the heavens really seemed to deliver while we were there. Even with the rain gear on, there was only so long I wanted to be out there getting hammered on. I made the climb back up to the top. The interesting thing was how many people we saw on the trail out and back but how few seemed to explore the falls themselves. Maybe they didn’t want to get too wet in the rain or perhaps they didn’t realize how far down you could get. I’m glad I checked it all out.

Thai Delivery

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Before the time changed, it was possible to get some evening departures from Everett in nice light after work. I saw that a delivery flight was scheduled for a Thai 787 and a Dreamlifter was due out shortly afterwards. I figured this was a good one to go for. The Thai delivery actually slipped a bit from its scheduled time and I was more than happy for it to do so as the light was getting better and better. By the time the jet started rolling, the light couldn’t have been nicer. It was also a heavy jet and rotated not far from me so I got a great angle on the takeoff and, as it climbed away, the purple in the livery seemed to glow.

High Tide Through the Drains

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The tide was very high when we got the parade in Cowes. The water level was just below the street level. Naturally, there was some swell, even though we were inside the harbor wall. This meant the water was pushing back up through the drains that normally take water from the street down to the sea. The water would force itself back up through the drains. Sometimes it was just a small amount of water but the bigger waves resulted in a bit more flow back out of the drain. Video is the best way to show this. The metal of the drain cover had the level of corrosion you would expect for something with this proximity to the sea!

P-3s May Be Going But There Are Still Some

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A trip to Whidbey Island for me and Paul was aimed at seeing whatever we could get there on a random weekday. In truth, though, what we really wanted was P-3s. With the Orions rapidly being replaced by P-8s, they are getting harder to find and will soon be a memory. Consequently, our fingers were crossed for some of Lockheed’s aging subhunters. It turned out we were lucky.

It wasn’t a busy day for the turboprops but we did get to see a few. A departure early on meant we were pleased to have had some success. We also got arrival traffic later which certainly was pleasing. Our only disappointment was that one of the planes was operating with a rare canoe under the fuselage. We saw it in the distance (when the shots are horribly distorted by heat haze) but it was operating off a different runway from that which we were near, and we never were in the right place. However, we did get some of its buddies so a successful day out.

Fall Foliage in Bothell

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The area around where I work has a lot of trees and they have turned out to be the sort of trees that get very colorful in the fall. It is really nice to be able to look out of my window and see such vibrant colors when the sun pops out (which it does do in the Pacific Northwest sometimes). I had driven down the road in the opposite direction to normal one evening and saw even more color so, when the sun was out one weekend evening, we diverted to the area so I could get some shots.

The richness of the colors is sometimes hard to represent with photos. They don’t always have the impact that being there had but hopefully some of these shots will give you an idea of how pretty the street was.

Bye Bye United 747s

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The disappearance of passenger 747s from service continues. Today is the last day for the United 747 fleet. I do not have anything of their earlier versions of the jet but I have seen the 747-400s in service a lot and have flown on them a couple of times too. I won’t be doing so again. A flight from San Francisco to Honolulu will repeat the first service and was sold out a long time ago. The planes have been heading to the storage yards in recent weeks and after today, there is one more to make the trip. Now the 777s and 787s will be responsible for the long-haul services.