My visit to Livermore for the Collings Foundation visit also provided some other interesting aircraft to shoot. The field was quite busy on a sunny weekend day. The usual piston singles were out and about while a couple of aerobatic types were also getting some hours in. No great description here. Just a few shots to show you what I mean.
This post comes as a single piece but it is a combination of different shoots. Marin County’s offices are located in San Rafael and are an impressive structure designed by the famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright. We saw plenty of his work in Chicago and my sister is a bit of a fan of his work. When she was visiting, I thought a trip across would be just what she wanted. We had actually been there once before on a trip we all made several years ago. On that day, it was raining heavily and I didn’t know exactly where we could go so this time we combined some research with a sunny day. It helped that it was a weekend so the parking lots were mostly empty.
For those of you that have watched the Star Wars movies and more particularly this recent ones, the building may look rather familiar. George Lucas is a local resident and I think there is a fair chance that the building influenced him when creating Naboo. The building is a long structure in two parts with a domed area at the join with a gold colored spire. It is quite something. Photographing it is, however, rather tricky. There is not a good location to get the full effect in one shot since tree coverage tends to block the views of one part when the other is in shot. However, a good wander around will allow a number of cool views.
To bring this up to date, I was on a flight back to Oakland recently that ended up coming down over this part of Marin County. Out of my window appeared the Civic Center. Shooting directly downwards through a plane window is usually not something that works well since distortion can be bad. However, on this occasion, I got lucky and so now I have some more shots that show the whole building from an angle most people don’t get at all!
I always seem to find something aviation related when I am out and about. San Ramon is the next town up from us and it was having its Art and Wind event. This combined a bunch of art stalls with some excellent kite flying displays and was an amusing play on the more common Art and Wine festivals that many towns around here have. As we wandered around, we came across a Bell 47 helicopter. They are not terribly rare but this one was a bit more interesting as it was in service with the Coast Guard Auxiliary.
I had no idea that Bell 47s were still in government service. The crew were standing by and talking to a selection of kids that came to have a look. Our timing couldn’t have been better because just after we arrived, they starting moving people away so that they could take off. It would have been rude to leave at this point so we sat down close by and watched them start up and depart the field after a brief moment turned towards us to say goodbye. Nice!
The Collins Foundation carry out a tour throughout the country with their vintage aircraft showing them off to many communities, sharing a message about what people did in the Second World War and providing an opportunity to ride in some historic machinery. I have seen them in the past while we lived in Chicago. Their tour this year brought them through the Bay Area with stops at Moffett Field and Livermore. Since the latter is close to home, I went along to see them.
The part of the collection that they bring on tour includes a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, a Consolidated B-24 Liberator and a North American P-51 Mustang. I headed over to Livermore ahead of their planned arrival time and plenty of people had already gathered to see them come in. We all waited for a while and then the B-17 appeared over the hills. It made its approach and landed a short while before the B-24 showed up and followed suit. The P-51 was last of the three making a nice pass before landing. What I hadn’t anticipated was a B-25 Mitchell was also following them in. A quick turnaround and the three main players were soon launching off for flights with expectant passengers.
At this point I headed off as I had other things to do. Later in the day I came back and managed to catch an evening launch of the B-17. The following evening I had more free time so came back again. Another evening launch and recovery as the light got better and better. Then, as everyone packed up, the Collings team was kind enough to let me take some shots around the ramp. A local P-51 was parked up while the Collings P-51 had disappeared somewhere. As the sun set, I shot around the various aircraft and included a cracking 1937 Oldsmobile that one of the volunteers had brought along. With the light fading, the ramp lights came on which gave me a whole new bunch of opportunities to get some shots. I shot a lot until it was pretty late. At that point I headed home. The following day they also departed moving on to the next stop on their tour. If they come your way, make the effort to get out and see them. If you have the money, take a ride and support the continued operation of these great aircraft.
I have been traveling a reasonable amount recently and on one of my trips we took off from Oakland and flew out over San Francisco Bay, past the city and the Golden Gate and up to the north. The first time, I had my camera with me but it was in my bag in the overhead locker. My phone was still to hand of course so I grabbed a few pictures with that. They were passable but nothing special. I also was fighting some reflections given the time of day and the position of the sun.
When I came to make the same trip again, I planned ahead and did two things. One was to have my camera with me rather than in the overhead and the other was to bring the Lens Skirt to try and cut down on the reflection issues. My methodology for having the camera to hand involves yet another camera bag but I shall leave the description of that to another post.
I should point out that on the first outing, I got interesting pictures both out and back. The second time, the weather was not so cooperative. On the outbound leg, the Golden Gate was shrouded in fog with the bridge just poking out of the top of the clouds. On the return leg, most of the bay was shrouded in cloud so the views of Oakland that I had got with my phone were obscured. Here is a selection of the shots. I will be making this trip again no doubt so will probably try and get a better selection. Shooting out of airplane windows is problematic and not usually the source of great images but airliners do get you in places that have views that are unusual and worth recording, even if they are not going to be published.
Many moons ago (pun intended), my buddy Paul was visiting and we decided to have a go at night light trails at SFO. However, we had not come well equipped so headed to Best Buy to pick up cheap tripods. They were very cheap and performed as might be expected. However, with Paul coming back, we decided to have a second go at this and to prepare properly this time. We also scoped out some locations that might be suitable to get good angles on SFO.
Two things conspired against us this time. First, SFO is having runway upgrades installed so the pair of 28 runways are the only ones in use. This cuts down on the possible angles for a while. Second, the great weather forecast turned out to include some low cloud over the location we had scouted out. The aircraft rapidly disappeared from view as they climbed. (It later turned out that they were still in the clear but above the thin layer of cloud which we were under.)
