Tag Archives: photo

Mukilteo Lighthouse and Some Ferries

I had previously got a few shots of the lighthouse at Mukilteo while waiting to catch a ferry. I hadn’t wandered around for long though. While showing my mum around the area, we stopped off to have a look at Puget Sound. It was a cloudy day but the sun was making the occasional appearance. We wandered around the lighthouse buildings and went to watch the ferries come and go to Whidbey Island.

After a short while, the clouds briefly parted. I headed back from the water’s edge to try and get a couple of photos of the lighthouse in sunlight. The white structure is hardly interesting when it is very cloudy, even when playing with some options for exposure to give alternatives in post processing. A bit of light makes all the difference.

The same could be said for the ferries. Out on the water, they would pass through patches of sunlight when they would suddenly “pop”. A short distance closer in and then they were back out of the light. You had to take the chance when it presented itself!

BA QOTS Over the Bay

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This is just a gratuitous Boeing 747 post. The jets are fast disappearing from service with the major airlines but British Airways (those of you that call them British Air just stop!) has a substantial number of them left and they are due to stay around for a few more years. This one was arriving at SFO in 2018. It came into view across Coyote Point and headed down the approach in nice winter light. There will come a time when they are gone so appreciate it now. I have flown on more of them than I can recall so have plenty of happy memories of traveling on them.

Captain Cook Not Getting Respect

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The waterfront of Victoria Harbour has a statue of Captain Cook. This is a long way from his home town of Whitby but the lad did get about a bit. Given the nature of his efforts, you might think he deserves a bit of respect (unless you come from a place that he ended up harming irreparably). A local gull -or one of its cohorts – was clearly not from the respect camp.

Another FedEx 767

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The only civilian 767s being built at the moment are for FedEx. I posted one of them on test at Paine Field in this post. I caught another one recently. I got the departure early on as it disappeared into the clouds that were pretty low. The return later had slightly better light. The approach was terminated with a go-around resulting in some vortices streaming from the wing as they climbed out. Dark skies make for an interesting background!

Some Waterfront Freight Traffic

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The weather was not great for a portion of the holiday period so, when the sun came out, we took a trip to Shoreline to walk along the beach. A couple of freight trains passed by while we were there. One of them was just a set of locomotives on a light move while the other was a train of tank cars. The curves along the shore provide a bit more context to just how long a full sized freight train can be with the line of cars snaking off into the distance.

Asiana A350

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During the summer season, Asiana was flying their new A350s in to SeaTac. I did get some more distant shots but nothing of significance. With the introduction of the winter schedule, they changed to a lower capacity type. However, while I was at SFO, I was able to shoot one of the A350s as they continue to run there in the off season. The light was quite nice as it came in so I was pleased to get a shot. They will soon be pretty common but, for now, it was a nice catch.

Focus Stack Animation

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In some previous posts I showed the results of experimenting with focus stacking. In those posts, I would combine one of the individual shots with the finished effort to show how shallow the depth of field could be on individual shots and how deep the focus was on the final image. I was pondering whether this was an effective way of communicating the concept to someone when it occurred to me that animation might be a better way. I created a new stack of images for a different subject but this time I used Photoshop to animate the movement of the point of focus through the shot and then show the final image. This can then be an animated GIF. I wonder, does this provide a better demonstration?

State of the Pegasus Fleet

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January 2019 brought a milestone for the USAF. They accepted their first KC-46 Pegasus. Admittedly they accepted it with a number of deferred issues that Boeing has been given a few years to resolve but that are Category 1 deficiencies. I guess this should mean we will see a lot of deliveries in the coming weeks and months.

The backlog of jets parked up is substantial. There are jets parked at Boeing Field on both the military ramp and the flight test ramp. There are more scattered around the Boeing ramp at Everett. More of them are in the conversion area at the south end of Paine Field. More still are parked up across the cross runway. It’s a lot of jets and, if you are an accountant, this is a level of Work In Progress that must make you squirm. We should see them start to head on their way before too long.

Printing on Glass with FractureMe

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I do like to experiment with alternative printing options and, when I heard an ad on the radio for FractureMe, a company that prints on glass, I was curious as to how it would look. I decided to make a print with them and to see how it came out. Their approach is pretty much how it sounds. A print is created on glass with a what backing sheet to provide the base and that is it. Nothing tricky about preparing the files so I uploaded an eclipse shot I had and placed the order. I did this just before Christmas and the lead time was three weeks, probably as a result of a bunch of holiday orders.

I sort of forgot about it for a while. When I got the shipping notification, I was quite excited until I realized it would be a week for the package to make its way across the country. When it did arrive, I was quite impressed with the way it had been packed. The image was recessed into a cardboard mount that was supported by a thick sheet of corrugated card. All of this was wrapped together and then slotted into mounts on the edge of a far larger box. It was stable and well away from potential dings. It arrived in great shape along with a mounting screw for the wall.

The image looks great. The eclipse shot is not a standard type of image so I haven’t tested color reproduction with this but it does look nice and the darkness of the shot seems to work with the glass well. The first thing I had to do was clean it. It seemed to have acquired a lot of dust – presumably in the packaging phase. Now it is time to find a spot to keep it long term. For now it is sitting on the mantelpiece.

Damp Air Brings the Vortices Out at KPAE

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Damp and cloudy days are not always ideal for aviation photography but they can provide some interesting options. One weekend I was up at Everett when they were approaching from the south. The jets broke out of the cloud at quite low level but there was some light from the side coming under the clouds. The damp air meant that the jets were pulling some conspicuous vortices as they flared for landing. They were a long way off but it was possible to get some shots of them. The 747 produced vortices that were easier to see but the 787s didn’t do too badly either.