Category Archives: photo

Spider Hiding Out

My effort at shooting macro images of bees in our front yard (this post) also yielded a surprised. While I was waiting on a flower for the bee to come to me, I noticed the flower already had a resident. A little white spider was hanging out in there. I am not sure what its intended prey was. It seemed a bit small to take on a bee but I have no idea if that could happen. Maybe it wanted something smaller. I got a couple of shots of it that interested me. The prime shots show its “face” in detail. Macro shots have a very shallow depth of field so I missed with plenty of shots but one or two had the end of the legs in focus. The detail of the hairs on the legs was so cool so I include that too even if it looks like I missed focus on the shot (which obviously I did!).

Fort Worth F-16s

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Ahead of an ISAP symposium many years ago, my friend Richard had arranged a visit to JRB Carswell at Fort Worth. As well as being the home of the Lockheed Martin assembly plant, it also hosts the 301^st FW of the USAF Reserve with their F-16s. They were great hosts and we got to spend a bunch of time around the base. On their ramp space, we had a lot of freedom to shoot them prepping for missions and heading out.

We also got to go to the EOR and see them come in after their missions and have the jets safed prior to taxiing back to the ramp. Being close to the jets while they are doing real work is such a different experience to seeing them at an air show when things are all a bit more contrived. This was a new experience for me at the time and so I was following the example of a few of the other guys when looking to see what sort of things to get shots of. It was a great learning experience and a bunch of fun too!

Building a Tower Crane

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Tower cranes are ubiquitous in big cities. The only way to construct tall buildings, there are the sign of a prosperous city when there are lots of them. They can be a nuisance when you are taking photos of a skyline of course since they interrupt the flow of a cityscape. You seen them all the time but you don’t often get to see how one is assembled. When we were watching the tower construction across from our building in Chicago, we got to see the cranes being put together.

The first thing that is needed is a big crane! Got to have a crane to make a crane! The base was put in place and then the cab was lifted into place. From this, the elements of both booms were lifted and attached. Then the counterbalance weights could be added along with the machinery to do the lifting work. It was fun to watch it all go together and to see the guys walking around on the structure once it was in place including all of the bracing elements. Once the crane is complete, there is a sleeve section that allows the inner section to be slide up and a new section to be inserted.

Two cranes were built for this project. They were both within the footprint of the building so it grew around them and they grew above it. There was never terribly much of the crane exposed above the building so it was well supported. One of the crane operators on this project used to take his camera up. He had a great selection of images from up there with all sorts of things going on a round him and some incredibly variable weather. I will have to see whether those images are still available online.

American West

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In the saga of mergers that have characterized the US airline industry over the decades, plenty of airlines have disappeared – subsumed into a larger merger partner. One such airline is American West. I was looking for some old shots for another project and came across a bunch of shots of this airline. It merged with USAir and then ultimately into American Airlines. It had a more interesting color scheme than is usually the case these days so I figured I would pop a few shots of their jets into a post.

I believe one of these jets is a retro scheme as part of the American Airlines retro jet program. The rest, though, are from the days when the airline was an active competitor. A search on the registrations of some of these jets would have, until recently shown them as still active in the American Airlines fleet. Now, with most of the fleets on the ground and given the age of some of these jets, I suspect a lot of them won’t be making it back in to service.

Ferraris on State Street

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There have been plenty of posts about sports cars from our time in California and Washington. However, when we lived in Chicago, there were always a ton of exotic cars around the city. These would be in regular use rather than part of organized gatherings. However, one weekend, there was a gathering of Ferraris on North State Street. I had completely forgotten about this until recently working through some old shots.

There was a combination of new cars with some older but no less exotics examples. An F40 was there along with Testarossas. Having this on a busy street in the center of the city seems pretty odd now but it was definitely cool at the time. Here are some of the nice motors that were on show that day.

The Edwards Museum

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Edwards AFB has been the home to an amazing range of interesting aircraft types. Many of them have found their way to prominent museums around the country given the significance of what they achieved. Others never found interest and got disposed of. Some never lasted long enough to be preserved given the hazardous nature of what they did. However, there was a storage program for the rest and Edwards has a museum of some of these preserved airframes.