We went with a plan B and found a location along the lake-shore that would provide an alternative. It was not as good but it did work. I had actually brought a spare tripod in case Paul didn’t have his so I set up two cameras. One was running long exposures that I intended to blend together to get light trails. The other I point out onto the approach which was quite busy at that point and take a lot of shorter exposures for creating a time lapse. The blend is above and the time lapse video is below. Let’s hope for better weather next time. I shall also remember that warm weather does not include after sunset and bring something a bit ticker to wear!
A drive along the Marin headlands was about to come to an end when we spotted something unexpected. I was about to turn off on the road back towards to freeway when we saw a coyote strolling along the side of the road. A quick reverse and turn onto the other piece of road and we followed him. Interestingly, he seemed totally uninterested in us. We followed him along the road and he went where he felt and did not seem to care about the car following him. Eventually, he hopped off the road and on to the grass. This gave me an opportunity to get alongside him and get some shots that weren’t through the windshield.
We watched him for a while and a few cars came up behind us. At first, you could see that they wondered why we were stopped until they saw the coyote at which point they, too, stopped what they were doing and watched him. We stayed for a short while and then decided to leave the guy in peace. I suspect that didn’t really work out since it only gave the people behind us an opportunity to pull up closer. I guess we did them a favor instead.
My sister wanted to see one of the more famous images of San Francisco while she was here. While the term painted ladies refers to the buildings in the city that have bright paint schemes, it is often focused on Alamo Square. Here there is a line of houses that typify the style and have a backdrop of the city behind them. Alamo Square itself is a park and the area is a popular place on a sunny day irrespective of the famous vista on one side. (Indeed, some of the other buildings in the area are more interesting but they don’t have the same context.)
We stopped off to take a look. The area is popular with tourists and there is an ongoing problem with tour buses blocking up the area despite the fact that they are banned from coming into the square. We didn’t have a problem finding somewhere to park though so went to hang out in the park for a while. The middle of the day is not the best time to visit if photography is your goal but in this case it wasn’t. Unfortunately, a couple of the buildings had scaffolding on them which took a bit away from the image. They were on one end so could be ignored if you tried but it was a bit of a shame. Sitting under the shade of a tree in the park on a sunny day looking across at that view is certainly not a bad way to pass a bit of time. A guy came and sat near us and got out his guitar. We wondered whether we would be impressed or distressed by his playing. As it was, he seemed to be playing silently to himself so it was neutral for us.
Another one of my processing technique posts today. For those of you interested in pictures of places, today will probably be one you pass on. You have been warned. This is about my first venture into the realm of HDR panoramas. I know at least one of you who knows exactly how to do this sort of thing and does it on a regular basis. You also will probably skip the rest of the post. However, you have some specialized tools for doing the job and I am playing with Lightroom and Photoshop so here is how it goes.
My initial thought having taken the shots was which order to carry out the processing. HDR first or pano first. I concluded that it had to be pano first. All of the pano exposures were consistent and would stitch properly while I wasn’t convinced that each of the pano frames would be consistent if I had done the HDR blending first. However, this left me with a second concern. Would the pano merge produce images that would align for the HDR merge. I use the pano tools built into Photoshop and, while I select the algorithm it uses, I did not have confidence that it would produce an identical alignment for each set of exposures. However, this was the route I tried.
Stitching the panos was straightforward enough. I created each of them from Lightroom and ended up with five panos with differing exposures. At this point I could have taken them directly to HDR Pro within Photoshop but, since I wanted everything to end up in the Lightroom catalog, I decided to save the files and go to HDR Pro from there.
Here I encountered my first hiccup. As expected, the panos produced were not identical. There were very close but not identical. HDR Pro only works on files that are the same dimensions. I imagine some more specialized HDR applications might be able to handle this but I was stuck with Photoshop. Since the panos were thousands of pixels across and only a few pixels different, I opened them back up in Photoshop and changed the canvas size to be identical in each case. HDR Pro is able to manage alignment of slightly misaligned shots anyway so I wanted worried about the positioning. Also, with such small changes in dimensions, I didn’t fear that I would have distortion.
With this change made, Photoshop went to work and created the HDR file. Amazingly, it worked just fine. I didn’t have any problems with the files being distorted relative to each other and it did a great job of blending them. All that was left was to crop everything in to clear up the empty corners from the pano creation (I didn’t get rid of those in the first instance since I was trying to keep the pano files identical in size and alignment) and then a few tweaks back in Lightroom had the job finished. I was pretty pleased with how it worked and, with the experience of this time, should be able to turn them around quite quickly next time.
En route back from Monterey, I wanted to show Liese and Chris the sea lions that bask on the jetty at Moss Landing. We got out of the car and sure enough, there they were. However, something had happened since I had last been there. One section of the jetty was gone and another section only seemed to be partially attached. I guess a storm had done some damage. This didn’t make any difference to the sea lions and they were squeezed on to all of the remaining space.
Whether this was a space issue or not I don’t know but a whole bunch of them had taken up residence on the ramp to the jetty from the parking lot. This ramp is blocked off to pedestrians but this isn’t a problem when you can look over the wooden panel and see the sea lions right underneath you. They certainly didn’t seem bothered by us and most didn’t even open their eyes, preferring to doze in the sun. Lower down by the water, the usual squabbles were going on between those in a good spot, those in a bad spot and those trying to get out of the water and find a spot of any sort.
