Tag Archives: washington

National’s A330 Moving Some Troops

Another one from the archive. National Airlines has made a few appearances in this blog over the years. I do find their livery very cool and a welcome change from the norm on airlines. They had one of their A330s in Boeing Field on, I believe, a troop transport flight. I don’t know that for certain and don’t know why it wasn’t at McChord but I’m not complaining.

The light was better on the aircraft when they were loading it up on the Modern ramp. Unfortunately, departures were towards the north which meant the only option for a takeoff shot was going to be over by the terminal building and that would mean quite strong backlighting. Nevertheless, I figured it would be worth a try. You can get quite a good angle from that location on a rotating aircraft provided that it uses a reasonable amount of the runway.

However, there are two downsides to the images that you get. First, the aforementioned backlighting is not going to make for an easy job processing the image. The latest masking tools in Lightroom do give you more flexibility with what you do but there is only so much you can do before things look really funky. The second issue is that the Boeing ramp is going to be in the background which makes for a very cluttered view. In hindsight, I should have tried going with a very low shutter speed to try and blur as much of that distracting material as possible. Guess I won’t be trying that out for a while!

Canadian Hornet Visits BFI

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Digging back through some stuff from last year and I came back across a surprise that I got at BFI. A Canadian Hornet had been visiting – presumably an overnight stop. It was heading off to its next stop and I have no idea whether that was back over the border or further into the US. Its presence had clearly attracted a fair bit of attention. There were loads of people out on the Modern ramp when it taxied out.

Hornets can get off the ground pretty quickly and I was hoping that the pilot would not be very high by the time he came by. With all of those people on the ramp, it would be nice of him to keep it low and he didn’t stay on the deck but still made a good effort. As he passed the perimeter fence, he pulled up a bit harder and was a bit too distant for a good shot of the vortices forming on the LERX, but I managed a hint of it.

Fat Albert Takeoff and Video of Return

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When I was up the tower at Boeing Field for Seafair last year, I got to play around a bit with what I shot of the Blue Angels C-130, Fat Albert. The takeoff was a straightforward as it was departing in our direction so photographing it as it left the ramp and then rotated and climbed past was the obvious choice for me. However, when it came to the return to landing, I was wondering what to do.

The threshold is a long way from the tower, so any shots of the landing were going to be quite distant and, given the heat haze, unlikely to be that good. I figured I might try video and, with the 200-800 having such good stabilisation, thought this might be practical. It turned out surprisingly well with the original video being pretty stable. I did apply a little extra stabilisation in Resolve afterwards. The worst elements are down to operator error where I had a few moments where I ended up moving the camera very jerkily and there is nothing that the post-production can do to fully disguise that! Shame I didn’t plan ahead enough and avoid having that happen when near the flare!

Second Weekend Flyover – Super Bugs

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The football season includes both college and professional games. I shared some shots of some US Navy F-35Cs that had been in Seattle for a UW football game flyover. They were not alone, though. The Navy also brought some Super Hornets for the Seahawks game on the Sunday. Nancy had come along with me to see the F-35s depart and I was ready to move on, but she enjoyed the departure of the first jets and was happy to wait for the Hornets to go out too.

The nice thing about flyovers is that you know that they will go on time because the game will start to a schedule. They often depart early and fly around locally until the time comes for the flyover. I assume this also builds in some capacity in case they have an issue with one of the jets. We watched them blast out of Boeing Field and then headed on. The return would have been okay, but I wasn’t that bothered, and it was a nice day to be out.

Cargolux Turns on to the Approach

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The joy of the 200-800 lens is the ability to get some really distant shots of something when a spontaneous opportunity presents itself. I was in Seattle at the locks in Ballard when I saw the familiar shape of a 747 approaching. Since passenger 747s are few and far between these days, I figured it would be a freighter and, sure enough, the Cargolux colours were on this example. It came close overhead as it headed for the approach path to SEA.

It was well beyond our location when it started to turn south on the approach but, courtesy of the long reach of this lens, I was able to get a decent shot of it as the topside came into view during the turn. It was a bit of a gloomy winter day, so the conditions weren’t ideal. However, no big heat haze issues to reduce image quality too much – although you aren’t getting great clarity at that range. How nice it is to see a 747 these days.

The Ride to the Next Phase

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This is just another British Airways Boeing 787-10 so maybe not something too exciting. However, this was the plane that was going to take me and Nancy to the UK as we wrapped up our time in the US. The plane was just another plane making another trip but, for us, it was the transition from one phase of our lives to the next. I have occasionally wondered about the journeys people are making when I see a plane coming from a long way away. It could just be a work trip or a vacation but sometimes it is a really significant transformation. This flight was that for us. Onwards!

Nice Retro Paint Job

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I am not very good when it comes to identifying some of the older light aircraft types. I have some friends that will be despairing of me if they are reading this because they can tell any of these different types at a glance. Sorry about that guys. This plane took off from Paine Field one sunny evening and the old military style paint job looked lovely in that light. It looked like a Cub but I looked it up when I got home. Apparently it is an L4X and listed as Experimental. It isn’t listed as a Piper so maybe it is a home built of some sort. Whatever its origin, it did look nice with the sun on it.

Head on For GlobalX

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The GlobalX operations at Boeing Field had become a pretty regular thing so were not necessarily enough to pique my interest. However, I was passing the field when one was getting ready to depart and, since it was a cold, winter day, I figured that heat haze was not going to be too bad. As a result, I decided to go to the street at the departure end of the runway to try a head on shot. I knew they would rotate a long way from me but decided to see what the result might be.

I was quite pleased with the results with the haze being limited and, while I was shooting through a fence, there was not a significant reduction in image quality. This A320 is one that GlobalX took on after it departed the Alaska Airlines fleet. The majority of the airframe is plane white but the rudder has to be balanced after painting, so it was clearly easier to leave it with the remnants of the Alaska livery to save time and money. Not sure who was on this flight, but I imagine they were probably not there by choice.

Comparison of a Couple of Edits

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Every once in a while, while I am searching for something specific in the Lightroom catalog, I will come across a previous shot that catches my eye for some reason. This might be because it was something interesting, something I had forgotten about or just something that I think might benefit from a re-edit. Sometimes I have changed the way in which I approach edits and in others there is a new tool that has been added which I think will benefit the edit. This image was exactly that. I thought that the masking tools now in Lightroom would make for a more flexible approach to balancing the different parts of the image. I played around with it for a while. Because Lightroom allows you endless virtual copies, you can try something new out without having to lose what was there before. I then created a combination of the two edits to show how differently the same raw file can end up.

Paine Field Light Traffic

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During the winter, the conditions in the Pacific Northwest can often be overcast, gloomy or downright wet. These are not great if you want to spend some spare time aviating. It doesn’t preclude this, but it doesn’t encourage it either. Consequently, when the sun comes out, a lot of people suddenly go flying. I did head up to Paine Field on one of those days as it was getting later in the afternoon. I imagine it had been pretty busy earlier in the day, but I had other things to do that day. Even so, I still caught a few of the local flyers making the most of the nice day and imagine that, as spring comes around, they will be back out again.