Tag Archives: washington

Messing Up the F-35B Departure

Since I switched to my R3 bodies, I have been playing a lot more with low shutter speeds to emphasise speed in images. This has been a topic in multiple posts on the blog in recent years. However, it doesn’t always work out well. I know that the keeper rate will fall when shooting fast moving objects at low shutter speeds, but you hope/expect that you’ll get something worthwhile from the ones you take.

However, that doesn’t always happen. During Seafair last year, the US Marine Corps F-35B departed Boeing Field for its display. I decided to go low with the shutter speed from my location up on the tower with the aim of having the airfield background blurring out and leaving me with the plane as the dominant element in the shot with little distraction. However, when I came to go through the sequence of shots that I took, I had some sharp ones as it approached me and as it flew away but nothing that really pleased me as it was closest and alongside me.

Some of them weren’t terrible but it was a huge disappointment as I clicked through the images and came to the realisation that I had blown it. You can’t always get lucky, and I knew what I was doing so I can’t be totally surprised that it didn’t work out, but it was still a bit galling. Does this mean I won’t do it again? No. Getting the record shot is fine, but I am more bothered about having a shot I really like these days. Might as well give it a go!

An Indian C-17 Visiting a US C-17 Base

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Quite a long time since I posted some shots from this day so I am not sure why it has taken so long to add the C-17 to the mix but hey ho! The arrival of the Indian Air Force contingent at McChord last year as they headed to Alaska included the support planes. Aside from the IL-78 tanker is shared long ago, they brought a C-17 with the maintenance team and spares. McChord is very used to C-17s since it is the home of a load of them. However, seeing an Indian one show up was far more of a novelty.

Bill’s Grand Caravan Takes a Spin

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Boeing Field is home to a selection of aircraft belonging to one of the planets more wealthy individuals. The founder of a large software company has his biz jets and helicopters, but he also has a Grand Caravan on floats. In common with his other planes, the registration ends with WM. I have no idea whether he was onboard for this flight or whether it was a currency trip for the crew. It is a nice-looking Caravan (they look so much better on floats) and I guess I won’t be getting a chance to photograph it again for the foreseeable.

The Blues on the Ground at BFI

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Another run back to Seafair from 2024. While I did get some good opportunities to photograph the team in the air, I also got to get a close up look at them while they were taxiing around at Boeing Field. The formation taxiing of display teams might not get much attention, but it is requiring a fair bit of concentration from the crews. Here is a combination of shots from different times during the course of the show weekend.

Under Condor’s Sandy Jet

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The shot I always think about wanting to get is looking straight down on a plane in flight. Long ago, I discussed doing this with the WHF team at Waukegan, but we never made it work out. The next best version is the shot from beneath straight up. This is not so good because the fuselage shape is disrupted by the wing and a blank sky is never as interesting as the ground beneath. However, I do still like to shoot this sometimes. In this case, it was a Condor A330neo coming into SEA. This one is in the sand colours that they have. Probably not the contrast I would have liked but so be it.

Looking Down on Boeing’s Flightline

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The first flight a Boeing 737 makes will usually take it from Renton where it was assembled to Boeing Field – a short distance away – where the flight test facility is located. Here the jets will undergo production flight testing and acceptance testing before delivery to the customers. Given the rate of production, that means there will always be a lot of jets parked on Boeing’s ramp.

Last summer, when I was up the tower at Boeing Field, I had a good view straight along the flight line. Further up the ramp were the active jets while the spot closer to the tower (where there used to be a viewing area before Max problems meant Boeing needed to park jets wherever it could find space) tends to be used for jets that are likely to be stored for longer – planes that were going to a customer that went bust for example.

National’s A330 Moving Some Troops

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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.