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!

Goodbye to Wabash – Before It Returned

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The demolition of the Sun-Times building was discussed in this post.  The building wasn’t the only thing to go, though.  The creation of the new tower meant that the street needed to be rebuild around it.  Consequently, a section of Wabash Avenue was completely taken apart before being rebuilt.  This meant our street became a dead end for a long time.  You could walk through on a temporary footbridge that they installed (which was good for seeing what was going on) but road traffic went elsewhere.  This made getting a cab a lot harder!

The roadway was elevated, built upon a series of steel girders.  The surface was drilled out and the structure taken down.  There was a lot of construction for what would ultimately sit under the new roadway and for the access to the new building.  Then new supporting structures were erected.  Finally, a new roadbed was installed.  Before the finish was laid on top of this, you could see the elements that would be contained within it.  Drainage elements as well as the central dividers that would be filled with plants could be identified.  There was also going to be a concrete pump to support the building construction and the exhaust port for this was built into the new road in the center.

Eventually the new road was completed and the traffic was free to come through again.  Since everyone had found new routes, it was actually quiet for quite a while until people got used to having the road available again.  Once it was complete, it was quickly hard to remember what it had been like when closed.

C-32s

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The demise of a bunch of airline fleets of 757s at the moment is a shame as it is a type I was always fond of from the days of British Airways using them for shuttle services around the UK as well as being the first commercial jet I flew on heading to Lisbon from Heathrow.  The military has also made use of the jet of course.  The New Zealand 757 displays in the past have been pretty impressive and maybe that gives me an idea for a future post.  The USAF has a bunch of them, designated as C-32, and they are used for VIP transportation.

They are not a type that you often come across but I have seen them on a few occasions.  An Andrews AFB Open House provided one movement – they are based there so not such a surprise.  Another was at Nellis AFB when one launched just prior to a Red Flag launch when we were waiting between the runways for the action to kick off.  The VIP colors of the USAF jets are quite elegant and they suit the 757 nicely.

North Rim

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Nancy and I took a trip to Arizona and Utah many years ago.  It proved to be a really excellent trip and we saw some amazing locations.  The first stop on the trip was the Grand Canyon.  While the majority of visitors go to the South Rim of the canyon, this trip took us to the North Rim.  The two locations are not far apart but to get from one to the other involves hours of driving.  Apparently, there is some canyon in the way!

The North Rim is accessible for a smaller part of the year because it gets snowed in and doesn’t clear out until late in spring.  The views are supposed to be similar on either side but the lack of people at the North Rim makes it a more peaceful place to visit apparently (I haven’t been to the South Rim so can’t speak with authority).  The scenery was definitely beautiful.  We had some cloudy times and some very clear weather.  At night you could look at an amazing night sky.

The problem with the Grand Canyon is that there is little you can do to convey the scale.  Images are really not able to provide an understanding of just how vast the place is.  You can see it is pretty, but the experience is not reproduced.  To be honest, even when I was there, I found it hard to appreciate the scale.  With so little to reference, you struggle to realize what is close and what is far away.  Occasionally, if you see a boat on the Colorado River, you realize just how immense it all is.  Awesome is a word that should be used when describing the Grand Canyon!

I haven’t looked at these pictures for years.  I realize that I took some of them as examples at the time and then focused on those.  I haven’t been through some of the others.  With newer processing techniques, there is plenty to be done with some of the shots I have overlooked.  I shall be playing with this for quite a while I think.

Stored 737s

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After two month of shelter at home, I did finally venture out in the car to see something other than the house or my bike routes.  I swung by Paine Field to see some of the stored Southwest 737s that are there.  Planes seem to have been arriving and then heading out again so I don’t know what the overall plan is.  They also seem to have moved from where they were when they first came in.  I got to see a few of them scattered around near FHCAM.

These jets look like they are in place for a while.  The nacelle inlet which is normally unpainted metal is currently covered in some black coating which runs on to the inlet blanking.  The exhaust ducts are similarly blocked up.  The jets are arrayed around the ramp and, while behind the fencing, the use of a monopod with a ball head and the remote shooting app from Canon allowed me to see what the shots looked like and to take the pictures.  I went with a few panos since things are rather close to the fence in some places.

I hope these jets are back up and working before too long.

Lightning In Kansas

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It’s been a while since my last visit to our friends in Kansas.  I need to get back and see them soon.  Our first visit there was a dramatic one.  We had gone to the movies to see War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise.  At the beginning of that, there is a scene of what looks like lightning striking but it repeatedly hits the same place.  In the film, that is noted as being unnatural.  As we left the theater and drove home, a storm started raging around us.  The lightning was striking frequently and seemed to be in the same places.  Uh oh!

We got home and stayed inside as the storm reached its peak.  I have always loved thunderstorms and this one was outstanding.  I watched the lightning striking around us constantly.  I decided to take some pictures.  Photographing lightning is normally tricky to do.  If it is dark, you can go for long exposures and hope to get the lightning in some of the shots.  If you have a lightning trigger, you can let it do the work.  In this case, you didn’t need either.  I just shot out of the window and the chances were that there would be some lightning in the shot.  It was crazy.  Here are a couple of shots looking out of a bedroom window!

Omni 767s

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Omni provides a lot of charter work in the Seattle area, presumably military work for JBLM.  The planes usually operate from SeaTac but then will reposition to Boeing Field.  There is often an Omni 767 parked up at the south end of the field but I have not ever seemed to have been there when they are moving.  More recently, I happened across one coming in to land after a short trip from SeaTac (I could probably have driven it faster given the routing that they had to take).  It was nice to see one up and about so it prompted this post with a few Omni 767s.