A Piper Malibu was launching out of Boeing Field last year. Things were quite busy and the tower asked them to make an early turn downwind once airborne. They clearly took them at their word because they barely seemed to be off the ground before yanking it in to a tight turn to the north. I doubt they even passed the tower! They were only going a short distance and were due back about fifteen minutes later so I guess they know the area well.
If you follow Formula One, you will have seen that the Renault team recently changed their name to Alpine. This is an old brand that has recently been reintroduced by the company. I popped down to Exotics@RTC recently to see what was showing up and came across a pair of Alpines of differing vintages. One was a new one to me but the younger example did seem rather familiar. I guess I must have seen them in the UK when I was younger.
A few people were hanging around them but I thought they weren’t getting the attention that they deserved. Exotics@RTC has a never ending supply of McLarens, Ferraris, Porsches and Lambos but these were something that definitely deserved the title exotic.
I was in a location where a couple of the departures from SEA were overflying me. I happened to have the camera to hand (of course I did) and I had the polarizer on there at the time. I had an Alaska Airlines 737 (what a shock from SEA) and a Hawaiian Airlines A330. I grabbed a few shots. The thing I like about the polarizer is cutting down on the glare from the white fuselages but they were still pretty bright. The rest of the sky was darkened considerably and, when editing to address the white fuselages, even more dark. I quite like the deep and moody look it gives to the shots with very little editing involved. Both jets pulled some vapor as they came through the same area so clearly there was extra moisture in that one spot. Maybe it was a thermal?
I’m not sure whether too many people noticed but a few weeks back, this blog briefly went offline. I had got a warning email from my hosting company that I had some content on the site that was not consistent with my plan. One of those files was an old file I had stored there to share with someone so I deleted it. The other was a folder that a backup plugin uses to create temporary files that are then sent to a cloud service. I left that one alone.
I got a second email with a similar warning, despite the first file having been deleted but discovered that the account was already suspended. There then followed a fair bit if discussion with their tech support to give me enough access to allow me to actually delete the files. When I got in via FTP, I came to see their worry. The backup folder is supposed to be emptied after the files are copied off. That is happening fine now but there were two years of daily backups sitting in there that never got deleted. Over 4,00 zip files with a huge amount of data in them. No wonder they were annoyed.
Deleting them took a while to do, not least because they took longer than the temporary access period I had been granted so we had a few cycles of getting back in again. However, they all got removed eventually and I was allowed to go back to normal.
There is some rationalization underway in the Japanese airline business at the moment. JAL and ANA are both taking control over smaller operations as a result of the difficulties that COVID has placed upon them. However, even before COVID reared its ugly head, JAL had created a new subsidiary. This is called Zipair. I recently read that it is due to start operations soon which surprised me because I thought I had seen its planes before. It turns out I saw one of their 787s as it was parked up at Narita when the flight I was on was taxiing in after landing. I guess that airframe hasn’t had much use yet.
The title is not intended to catch you out, but it probably will. These photos are in Washington rather than Hawaii. Cape Disappointment has a small beach tucked under the cliffs and it goes by the name of Waikiki. At the tail end of my trip there, I saw that a group of surfers had gone in to the water and were making the best of the waves which, since they were a lot smaller than what I would have hoped for, we probably ideal for them.
Not being a surfer, I am not a good judge of what the right techniques are when surfing but, even so, you can usually quickly work out who has got a better feel for the waves and who hasn’t. Picking the right one to go for and getting up to speed to make it on to the wave seems to be a bigger deal than staying up for some of the people. As I say, I’m not a surfer so this is all uninformed commentary.
Two things are of interest when photographing surfers. Having them coming in your direction so you can see their face while they are carving across the wave or watching them wipe out in style. The latter is probably not what they want me to be focused on but you take what you can get when shooting this stuff!
The Aloha Air Cargo 767 was the reason for me being out early one morning but it wasn’t the only freighter coming in. (Indeed, this was the case for both of my efforts to get the Aloha jet.). Kalitta were also operating a 767 which is under contract to DHL. Some of Kalitta’s jets are plain white so you wonder whether a given day will bring something in that has a bit of color to it or not. On this occasion I was lucky. It might not be the most dramatic of the DHL schemes but it is better than no color at all!
My aerial photo searches brought me to some shots of the Royal Navy’s dockyard at Portsmouth. One or two shots from this were used in a post about a flight I took with Pete but not very many. Flying over the home of the Royal Navy, we got to see a bunch of ships – large and small. HMS Bristol was moored for use as a training ship. I think she may have now been relieved of that duty so don’t know whether she is still around and for how long.
Plenty of frigates were moored alongside and there were surplus Type 42 destroyers at various locations too. This got me thinking about a day many years ago when we were in Portsmouth for some reason. We took a trip around the harbour in a sightseeing boat and I got a few shots of some ships then too so these are interspersed here. Now the arrival of the two carriers to the fleet would mean a good chance of getting a far larger vessel alongside. Might have to think about doing something like this again at some point when I am in the UK.
I have posted a few shots from a visit to Paine Field one evening when the light was really nice. The bigger movements of that evening have got their own posts but there was a fair bit of light aircraft traffic that evening. Some of these were vintage types or at least types that have been a round so long that they should probably qualify as vintage these days. The warm, low light made for good shots of what otherwise might not be the most interesting of photo subjects.
Down in Federal Way, there is a rhododendron garden. It is next to the bonsai garden I have posted about previously but we hadn’t visited it before. We took a trip down when the rhododendrons should have been getting into bloom. The garden is a strange location since it is tucked in between two freeways. While you are walking around lots of lovely greenery, you can’t escape the rumble of traffic nearby.
Unlike some gardens that have a very manicured feel to them, this feels a lot more organic in the layout. I am sure there is a lot of planning that went in to the design but it feels like it is a natural growth. Supposedly, it has the largest collection of rhododendrons in the world. Not sure who verifies such things but it was certainly large.
It isn’t just rhododendrons, though. Lots of other plants are scattered around the place. They have a meadow that has blue poppies in it. They are lovely looking flowers if a little fragile looking. There is a glasshouse in the middle of the garden and we took a wander around in there but, with the sun out, it was pretty hot and humid in there so we didn’t spend too long.
The blooms were not extensive when we visited so it didn’t have the same feel as we got on our first visit to Meerkerk, for example. However, as a garden with a wide variety of plants and color, it was certainly a great place to wander about and I suspect we will be back there in the future.
