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Other O’Hare stuff

The trip to O’Hare for the arrival of the United 787 meant I had a bit of time to shoot some other aircraft while I was there. I had started out at the arrival end of 28 for the 787 to show up. When we changed rapidly to 10, I was now on a good side of the field for some of the departures.

Departures at this end can be a good selection. Some will turn towards you and give a nice topside view. Others head out straight or turn away so you are always wondering whether this one will be worthwhile. I wasn’t out for a long time so this was just a chance to see what would come out before heading home. A 747 freighter is a welcome addition but it, sadly, turned away. Even so, it still looks cool. A few gave me a better view. I grabbed some shots and then headed home.

Is This Lake Real?

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The drive along Tioga Pass Road is an impressive one with plenty of dramatic scenery around you. As you get to Olmsted Point, your initial view is towards Yosemite Valley. However, if you turn around, you are looking towards Tenaya Lake. This was the next stop on my journey. Looking at the lake from Olmsted Point, it was hard to believe it was real. You are very high along this pass, often above 9,000′, and the sky is a darker blue at that height. Also, the water is clearer since it is either straight from the sky or from snow melt. Consequently, the blues are intense.

The lake looks like something that someone would create as a made up lake. It is very striking. It isn’t alone either. As you drive further towards the descent to Mono Lake, there are a number of lakes that have been created with dams and they all are pretty impressive. I don’t know how they look on an overcast day but in the sun they look great.

Road to Hana

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One of the more famous things to do on Maui is drive the road to Hana. We were advised that an early start was a good idea before the road got filled with tourists and you stopped seeing the sights and instead watched the rear of the car in front of you. I don’t know how busy it got later since we followed the advice but we certainly had a quiet road to drive.

The terrain is undulating so the road twists and turns as it makes its way around the coast. You never go very fast and the odd straight sections feel very unusual when you come upon one. There are plenty of spots along the route to take note of and lots of waterfalls to see. Some are more impressive than others and our guidebook was very effective at making sure we saw the best of the bunch but didn’t lose too much time at those that were less worthwhile.

It was certainly a nice drive and quite pretty. Whether I would agree that it is one of the most beautiful drives in the world is a very different story. Worth doing if you have the time but not unmissable. I am glad to have done it but won’t feel compelled to do it again if we should return. There certainly isn’t too much in Hana to do once you get there! However, it does provide access to some of the nice features of the south side of the island which I actually found more appealing.

Playing with Noise Reduction

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One of the biggest developments that there has been in digital imaging in recent years has been the improvement of performance in low light. A few years ago, it was hard to get a decent image at above ISO400 and much post processing work was required to try and make the images workable. Plug-ins for noise reduction were very popular. However, the camera manufacturers have been very aggressive in developing chips and processors that allow shooting at ISO levels that would have been unthinkable a while back. You hear of cameras being perfectly acceptable at ISO6400 and above.

My cameras are not the newest on the market but there are certainly not slouches in low light. However, I have never been terribly happy with the performance at high ISO settings with the image breaking up a bit when viewed up close. This is where I have to admit that I can be a complete idiot sometimes.

I shoot RAW all of the time and then process the images in Lightroom. I have created some presets of development settings that I apply each time I import an image and which then acts as the starting point for any additional editing. This is where my problem lies and why it has taken me so long to realize it I can’t imagine. Anyway, enough of the self-flagellation and on with the topic.

The problem lies in the Detail section of the Develop module. This is where sharpening and noise reduction are applied. I have some basic settings I start with here and, when I was importing shots taken at high ISO settings, I was not changing them. I would play with the noise reduction but things still didn’t look right. The problem was, of course, the sharpening. The basic setting I had entered was sharpening far too much for the ISO setting and was causing some odd breakup of the image. I finally realized this one morning while lying in bed – I have no idea why I was thinking of this but it suddenly came to me.

I got up and opened some high ISO images and went to the detail area. I zeroed out the sharpening and the noise reduction. Everything looked awful. Then I brought back the noise reduction and things suddenly started looking a lot better. When I was happy with the noise, it was time to bring back some sharpening. Things were a little soft after the noise was taken out so the sharpening brought back a bit of punch to the image. A tweak on the amount and opening up the radius a bit made things look good. Then a more aggressive level of masking of the sharpening and suddenly the image was looking way better than before.

When I was happy with things, I saved a new preset that was just sharpening and noise reduction and labeled it as High ISO Detail. Now I can apply it to any images that need it and be in a far better starting position for further processing. Each image will require its own approach if I am going to make more effort on post processing but I will now be starting from a far cleaner place. The samples above are comparison of approximately 100% crops with my original settings and the revised approach. Hopefully you can see the difference. It might be annoying to realize you have been missing something for so long but at least I finally worked it out!

Pano 360

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There is an app I have had on my phone for a while called 360 which is for taking panoramic photographs. I have had it for quite a while and have mentioned it before here but they have progressively introduced new features over that time. While the new operating system has a pano function built into the camera (if your phone isn’t too old), it is rather basic and nowhere near as good as this one.

Taking images requires a little planning since you are able to take a full spherical image. Doing this without having the whole thing look strange in close requires you to keep the camera point itself unchanged as you turn around. This is harder than you think. The software can compensate a bit but you need to try and get it right in camera as much as possible.

