Concorde Formations Flypast

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RIAT is known for putting together formations of different types to celebrate certain events.  The fiftieth anniversary of the first flight of Concorde resulted in two display teams getting together.  Concorde was an Anglo-French collaboration and so was the celebration in this case.  The Red Arrows and the Patrouille de France both fly formations to represent Concorde so, for this joint effort, both teams got airborne and flew their two Concorde formations in line astern.  They made passes in each direction with the national anthems of each country playing – one on the first pass and the other on the second.  It was a simple demonstration but an impressive one all the same.

Red Kestrel

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The Red Funnel ferries have made appearances on the blog after previous UK trips including this one here.  While we were on the seafront at Cowes, we saw one of the ferries coming in but it looked pretty odd.  It actually looked a lot like the old style of ferries from my youngest days.  There was little upper superstructure and it looked like it was designed for trucks only.  The name was Red Kestrel so a quick google confirmed that this is exactly what it is.  By taking freight traffic, it leaves more space on the main ferries for the car traffic.  Apparently, it has space for about 12 passengers so I guess it is not well appointed!

M346 Sporty Departure

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A quick post from my visit to RIAT.  There are going to be plenty of things from my time at the show that will show up on the blog in the coming weeks but this is an intro even though it comes from the last day I was there.  Departure day included some more energetic maneuvers from some of the participants including this M346 heading back to Italy.  It waggled the wings to give us a nice top side view.  Thanks chaps.

South Coast Trains

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There are a few readers of the blog that like trains so this is a quick view of some UK passenger trains.  We stayed in Chichester for a while and were very close to the station.  We had to walk past it in to the town.  There were tons of trains running along this coast route so I saw several as we were finding out where things were.  Here are two of the trains.  They are both EMUs, one of which is relatively recent while the other is a pretty old vintage of train that I didn’t even realize operated in this part of the world.

Cloudy Isn’t Always Bad

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I was looking to get some midsummer shooting in at Vancouver.  The day was a lovely one but the evening promised so overcast rolling in and that proved to be the case.  However, I thought I would give things a go.  The lack of the strong evening light was disappointing but it did actually make for some softer lighting conditions and things weren’t all bad.  The evening culminated (at least for me) with three quick arrivals.  An Edelweiss A340-300, a BA A380 and a China Airlines A350-900.  I quite liked the conditions as they provided something slightly different.  Clouds shouldn’t necessarily be a deterrent from an evening out shooting.

HMS Queen Elizabeth

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One leg of our trip to the UK included a ferry to the Isle of Wight.  We took the ferry from Portsmouth and, as we drove in to town, I thought I could see the twin islands of the HMS Queen Elizabeth, the first of the pair of new aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy.  Sure enough, when we pulled out of Gunwharf on the ferry, we could see the carrier moored in the naval base.  A rear view doesn’t give to much impression of the ship but she is clearly pretty large.  At about 65,000 tons, she is over three times the displacement of the previous RN carriers.

Korean Air’s Last 777

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I’ve seen a few Korean Air 777s on test at Everett since we moved here.  This one was heading out on a delivery flight on a Friday evening.  The only reason it gets a post is that, from what I can discover, this is the last 777 that Korean Air has on order.  They have a bunch of 787s to come in the coming years but this is their last 777-300ER.  They haven’t ordered the 777X (which, given how many different widebody types they operate, is quite a surprise!).

Precursor to the Lifeboat Posts

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There are going to be some lifeboat posts coming up in the coming weeks.  We ended up seeing quite a bit of the RNLI’s work while we were there.  I shall have more detailed posts but these shots are just a warm up act for the posts to come.  I do like the RNLI and they certainly entertained me on this trip!

Dropping the Shutter Speed in Bad Light

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My cloudy Vancouver shoot also gave me the chance to play around with some lower shutter speeds.  I have done this for the turboprops before but this time I decided to play with some of the jets.  A really low shuttle speed can blur out the background and give a nice impression of movement but it is a problematic shot to make.  You don’t want to do it on something that you are keen to get in case you get nothing!  It is also something that results in very small apertures if there is much light which can make for a lot of dust spotting in post!  A cloudy evening is a good time to try and a bunch of boring regular jets are good targets for a trial!

Power for a Factory

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The Dearborn factory required a large power generation facility and, in days gone by, this was provided by a large steam engine driving generators.  This machine is now nicely preserved.  The scale of it is a bit hard to represent.  The cylinders are huge and the controls are substantial.  You can climb up on top of the whole thing to see how it went together.  Surprisingly, this is not a place that was getting too many visitors which meant I was able to nose around in relative peace.  It is hard to imagine what it would have been like when this enormous piece of engineering was in use and was generating the power for the plant.  Now it is idle but it still looks imposing.