I haven’t been to Edwards for a long time so I don’t know what the current situation is with the collection but I did get to check it out on a previous visit. The collection was mainly front line types that had been used for testing purposes. (This is the USAF side of things rather than the NASA collection.) There are some types there that I didn’t see which I would like to have done like the YA-7F. However, there was a test A-7D with an air data boom. Here are some of the shots I got that day. I also shot a couple of other jets that were away from the rest but these were only with my phone and phone quality in those days was not what it is now.

Bees at Work

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The Puget Sound area is currently abloom. Everywhere you look there are flowers. It is quite beautiful. We haven’t seen too many hummingbirds on our feeder recently and it’s not hard to see why when they have so many places to feed right now. We have some blooms in our front yard too and this means the bees are visiting. I decided to try and use the macro lens to get some shots of them. My lens is a Tokina unit. I bought it for the negative scanning process for which it worked well. However, the focusing drive is not fantastic and it hunts a bit when I use it for things other than manual mode. However, it is still worth a shot. Here are a couple of bee shots from the yard. I can’t go anywhere so I may as well shoot at home!

Dreamlifter Before Sunset

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This is my first shoot of a moving plane that wasn’t taken from my yard since the virus shelter at home started. With a slight relaxation of the state rules, I saw that a Dreamlifter was due in to Paine Field from Charleston. It was due to arrive some time after 8pm. With the sundown not long before 9 and the weather looking lovely (unlike the forecast for the rest of the week), it seemed like the light would be very good. I have got a lot of Dreamlifter shots at this point so, if it had been anything other than shortly before sunset, I wouldn’t have thought of going. With this light, though, why not.

I was tracking it on two services and they showed rather different arrival times. I got there with some margin just in case but, even so, the jet was already getting ready to turn downwind when I pulled up. The arrival procedure takes a while so it wasn’t a rush, but I should probably have added a little time. The sky was so clear you could see the jet flying the approach from miles out. As it turned to final, the low light angle even picked out the texture on the side of the jet! The air was still so you could hear it from a long way out too. After all that, it was suddenly so close and touched down just a little away from my spot. Time to pack up and head home.

Another Look at the Hoh Rain Forest

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I was recently watching a video of a landscape photographer and he took a trip to the Hoh Rain Forest on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. Nancy and I went there on a vacation a few years ago and I posted about it here. I decided to go back and look at some of the images from that visit and see what I liked. I had taken a bunch of photos in multiple locations on that trip and I found that I had not really given many of the shots any effort.

I decided to take a look at both those that I shared in the original post but also some “new” ones. I realized that a little effort made the images so much more interesting. The rain forest is so lush and there is so much green that it almost seems unnatural. I brought down the exposures a bit and did punch of the saturation a little. It does look a little overdone but I assure you it is actually a reflection of what the place is really like. I think digital cameras tend to tone down greens a bit and, when the place you are looking at is all green, this is a bit of a problem that needs to be addressed.

Oho is about four hours drive from where we are now. A bit of a trek for a day out but I think a trip over to that side of the peninsula is definitely something we should do again before too long. We can also check out the coastline over there which is really stunning.

An Old RIAT Since This Year’s Is Scrubbed

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When I lived in the UK, a trip to RIAT was a regular thing for me. After I started shooting digital, I was living in the US so RIAT was more than just a day trip. My first visit with the digital camera was in 2006. I had to be in the UK for work so I timed it to coincide with RIAT because, you know, it would have been rude not to. With RIAT canceled this year due to the ongoing virus issues, I figured I would jump back to this show to provide some highlights.

I spent two days there. I made my first arrivals day visit and spent the day at the west end which was really nice. Planes were arriving from that direction anyway so it worked out well. The conditions were really nice on both days too so it was a fun and successful shoot. Mikoyan-Gurevich brought there MiG-29OVT demonstrator with thrust vectoring and it flipped its way around the sky with abandon. There was the usual selection of types from around the world which makes RIAT so fun. There were also some older UK types making an appearance like the Canberra demonstration – the last RAF Canberra flights I saw – and the old Twin Pioneer.

A Czech Mil-24 Hind helicopter gunship in special tiger dquadron markings overflies RAF Fairford, UK.

Hopefully there is something in this selection that will be of interest from a great show. There have been more RIAT visits since so maybe I shall dig out some stuff from those years if I continue to struggle for material for future posts!