Grand Canyon

Leave a Reply

My friend Jo Hunter recently blogged about her trip from Texas to Las Vegas and back. She saw and did many interesting things en route so I would suggest you check it out at Futurshox. Part of her trip took her to the Grand Canyon. Nancy and I made a trip to the North Rim of the canyon quite a few years ago. I decided to take another look at some of the pictures from that time. One point of having pictures is so that you can go back and take another look to remember what you did in days gone by.

Another thing if you are a photographer is to go back and see what you did with those pictures and whether anything you have learned since might give them a new lease on life. One thing is the different processing tools that are available. Another is your approach to using those tools. Consequently, I had a look through a few of the shots and decided to give them a go.

It is a little sad to see how many cameras I have been through since that trip. These were taken with my first DSLR at a time when it was still relevant to use the term DSLR. Nowadays, there are hardly any SLRs around that aren’t digital so perhaps we should just call them SLRs again. Anyway, I digress. Despite the lower resolution, the image quality from that old body is really not too shabby. I had full page magazine images from that camera and they looked great. It might have been a bit restricted in how far you could push it but it still worked well.

Enough blathering, here are the shots. It has got me excited about that part of the world again. I suppose a trip down there may be another thing to add to the list. Of course, the list never gets shorter. Always so many things to be done!

Erickson Flashback

Leave a Reply

I was recently looking back through a few of the previous posts and came across some images of Erickson Aircrane at work in Chicago with their S64 Skycranes. I was thinking about the various times I had worked with these guys and it occurred to me that several of those lifts had taken place before I started the blog. Therefore, today is a gratuitous chance to look at some older helicopter shots.

The guys at Erickson have carried out many lifts in the Chicago area. On one occasion, they did two lifts in one day on opposite sides of the city. The first was down near Hyde Park with some equipment being lifted onto a residential block. The loads were lifted in a park area in front of the building. Lots of trees were in this park and the Skycrane did an excellent job of finding the weakest and dead limbs. By the end of the job, the ground was covered in dead wood!

The second lift was in Oak Park and was from a garage structure up to the roof of the building. however, next to the garage was an older building with a wooden roof and balconies which had lots of stuff stored on them. After the morning, we were rather worried about how much stuff would be damaged. Amazingly, the gentle breeze from the street made the downdraft totally benign and the building was unharmed. Hope you like the shots.

Blue Angel

1 Reply

A surprise visitor at Boeing Field timed his arrival perfectly. I had just pulled up at the field when I saw something running in on the approach at speed and not descending. This had the look of a military break. I didn’t have the camera out but, fortunately, given that it looked like they would break downwind to land, I had some time to grab the camera. Sure enough, it was an F/A-18 that broke overhead. More interestingly, it was a two seater from the Blue Angels.

I was ready by the time it was on the approach and managed to get a few shots as they landed. They then taxied over to Clay Lacy’s FBO and parked up. Not sure what they were in for but it could involve the planning for Seafair later in the year. Whatever the reason, a nice surprise.

Small Corporate Jets

Leave a Reply

While the big jets were an interesting target for me at Boeing Field, there is a good trade in smaller corporate jets too. The regularity of Citations and their ilk makes them a little less exciting but they can still be interesting if painted up nicely. However, one that caught my eye was an older Learjet. This is operated by Boeing Flight Test as a support and chase aircraft for their programs. It taxied by before departing over my location.

Also we got a Dassault Falcon 10. Quite a vintage type of jet these days so that was a nice surprise.

The Strip at Night

Leave a Reply

A project recently took me to Las Vegas. Vegas is not one of my favorite cities. I am not a gambler so, after you have seen it once, you are pretty much done. However, aside from the Strip, there are some other interesting things in the vicinity so the trip was worthwhile. We came in from the west and overflew the airport before turning back to land. All of my main gear was in the overhead but I did have my phone to hand. No problems with using it all the way to landing now so I tried grabbing a few shots of the city as we flew overhead. See what you think of the iPhone’s night capabilities. Of course, at the size for being online, some of the issues are disguised. However, the shot below gives you a full size view so you can see how the detail holds up – and my night panning in a moving airliner. Not so good I guess!

L-100

Leave a Reply

My Boeing Field visit also included a very nice surprise. The evening was drawing in quite quickly but a view off to the south showed a lot of smoke coming from something on the approach. At first I had no idea what it was but soon the familiar shape of a Hercules came into view. This was a civilian model, the L-100. It was operated by Lynden Air Cargo delivering something large!

They were heading for a ramp close to the threshold so the crew were not shy about thumping the aircraft down right on the numbers. A decent cloud of tire smoke let you know they were down and then they put the props into reverse and were soon off the runway and taxiing back to the stand. An interesting aircraft and a lucky break.

Firehouse Art Center

Leave a Reply

Bit by bit, I am seeing more of the local area in our new home. We have been to Pleasanton a few times and it has cropped up in the blog before too. We were recently there for a spot of lunch and decided to have a wander around before heading off to our next task. A sign showed the way to the Firehouse Art Center. As you might imagine, this is located in an old firehouse. The building has undergone significant restoration and modification it appears.

Time was not on our side to go in and have a look around but the lovely day made a quick external recce worthwhile. The building looks very nice and there is a great sculpture of an artist at work outside. It is surrounded by some nice grounds and it looks like a pleasant place to relax if you had a book handy on a nice day.

