Grabbing a Passing Shot of The City

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I remember talking with a photographer for National Geographic once and they pointed out that having great photos of a subject meant having gone there twenty or more times in order to be there when the right conditions occurred. This taking of the opportunity when it presents itself is true for all of us. I often walk across Waterloo Bridge in the morning and evening. It provides a view both upriver towards the Palace of Westminster and downriver towards the City. As a commuter, I am not going to embarrass myself by stopping to take photos all of the time. So uncool!

However, sometimes the lighting or the weather is making a wonderful image. There is no way that this will happen again when I happen to have time to plan to be there and bring my better camera. Maybe I should just take a photo with the phone and accept I look like a tourist. Being on the wrong side of the bridge and being in a hurry to get my train means I am not finding a way across – no easy feat in the middle of the bridge – so the foreground might mess things up. However, get the shot and worry about that another day. For one of these, the light looked great. For the other, the buildings were disappearing into the cloud, but St Paul’s was still clear. This view is something I must not get blasé about.

The Ramp Action at Barcelona

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When I made a trip to Spain for work, my route took me through Barcelona. Not a city I have visited before, but I do plan to return. I hadn’t brought a main camera with me since it was a brief work trip, and I was travelling light but I did take my old M6 along with me. Going to a new location can mean some different airlines. However, these days the airlines across Europe are usually the same ones. Ryanair is everywhere of course. There were some converted freighters sitting on the opposite side of the airfield from my terminal. I grabbed a few shots in the brief time I had which wasn’t long given that the schedule was pretty tight.

Snowdrops at Longstock

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I am going to be repetitive on the blog for a while. I have already photographed some snowdrops on my bike rides and posted about it. Then I made a more specific visit to see some snowdrops. This will not be the last snowdrop post this year either. In Longstock, there is the Leckford Farm Shop run by Waitrose. Last year I saw lots of bluebells in the grounds when we visited. Dad told me it is a good place for snowdrops too, so Nancy and I diverted in there as part of a walk we were doing in the area.

At first, I only saw a few small clumps on flowers along the path. It had me wondering whether we had missed the peak. However, I just needed some patience. As we got closer to the shop, the area under the trees was covered in snowdrops. They looked really great. With snowdrops, if you are close, they appear to be quite well spaced. Taking shots from further back and lower down helps make them look really dense. They feel that way when you look at them but getting the photo to reflect that sense is a bit more of an effort.

Virgin Atlantic Names of Planes

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Since they first started flying, Virgin Atlantic has been naming their planes with slightly quirky titles. Many airlines have names on their planes, but they are more often something like cities, rivers, castles etc. Features of the country that the airline is based in. Virgin has a different approach, and they do like a good amount of pun activity in their names. This can also be reflected in the registration of the aircraft with the letter combination sometimes tied to the name.

I have seen this naming over the years and never really given it much thought. However, on a visit to Heathrow a while back that was aiming for something specific, I naturally got to see a bunch of Virgin jets arriving. I decided to get a few close-up shots of the names at the front and then decided to check out what other names I had come across. This is not a comprehensive list of the different planes, nor do I plan on making it a goal to get them all, but it is a fun look at some of the names that they have gone with.

The Canal Cutting in the Dark

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If you saw the previous post about the locks on the canal in Chester, you will know I was in the dark along the water. While it was very dark down there, this was a pretty busy place with people out walking their dogs or pushing their pushchairs and purchases along after some shopping in the city. I decided to walk along the canal back in the direction of the centre of town. For quite a stretch of this part of the canal, there was no lighting. A sign warned about this as you entered the darkest spot.

There was some ambient light coming down from the streets above. However, the canal course was cut into the rock so the light from above was quite a way off and things were really dark down along the path. What was slightly more concerning was that the water level was almost the same as the bank and, in the low light, it was hard to see where one ended and the other started. I was pretty cautious as I walked along.

As before at the locks, the camera was able to pick up way more detail than my eyes were seeing. There was an old bridge across the canal. According to a sign I saw further up the path, this was to connect the old prison with the chapel on the opposite side. It has since been joined by a larger bridge that carries traffic and this bridge now seems to be out of use. I was soon back out into the (relatively) lighter area and back towards the middle of Chester. As with the locks, this is somewhere I wouldn’t mind exploring in the day so I can see what it actually looks like!

Looking Back on Bones at Nellis

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I was digging through the catalogue recently. Every once in a while, I will just randomly move the slider in grid view and see what pops up. Having been taking images for a long time, there are often things that I have completely forgotten about that show up in the collection. While doing this, I came across some shots of B-1Bs launching out of Nellis when I was between the runways for a Red Flag media day. I hadn’t really done much with these images. They were a touched underexposed and I had not processed most of them.

I ended up working through a few of them as they reminded me of the amazing experience being alongside a runway when four F101 engines in full burner come by. It really does get your attention. The B-1 fleet has been shrinking in recent years, and the plan is that the remaining airframes will be retired when the B-21 fleet comes online. It won’t be too long before this sight is confined to history.

Farnborough’s Older Buildings

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In my days working in aerospace, I dealt with people at the RAE/DERA, but I never had any visits there. I went to the show, of course, and BAe moved the headquarters there and I spent plenty of time in those offices, but I never was on the government side of the site. Now it has been handed over to private developers, you can drive around the various buildings. Much of it is new development or refurbishment of old buildings.

There are some of the old facilities still there, though. A couple of wind tunnel buildings are in place – one of which has camouflage paint for some reason! There are plaques on the various buildings to give a bit of their history. I know of many test programmes that were undertaken in these facilities, and I believe they are still in use since some of the capabilities are still in high demand.

One smaller building is the remains of a water test tank. This was apparently shortened at some point and now the building still has the tank profile inside while the outside has the test rails but seems to have been filled in. It is good that so much of the original facilities is still there even as redevelopment has taken place. Sadly, I won’t get to experience what it was like when it was at its busiest.

Snowdrops Alongside My Ride

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The weather has not been great for cycling during the winter with it being wet. I have ended up riding the trainer indoors to try and keep in some shape. I did get one Sunday when it wasn’t raining but looked like it might. I decided to head out irrespective of the chance of it getting damp. I got lucky and, while it did drizzle occasionally, it was actually pretty dry. As I rode through the country lanes, there were loads of snowdrops along the side of the road and in the trees just off the road. I mostly rode on by but did stop on a couple of occasions to take some photos. Here they are.

Frame for a Balloon Hangar

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Aside from the buildings at Farnborough, there is also the frame from a balloon hangar. This was a fabric covered structure with the fabric having been lost in a storm many years ago. I read that the frame was previously in another location but was moved to this space as part of the redevelopment of the site. Some elements needed repair or replacement but much of it is original. It was repainted and assembled with some minor additions to prevent people climbing the structure. On a gloomy day, I decided a combination pano and HDR was needed to record it. Not anything like the grand scale of the hangars at Moffett Field I used to see but still cool.