It shows you a grid of the total shot and so you can see which bits you have shot and what is needed to fill it all in. It gives you a live preview as you shoot including looking straight up and down when required. Once the image is complete (or as much of it as you want), it processes it and then you can upload it to a website to view later. The links here are from that site. It is a great app and fun in some situations and valuable in others when showing off a wide view is hard to do any other way.

When checking this examples out, don’t miss out on a cool feature. At the top of the viewer are three buttons. It starts on the middle setting which allows you to pan around. If you click on the left button, it creates a view from the ground up. The right button creates a view looking straight down. (This only works properly if I have shot a full 360 image.) This looks like the work that Gerry Holtz has done and I blogged about here although his is far superior.

Muscle Cars

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My friend Joel recently suggested a trip out to a car show near O’Hare at the Rosemont convention center. It was a display of muscle cars. While this is a generation of vehicles that I know nothing about since American cars of the 60s and 70s were not something that meant anything to me in the UK, the chance to see some great restoration work and to see something different to my normal interests meant I was keen to go along.

The show was very well attended and there were plenty of cars on display. The quality of restoration work was generally very good. Some great looking cars and some proud owners willing to talk about what they had done to get their cars to the condition that they were in. I was seeing a whole bunch of cars that I had never seen before so that was interesting. For those who grew up with these cars, it would have been a far more interesting time since seeing these old cars would trigger lots of memories. However, I still had a good time and will certainly go again if the chance arises. If you want to see more, I do have a gallery of images here.

Windsurfing and Kiteboarding

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Being on the north side of the island of Maui, we were also able to see a bit of the watersport activity that people can get up to. The north shore is famous for surfing of course with Jaws being the most well known of the surfing locations. That is a little inaccessible and the surf is not huge at the time of year we were there. However, there are plenty of other ways to have fun.

With the steady, strong breeze, this is a great spot for windsurfing or kiteboarding. As we wandered along the shore near our lunch location, we could see plenty of people out having some fun. They were making great progress as a result of the strong winds and were great to watch. It is always fun to see someone who is good at something doing it well. I grabbed a few shots before we went on our (far more leisurely) way.

Festival of Light Fireworks

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Every year in the run up to Christmas, the traders on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago have a parade to get the shoppers interested. The parade has a strong Disney theme to it and attracts large numbers of families with small kids. You might be surprised to know this is not a big deal to me. However, they do finish it off with a fireworks display on the Chicago River and that is something I am happy to see.

Finding a spot to watch them from is something that is not so easy since a huge number of people are already there to see the parade. I had intended to stand on the Wabash Avenue bridge which provides a good view along the river to the display. However, that was not possible since the bridge was full of people looking at the parade, even though it was a long way away. However, dropping down to the river level provided a spot that did not give a good view of the parade but was absolutely fine for the fireworks.

I got set up with two cameras, one for stills and another for video. Rather than take a full tripod setup, I took a couple of Gorillapods to mount on to the railings along the river. This proved to be a good setup. It was flexible, easy to carry and didn’t get in anyone else’s way. One downside is that a tripod does tend to act as a bit of a deterrent to passers by. This setup seemed to encourage people to bring their kids close to my stuff so I had to make sure the kids kept their hands to themselves since their parents didn’t seem bothered about what they were up to.

Solomon Island

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We had the great pleasure of traveling to Maryland to stay with our friends Mark and Rosie a while back. They are friends of ours from the UK who are currently in the US for work. We spent the weekend with them and got to enjoy a part of Maryland that neither of us had spent much time in before. They live down near where the Patuxent River meets the Chesapeake Bay and there is plenty of water around you wherever you go.

As someone who grew up by the sea, I have always enjoyed being by the water. A good local spot to visit is Solomon Island and we decided to head there for a walk around and a spot of lunch. Since they have a boat, Mark and I decided to go by water while Nancy and Rosie took the car. I wanted to have a blast about in the boat and Mark wanted to go a bit faster than he would if Rosie was aboard so this worked for all of us.

United 787

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A while back I was in Seattle and headed up to Everett to see the large numbers of 787 airframes parked up awaiting rework and delivery to their customers. When you see that many of them lying around, sometimes it is hard to remember that some of them are now getting delivered and entering service. One of Chicago’s local airlines (if you have a local airline these days) is United and they are the first US operator to take delivery of the aircraft.

Houston is the base of operations for the early aircraft but as they are trying to build experience for the crews, they are carrying out internal flights before taking the planes overseas. The first revenue flight was a leg from Houston to Chicago O’Hare. I was interested in covering this for the magazine since they were planning a reception for the aircraft when it got to O’Hare. The Chicago airport media relations people were not handling the event but they gave me the contact details for United. Sadly United were not inclined to respond to inquiries.

However, I decided that it was worth heading up to O’Hare anyway since the forecast was looking quite pleasant. Admittedly, these things will soon be a very common sight but getting the first arrival seemed like something worth spending a morning on. (In truth, the 787 had already been to O’Hare a few times on proving flights but let’s not get too picky!)

I was not the only one there. A lot of people had shown up and the place under the approach to 28 was pretty busy. That is until they changed runways shortly before the 787 was due in. A convoy of cars suddenly headed out to get around to the 10 arrivals. I was part of the convoy and found a spot that seemed reasonable. I had barely got out when the 787 came into view. Fortunately, the sun was being cooperative and the 10 approach actually was better for putting the light on the nose of the aircraft rather than the rear. I wonder how long it will be before I get bored with United 787s showing up.