Tag Archives: museum of flight

IPMS Northwest Gathering – Time to Focus Stack

Once a year, the IPMS northwest group has a gathering at the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field.  The modelers from around the region come with their creations to put them on display.  I used to make models in my youth and have done a little bit since the pandemic started but not a huge amount and definitely not that good.  I do like to go and see how good some of the work can be.  I tend to focus on the aviation models but the others are of interest and anyone that has put together a diorama is going to get my attention.

Here are a bunch of shots of the various models on display that particularly caught my attention.  When trying to photograph models the problem is that focus is usually very shallow and so it makes the subject look very small.  I use focus stacking to try and give a clearer view of the full model and make it look slightly larger.  I am doing this handheld which is not ideal and, in some cases, the shots just don’t blend well.  Most of them came out okay though.

JetStar Prototype

I’ve seen the JetStar prototype a few times in various visits to the Museum of Flight restoration facility up at Paine Field.  The JetStar is a favorite of mine as might be determined by several of my posts over the years.  The prototype is a bit different, though.  It was built with two engines – Bristol Orpheus turbojets.  After the first two aircraft, the rest were four engined.  After it finished testing, it was used by Lockheed for transport duties.  It ended up in Vancouver before coming into the museum’s collection.  These shots are of it in the restoration shop.

ALCM

The Museum of Flight seems to have two examples of the air launched cruise missile.  This is the Boeing developed AGM-86 missile.  One of them is hanging from the roof in the main museum complex while the other is in the restoration facility up at Paine Field.  I don’t know which versions of the missile they are.  Some were nuclear armed (this version remains in service I believe) while others had a conventional warhead (and I read that these were retired recently).  The missiles were widely deployed on B-52s and B-1Bs but I understand that only one wing of the B-52 now has them.

Fire Truck Renovation

Aviation museums tend to be full of airframes of various types but sometimes they have associated items that they work on.  The Museum of Flight restoration facility at Paine Field has a fire truck that they have rebuilt.  It is tiny compared to current fire trucks but it is a great example of a truck from a time long gone and it is in great shape after all of the work put in to it.  I thought I would share it here since it probably won’t get a lot of attention from everyone other than those that worked on it.

Focus Stacking Issues

There was a meeting of the IPMS northwest branch at the Museum of Flight recently.  My friend Jim had given me a heads up about it taking place and, with a day free, I figured I would pop along.  The display as a whole gets its own post but this one was about my experimenting with focus stacking.  I went to this a previous year and took some focus stacking shots handheld to see how it would go.  This time I went prepared and took a bunch of shots.

I took a tripod and my macro f/2.8 lens to try and get detailed shots while isolating the background.  There were lots of models on display, some of which were really good.  However, they didn’t all make good subjects since many were displayed in amongst lots of other models.  I picked the ones I liked as a wandered around and them went back to shoot them.  Many of the stacks worked out just fine and I include an example or two of what worked well.  However, some of them just confused the software.

I use Photoshop to do my focus stacks.  However, on one of the shots that I really wanted to work well – the FW190 which had a diorama – things didn’t work well.  I decided to Google other software solutions and came up with two other applications for focus stacking.  I downloaded trials of both but neither managed to do a good job of it.  I guess this combination of shots just made it too hard for the software to make it work.  I can see the rear fuselage markings of the FW190 showing through the wing of the aircraft.  Maybe this is a function of the narrow depth of field of the f/2.8 shots.  The wing gets blurred out a lot when the rear fuselage is in focus and it decides to take that area as the one to give preference too.

All of this is to say, I have found a new aspect of this technique that needs further investigation.  My earlier experiments with focus stacking probably made it easier on the software.  I have now started to make it a bit harder.  Maybe I need to control the aperture to get things to behave the way I want.  That might have to be tailored to make sure I don’t get the background coming in to focus too much since that separation is something that I want to preserve.  If you have experience with this, I would welcome advice.

Why Not Shoot an M-21 While I’m Here

I was at the Museum of Flight for the IPMS exhibit but, while I was visiting, I figured it would be churlish not to take a picture of the M-21 that dominates the main hall.  It is actually a bit difficult to photograph and there is a lot of contrast with the background and it is always busy so a bit cluttered.  I knew it wasn’t going to be a great shot but decided to crop tighter on the airframe and shoot bracketed exposures and maybe go with an HDR process.  It isn’t great but it came out better than I had expected.

IPMS At Museum of Flight

The IPMS has a gathering of their members for a display of their models each year at the Museum of Flight.  I went along to say hello to my friend Jim and to see what creations were on display.  While it is held at the Museum of Flight, it is not restricted to planes although there are plenty of those.  I was interested to see quite a number of rocket models including a great Atlas/Mercury launch pad diorama.

Everything was laid out on the main museum floor around the M-12 which is certainly not a bad background to have for an event.

Comet Cockpit and Cabin

The Comet may have been the first British jet airliner and the first in commercial service but it is not too well served by Museums.  I guess the stragglers got chopped up when they had served their purpose.  Everett is home to a Comet 4 though with the Museum of Flight’s restoration facility being home to one.  Progress on it has been slow but steady.  I have seen it a few times over the years.  You used to be able to walk outside and see the bits stuck outdoors but now there is commercial service at Paine Field, the ramp is a bit more secure.

On my most recent visit, I wandered through the cabin and had a look in the cockpit.  The cockpit did result in some HDR shots and I wrote a post about that here that discussed the different results Adobe software provides for HDR.  These shots just give you an idea of what the early days of jet aviation brought to the flying public.

Destination Moon Exhibit

The Museum of Flight has been holding a special exhibit this summer for the 50th anniversary of the first manned moon landing.  The museum has a number of interesting Apollo exhibits as it is but these were combined with some extra items specific to Apollo 11 and its crew.  The centerpiece of this was the command module, Columbia.  We actually waited until near the end of the exhibit before we visited but it was well worth the trip.  Columbia was in the center of the final room of the tour and you could walk all around it.

The hatch was separate from Columbia and set up so that you could look through the window of the hatch at the command module itself.  This was a nice idea but, since the exhibit was so popular, getting a moment when there wasn’t someone in the shot was unrealistic.  Other items on display included gloves worn on the surface by Buzz Aldrin (which had various checklists embroidered on patches attached to the gloves), a NASA jumpsuit worn by Neil but used for chores on his farm in later years and his Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

The display also included the recovered engines normally on display but with the addition of a part from one of the Apollo 11 F1 engines recovered by Jeff Bezos’s team.  The local Boeing connection to the project was well represented and a lunar rover was on display to highlight this too.  Even at the end of the exhibits time, there was a long line of people waiting to get in.  We had an early slot which turned out to be a good thing.  By the time we got out, the line had grown substantially.

Boeing 2707 Mockup

An online discussion I was involved in recently revolved around supersonic transports.  While the TU-144 and Concorde were the main focus, the Boeing 2707 also came up.  I had seen the front fuselage mockup of this when it was at the Hiller Museum in San Carlos.  I realized I didn’t have any good photos of it and was a touch annoyed.  Looking up the story of the mockup, I found it was now at the Museum of Flight Restoration Facility at Paine Field.

I hadn’t visited the facility since moving up here so figured a visit was in order.  The mockup is easily accessible in the main part of the hangar.  However, it is rather big and so only fits in with the nose section removed.  I had a chat with the docent and he advised that it was unlikely to be moved to the main museum building given the amount of space it takes up.  I assume it will stay where it is for the foreseeable future.  The rest of the mockup was destroyed long ago so it is great that this piece has survived as a relic of a long gone program.