Heading back to the car, I couldn’t help myself but grab a quick shot of the gas station in town. This has such a nice throwback feel to it, it had to be done. All of these were just shot with the phone but they give a little bit more of a feel for the area.

Big Business Jets

Leave a Reply

I was back in Seattle recently and, while the reason for being there took up the majority of my time, I did have a couple of opportunities at the end of the days to pay a visit to Boeing Field. I had been there last year and made the best of the nice light later in the day then. This time, the light looked good but proved to be a bit fickle and the day was not as long given the time of year. However, I did get an interesting selection of aircraft to shoot. Boeing Field is a popular location for business aviation given its close proximity to Seattle city center. There were some very nice large jets visiting. An Airbus ACJ from Germany was parked up the entire time I was there but I never saw it move. However, I did get to see some Globals and Gulfstreams stretch their legs.

The Global Express is a great looking business jet. One arrived shortly after I did and I managed to get it as it came in. I was at a spot I hadn’t tried before. It gives a better angle on the aircraft as they approach and touch down but it does suffer from a more cluttered background which is a shame. The Global looked like it was heading out again as I got ready to leave for the evening so I decided to go to the departure end of the runway and try and get it head on. By now the light was really going but I ramped up the ISO and decided to go for it anyway. Having Mount Rainier in the background certainly doesn’t harm a shot but it was really a bit too dark.

The other nice visitor was a G650. The newest of the big Gulfstreams is a significant improvement from an aesthetic point of view as far as I am concerned. This one had a great paint scheme too so I was very happy to see it. The runway direction was changed just before it left so I got to see it as it was airborne rather than on the takeoff roll which was nice.

Throw in some Dassault Falcons and I had a lucky run given how limited the time was that I had there. Hopefully I will be back again sometime soon.

Crummy Skies at SFO

Leave a Reply

Sometimes you have an idea about something that will work out really well. Unfortunately, you are not always right in that assumption. I was up early one weekend morning and was over in San Francisco. My reason for being there didn’t quite work out – this day is turning out to have a theme – so decided to go down to SFO. The weather was not great with a lot of cloud about at low levels. However, I had in mind that it might be cool to try and get shots of the jets coming in with lots of moisture around them in a moody form.

I got the shore and the planes were easy enough to see as they landed but it was just grey so nothing special or dramatic. I decided to head a little further along the shore as I have previously seen the jets streaming vortices as they approached which then disappeared as they got closer to touchdown. I figured that the moisture content of the air must change along the shoreline. I was certainly right but not in a helpful way. My next spot gave me a good location to be when the planes were finally about to get visual with the runway. As they passed me they were still in the bottom of the clouds and only just breaking out. Consequently, they were heavily obscured and not easy to see let alone photograph.

My grand idea did not work out well at all. As they got further away down the approach, they may have been showing some moisture but there was so much between us, it was hard to tell. One United 747 did put on a good show with some serious cloud activity over the wings and flap system as it passed but that was as good as it gets. After a little while, I accepted defeat and headed home. It is true you won’t get something different if you don’t try something different but that doesn’t mean it will be worth it!

LRTimelapse

Leave a Reply

I have previously written about some time-lapse software that I use based on a recommendation from my friend Jo Hunter. I used this software for a while before the creator, Gunther Wegner, updated it to a new version and deactivated the version I had. I was a bit miffed by this but I was able to continue using the export settings from his application within Lightroom but with me having to manually manage the file cropping. All transition and smoothing capability was lost but I could still make a basic time-lapse.

Sadly, the latest versions of Lightroom have done away with that as well and now I couldn’t even render the video. Therefore, I decided to take a look at the latest version of his software. It is now on version 3 so I have skipped a version en route to this place. I had shot a few sequences recently and wanted to be able to manage them properly so decided to come back and have another go with his application.

There have been some improvements in tidying up the software so the workflow is a bit better. There is still a certain amount of effort as you switch back and forth with Lightroom. You have to put all of the images into a single folder while working on them. This means a modification to my storage strategy but it isn’t difficult to manage in Lightroom and, when you are done, you can revert the images to their original locations and still render the video output. It might be nicer if he gave you a more flexible approach to selecting files but this is not a hardship.

It has changed a little from what I am used to since now it starts out analyzing the files before you have created keyframes. Once this is done, you save the xmp files out and reload them in Lightroom. Define your keyframes and make any edits to them that you want and save xmp again. Back to LRTimelpase to load the changes and now it does its smoothing very quickly. Save xmp again and back to Lightroom and now there is an Export setting along with all of the other export options. No going to the Slideshow module any more.

The results are pretty good. The new export functionality actually generates a sequence of still images which it stores. You then head back into LRTimelapse where you have a series of options for rendering a video sequence from those stills. You can have it automatically delete the stills when it is done or keep them and render again using different output options. This is pretty flexible although it means you have to pay attention to what you have used so you don’t end up with a ton of stored intermediate images. The video output looks good. I am not using the product commercially so do not have the full commercial license. That will allow output in 4K formats. I only wanted 1080p HD format for my purposes. It is a little interesting that 4K is automatically assumed to be commercial use. With people able to record 4K on GoPros these days and 4K TVs showing up, I suspect this is going to be a more mainstream format before too long. Maybe it will be in the personal use license of future versions of LRTimelapse. We shall see.

Was it worth the upgrade? Yes. Not least because I wanted to have the capability back that I had lost when Lightroom changed its output but, even so, I have found the new version to be quite a bit more friendly to work with. I think it will encourage me to work on a few more projects.