Category Archives: photo

Brickworld 2016

When we lived in Chicago, we made a couple of visits to the Lego convention, Brickworld. Some of the Lego creations on display were really impressive and I have included them in previous blog posts. It just so happened that, this year, Brickworld was on the same weekend that we were in the Chicago area for my niece’s graduation. We had a little spare time on the morning that we were flying home so we decided to check it out en route to the airport.

The venue has changed from when we last went. It is now at a larger location and everything is in one large room. The previous place had four smaller rooms. This seemed to result in the more advanced pieces being grouped together. Now everything is scattered around the one space. Combined with the many retail stands, it made things a bit more tricky to see in a short space of time. Even so, we managed to cover everything enough to feel like we hadn’t missed out on anything. I even managed to FaceTime my sister in the UK so she could see some of the stuff from a long distance!

As with previous years, there were plenty of impressive creations. A section of downtown Chicago from the area we used to live was very cool. A recreation of a baseball stadium seemed to be incredibly detailed but it was quite hard to see since it was enclosed in a case. A guy had produced a detailed representation of a building from his home town in Europe. A Middle Ages scene from previous years had received some updates. My favorite, though was a scene from D-Day.

The scene consisted of a landing craft with soldiers and vehicles coming ashore on a Normandy beach having taken the area in battle. The level of detail was impressive with the water created from thousands of little pieces. I have no idea how many total pieces were included but it was clearly a lot. It must have cost a small fortune to put together combined with a lot of time and effort. A very impressive effort.

RO-6A Lurking Around

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A while back a friend of mine told me about a modified Dash 8 that the Army was using that had been flying out of his airport. It ended up coming to Livermore – a short drive from home. I went to see it but it was parked in a hangar on the other side of the field and I couldn’t see much. It flew a few times but never when I could see it. I figured that there was nothing much to do since I wouldn’t see it. Imagine my surprise when I came across its siblings.

I was driving around Tucson International when I saw two Dash 8s parked up. Sure enough, they were in the same configuration as the previous one. This time they had their civilian markings obscured. A little check with Google and they are apparently RO-6A airframes. The Air Force operates Dash 8s to monitor ranges for traffic under the -7 designation but these are different. Spooky stuff no doubt. Sadly, they didn’t move while I was there but they had been active. I was just glad to catch them out in the wild.

Park at Your Own Risk

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Pacifica is a town built on cliffs that are not terribly resilient. The water progressively eats away at the base of the cliffs and, inevitably, things end up falling in to the ocean. I recently heard about a couple of apartment buildings that have been evacuated because of their proximity to the edge. I passed a building that had signs up in the parking lot advising you to go no further. As I got further around, I could see why. You can park there I guess but you might not have a car to come back to!

Coolest Landing Light

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While walking along the ramp at Davis Monthan I was looking for different shots of the A-10s that were arriving for Hawgsmoke. The lights on the nosewheel of the A-10s have been replaced with an LED based solution. This is clearly not the original light. It actually looked to me like it was a circuit board rather than a cluster of LEDs. I didn’t see it lit up but I don’t doubt that it’s bright. I just think it looks rather cool.

Waiting for Amtrak

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While we were walking around Truckee, a UP freight train pulled in to the town just short of a grade crossing. At first I assumed it was going to head into the pass but it didn’t move. We then figured out that an Amtrak train was due in from the opposite direction but was running about an hour late. (The flight only started in the Bay Area so I have no idea how late it might have ended up being by the time it got to Chicago.) Since there is only a single track, the UP train had to wait until the route was clear. We left before it did so I hope they got on their way before too long.

National Guard Chinook

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San Carlos Airport is home to the Hiller Aviation Museum. In times past they used to have an event called Vertical Challenge. It was a big gathering of all things rotary winged. Sadly, the challenge ended but the current team is trying to reestablish something similar. They have a smaller gathering called Heli Fest and I went along to shoot with the team for this year’s event. It was a normal day for admissions to the museum but the arrival of a lot of different airframes provided a lot more to see so the visitor numbers were significantly up.

The biggest visitor was a Boeing CH-47F Chinook for the National Guard unit at Stockton. They carried out a few passes before landing. Since the airframe is a little large and has quite a rotor diameter, they shut down on the ramp and were towed in to their parking spot. Once in place, they were open t visitors to come and look through the helicopter and talk to the crew.

No surprise that there was a steady stream of people checking out the Chinook during the course of the day. It is a great looking machine and the crew was busy answering questions throughout the day. When things were wrapping up, they taxied out and took off. A flyby was a necessity prior to going home. The Chinook is a very fast helicopter to the pass was pretty zippy!

: A US Army Boeing CH-47F Chinook taxis out for departure at San Carlos CA.

Squaw Valley Aerial Tram

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If you want to go the top of the mountains, you might as well travel in style. An aerial tram (cable car for the Brits out there) runs from the center of the resort to the top of High Peak. We went in to buy our tickets only to find out that they were running a special for the last weekend of the ski season and both of us could go up for less than I was expecting to pay for one of us! Nice result.

Whenever I see these contraptions, I can’t help but think of them in the context of so many movies I saw as a kid. Invariably, someone would end up on the roof in a perilous situation. The real thing is of course a lot less dramatic. The larger these things are the smoother the run seems to be. The only disturbance is when you pass over the towers but this one was large enough that the transition was very gentle. The swing was nicely damped too so it was really a non-event.

The thing I find quite amusing is how the cables sag under the load of the car. As you get towards the steepest part of the climb, the car seems to head straight for the cliff face before it pulls up to the next tower. It is all very simple really but it still looks cool. Our trip up was pretty quiet because we were early. By the time we came down, things were quite a bit busier. I liked the display screen in the car that had all of the key parameters for the service so you could see that the loads and wind speeds were well inside limits. Just as well!

Dutch Training

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The Dutch F-16 training unit has been at Tucson for a while now. It moved from Springfield IL to join the Arizona ANG unit at the International Airport. I have seen their jets before but it was nice to see them again. The Dutch F-16s have been through an extensive upgrade program but the airframes are knocking on a bit. Built by Fokker as F-16A/Bs in the early days of the program, they have soldiered on while the USAF retired their F-16As a long time ago. I didn’t get a lot of chance to shoot the Dutch jets but managed to catch a few during my time there.

This Harpoon is Not the One We Flew In!

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One of our party on the trip to Eagle Field commented on whether it was a rule that all airfields have a derelict Harpoon parked on them. While we had traveled down in a pristine example, parked a short distance away from us was a Harpoon that was not in the greatest of shape. Most of it seemed to be there but some bits had gone. The effect was to expose the aircraft and make it look more like a skeleton of a plane. When the light angles were nice and low, the texture on the plane was really nicely picked out too. I have no idea what the future holds for this plane but I doubt it is going anywhere in a hurry.

New Zoomify Trial

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I previously added a Zoomify image to a blog post. It was pointed out that, as a Flash based format, it didn’t work on some mobile devices. That was using the default Photoshop installation. I have now found a way of generating an HTML5 version of the Zoomify output. This is a trial to see whether it works. Let me know in the comments. Click here to see the file.