Cloudy Arrivals for the Family

Leave a Reply

I was picking up some family members that were coming to stay.  I got to the airport a little ahead of their scheduled arrival time and, since it was some time near an airport, I figured a bit of photography wouldn’t go amiss.  They were coming in on a Virgin 787-9 so I knew I would shoot that.  The heavies come in on the inner runway, but the rest tend to go to the outer.  You can still get them, but it isn’t so close.  I figured a few shots on a cloudy day was worth time to experiment with exposing high and playing with the shots in post.

Nagoya Castle

Leave a Reply

I had a free Sunday in Japan prior to some meetings getting underway so made the trip to Nagoya.  Nagoya is a fair distance from Tokyo but the Nozomi Shinkansen service compresses that journey to just over 90 minutes!  I took the subway to the location of the castle and wandered around the grounds.  It was unbelievably hot.  In the shade it was uncomfortable but when you got into the sun it was brutal.  Still, how often am I going to get a chance so off I went.

The castle is surrounded by a moat and some very thick walls.  Lots of the structures were destroyed by fire in the bombing at the end of World War II.  The tower was reconstructed in concrete after the war but has now been closed and they are planning to demolish it and reconstruct it in wood like the original.  Other buildings have already been reconstructed in their original materials.

The tower is an imposing structure, even on a sunny and toasty day.  I was able to walk around the perimeter of the main castle buildings in the time I had available.  I had a return train booked based on when I needed to meet a colleague arriving in Tokyo that evening.  Therefore, I needed to keep moving irrespective of how much I wanted to be in the shade!  I had a look in some of the other buildings too.  They were quite simple and elegant in their construction.  I imagine that the whole thing will be most impressive when the reconstruction work is completed.

There were actors walking the grounds in costume as I moved around.  They engaged freely with the visitors but I still felt a little weird photographing them as they passed me by.  They clearly didn’t mind but somehow it felt like I was doing something wrong.  Not sure why, to be honest.  Maybe it is just the feeling that comes with being a foreigner.

Damp Days for Floatplanes Means Prop Vortices!

Leave a Reply

A couple of Kenmore Air planes departed from Kenmore while I was at Log Boom Park.  The conditions were pretty damp and humid (and were about to be joined by pretty heavy downpours of rain!).  This meant the departing planes had a good chance of pulling some streamers from the prop tips.  Sure enough, when the Otter took off (and it started the takeoff run a little early which helped the shooting angles) the prop was streaming some vapor.  The shape of the cone of the tip vortices as they flow across the fuselage was quite interesting.

A little while later (and just before the downpour began), a turbo Beaver came out.  It, too, pulled some nice vapor from the prop tips as it accelerated across the water.  A bit of a cross wind was apparently coming in (no doubt related to the impending storm) and they got airborne one float at a time.  At this point we retreated to the car – but not in time to avoid the rain entirely!

Tokyo Dome for a Baseball Game

Leave a Reply

Some colleagues arranged for us to buy some tickets for a baseball game while we were in Tokyo.  The Giants were the home team playing another local team called the Swallows.  The game was played inside Tokyo Dome, an inflatable structure and thankfully one with air conditioning!  Here is a panorama of the interior of the dome during the game.  Baseball games in Japan have some notable differences from those in the US, mainly relating to crowd behavior.  That may get a separate post so I will leave it for now.

 

Pilatus’ New Toy

Leave a Reply

There were lots of things I was hoping to see at RIAT but I did get a few that were very pleasant surprises.  Various air forces had business jets showing up and departing throughout the show as dignitaries (or urgent spares) needed to be moved.  The Swiss brought in several jets while I was there but one of them looked a little different.  My first encounter with a PC-24.  To say I was surprised and pleased would be to understate my response!

Three Types of Wightlink Car Ferry

Leave a Reply

Having traveled on the car ferry from Portsmouth to Fishbourne on the Isle of Wight for all of my life, I have seen many generations of ferry come and go.  The oldest ones I recall are Fishbourne and Camber Queen.  These would amaze current travelers with their limited car capacity and very limited customer amenities.  They were replaced by a bigger and better equipped fleet which were replaced in turn but the fleet of Saint named ferries.  Their time has mainly come and gone and now most have been replaced again.

On this trip, I got to ride of two ferries from the newer generation.  They have  a significant increase in capacity that has required the introduction of two level loading to allow the schedule to be kept.  While traveling on each, I got to see the other heading in the opposite direction along with one of the older Saint class.  The latest ferry has again gone away from bi-directional operation and has also added a hybrid power drive of some sort.  No idea how it works but the large logo on the side leaves you in no doubt that it is there.

The Alaska 321neo Didn’t Keep the Special Colors Long

Leave a Reply

The merger of the Virgin America fleet into Alaska Airlines started off slowly at first.  With Virgin taking delivery of new jets, Alaska pondered how to mark them up.  The first of the A321neos came in Virgin America colors but then one arrived in a plain scheme with some outlines on it of west coast skylines under the tag line “Most West Coast”. It didn’t have obvious airline branding and I wrote about it here.  It turns out that jet did not stay in those colors for long.  It has now received the standard Alaska Airlines branding and I saw it operating out of SeaTac heading to Los Angeles.

Fastnet Race Start in the 90s

Leave a Reply

We recently had the 40th anniversary of the Fastnet race that ended up with a significant loss of life and boats.  Weather forecasting technology and the methods of communicating were very different forty years ago and some of the boats were ill-suited to open water racing of that nature.  Growing up in Cowes, the Fastnet race was always a big deal.  It was every other year as part of the Admiral’s Cup.  Some of my school friends got to crew on it.  I watched the start of one of the races when we still lived in the UK and I scanned in some of the shots I got that day.  The start was always frantic.  Boats are jockeying for position, often very close to shore.  Lots of shouting goes on.  With a good wind, big sailing boats look so cool to me.

Falcon Freighter

Leave a Reply

Falcon 20s are not that unusual but, if one is coming close to home on a Saturday afternoon when I don’t have anything else planned, why not?  This one was coming in to Paine Field and the sun was out and it would be approaching from the north (hopefully) in the afternoon.  Good combination.  I popped up the road to see.  It did indeed show up on schedule.  This was just as well.  A short while after landing, clouds rolled in and the wind picked up resulting in them changing runways!  This jet belongs to Alliance Air Charter and appears to be configured as a freighter.  I wonder if it is an old FedEx jet?

Diablo Dam

Leave a Reply

My sister was visiting so we took a trip up into the Cascades across the North Cascades Highway.  Having traveled this way before, I had photographed some of the dams already.  This time, we got a closer look at Diablo Dam.  You can drive down to the dam and across the top of it to get to the facilities on the other side.  The dam is wide enough for two vehicles to pass although that might not be obvious given the way some of the drivers behaved.

The spillways on either side of the dam look a lot bigger when you get close to it than is the case when looking from a distance.  The chance to see it up close, given that so many of the dams in the mountains are rather inaccessible, was pretty cool.