A dark afternoon with a band of sunlight on the ships moored up at Naval Station Everett caught my eye. The snow on the mountains behind was in shade, sadly, but the bright glow of the foreground warships still made for an interesting shot.
Having shot the 777X test aircraft a bunch of times, I was looking for something a little different. I figured I could head out to the north end of Boeing Field and be under the jet as it was on short final. I shot something similar at LAX a number of years ago and liked the results so decided to have a go. This was not as simple as I had hoped for. First, the plane is out of sight for most of the approach with buildings and power lines in the way.
Second, I didn’t have lots of big jets to pay with. It was my first opportunity so I didn’t have time to get the hang of it. As it was, I didn’t do as good a job as I would have liked. I was shooting with a wide lens and tracking the airframe to fill the frame was trickier than expected. In the early shots, it was too far to one side of the frame and I ended up with the nose closer to the middle than ideal with the result that many shots lack a back end of the airframe. I will try it again with these issues in mind and I shall skip the long lens shots first. Making a quick switch meant I was not as well prepared as I could have been. I did grab a shot through the fence of the jet heading for touchdown with Mt Rainier in the background too.
Driving through the back roads in Anacortes, I came across Anacortes Castle. I think it is actually just a house but it is certainly one that has been styled to look like a castle. You probably couldn’t defend it from marauders very easily and the turret seemed to have a lot of open space inside but it is still an interesting looking building. It sits on a normal residential street so is quite out of keeping with the rest of the houses. Still, it is a talking point, I am sure!
I had not heard of Blue Air prior to seeing this Max on test. It is a nice thing about living near Boeing’s production facilities that you see jets that will be heading somewhere you don’t go. In this case, I read not long afterwards that this jet was the first delivery of a Max to Blue Air and that they are a low cost carrier in Romania. I guess I now know about another airline that I previously was unaware of. Looked quite nice in these colors (when you consider how bland airline colors can be there days).
Just as I arrived at Steilacoom, a small passenger ferry boat was heading in to the docks. I had no idea what it was for at the time. While I was waiting around, I looked across and saw a large building on the island across from where I was standing. Wandering down to the docks, there was a sign for the McNeil Island Commitment Center. I had no idea what this was but figured I could look it up later.
Turns out this island used to be a prison. For a long time, it was a federal prison. The feds then turned it over to the state which continued to operate it as a prison for a while longer before its high cost of operations meant they closed it down. However, the state has maintained a facility for offenders that are considered to remain a risk to the community after their sentence is complete and this is the Commitment Center. Only people visiting or associated with this place have a need to go to the island so I guess it is not somewhere I shall be visiting – at least I hope not!
The Bell 206 JetRanger was an immensely successful single turbine helicopter and was ubiquitous for decades. However, the type was dated and more modern helicopters had come along and taken market share. Bell needed to come up with a solution and that was the Bell 505 which has since become branded as the Jet Ranger X. The project was not as smooth as intended but it has now entered more widespread service.
That didn’t mean I had actually seen one, though, until recently when I got to photograph one at Boeing Field. At this point, trouble has reached the program again with fatigue failures in the controls for the right seat meaning you aren’t supposed to fly one solo from that seat until a redesigned control is fitted. This will get addressed, of course, but it is another issue for the type. The example I saw was marked as Experimental so I wonder what purpose it was being used for. According to the FAA, it is registered to Bell but what it is doing is anybody’s guess. Putting aside its technical issues, my biggest problem with the 505 is that I think it doesn’t look very good. It reminds me of a tadpole and seems to have a slight feel of a toy design compared to the other types in this class (or the original JetRanger). That is not going to make or break it of course – just a personal observation.
When out looking for wildlife, it pays to keep your head swiveling. There are the things you are expecting to see but also the odd one you weren’t. It was close to high tide as I walked far out on the boardwalk at Nisqually but the tide had turned and the water was starting to flow out. As I glanced across, I saw three shapes in the water. Some seals were drifting out with the tide. Two of them were swimming along but one had stopped close to me and was staring directly at me. Consequently, he got photographed. We stared at each other for about a minute and then he disappeared under the surface and I didn’t see him again. The other two were long gone so I assume he was chasing to catch up with them.
The most recent update for Adobe Photoshop includes a function called Super Resolution. Many of the third party plugins and stand alone image processing tools come with tools to increase the resolution of images. In Photoshop you used to have a basic way to increase resolution but it wasn’t that clever and could introduce odd artifacts. I had been advised to use it in small increments rather than one big increase to reduce the problems but I hardly ever used it.
The new addition to Photoshop is apparently based from machine learning. If the PR is to be believed, they took loads of high res images and low res versions of the same image and the machine learning came to recognize what might be there in the small shot from what it knew was in the large shot. I don’t know what the other packages aim to achieve but this new tool in Photoshop has been doubling the resolution of the shots I have played with. You end up with a file four times the size as a result of this doubling of dimensions.
I have tried it out on a couple of different shots where the resolution was okay but not terribly large and where a higher res shot might prove useful. So far the tool is available through Camera Raw in Photoshop – not Lightroom. You need to update Lightroom in order to import the DNG files it produces. There is a suggestion that Lightroom will get this capability in time which would be more user friendly from my perspective.
My computer is not cutting edge so it takes a little while to process the images. It forecasts five minutes but seemed to complete the task way faster than that. In the examples here, I attach a 200% version of the original shot and a 100% version of the new file. There seems to be a definite benefit to the output file. I wouldn’t describe this as earth shattering but it is useful if the original file is sharp enough and I might have a need for this for a few items over time.
When walking along the shore at Mukilteo, I will often see one or two Murrelets diving for food in the shallows along the edge of Puget Sound. They are not rare but nor are they particularly abundant. Consequently, I was rather surprised when at the new ferry terminal to see a large number of them swimming in the water around the new pier structures. There was a constant stream of them diving down and surfacing again.
I can only assume that something is growing on the surface of the steel posts that support the new loading spans. The birds would swim up to the posts, dive straight down for a while – presumably as they grabbed the food – and then surface at an oblique angle. The result was a cycle of birds going down and back up again. It looked really strange and seemed like something that would stop but there must be plenty to eat as they just kept going. I figured video was the best way to show what was happening so below is a short clip of them feeding away!
I have posted a fair few things from an evening spent at Paine Field after work. Ironically, the reason for actually being there is the last topic to get a post from that visit. Boeing continues to build 777s ahead of the introduction to service (eventually) of the 777X. Almost all deliveries are of the 777-300ER. Its sister ship was the 777-200LR, a lower capacity plane with longer range to meet the need of extreme range operations.
None of these have been built for a while but one more was on order. (The 777F is a variant of the 200LR and it continues to sell well.). This final 200LR was order by Turkmenistan. Getting the last of the type was of some interest but an aircraft from Turkmenistan was more unusual so I wanted to see it. Turned out it was on a test flight in the afternoon when the weather was nice and it was due back at the end of the day.
I thought it was going to mess with me. When it showed up approaching the field, instead of lining up on approach, it flew across the approach path to the west. However, this was just a feint and it then came back and flew an approach. Not the most exciting of colors for an aircraft but the last of the line and an unusual country made it worth going – besides, it was a lovely evening so being out was worth it anyway!