While waiting for the ferry at Lymington, I saw this post with the various cameras that Wightlink uses to keep track of what is happening in the loading area. There are quite a few cameras here. I wonder whether they are all in use or some have replaced others that haven’t been taken down. Either way, there are a lot of cameras on this one pole!
My visit to the TBAG event at Kemble was quite a while ago now. However, still more to share from that day out. The airfield is home to the Buccaneers and the Phantoms that I have posted about but there are some other aircraft that are parked there. This includes one of the Ex-British Airways 747-400s that were painted in retro liveries. There is a Gnat painted in Red Arrows colours, and a Canberra PR9 in a silver scheme. Both look good.
A Hunter is also in a silver scheme which is a nice addition and there is a Bristol Britannia that I have posted about previously. These are all by or close to the café so any visitors to the airfield will have a few cool planes to check out during their visit.
The National Motor Museum at Beaulieu has an F1 exhibit running throughout the summer. There are a number of F1 cars from across the decades on show along with some images and information displays. I imagine that a few competitors were willing to collaborate on this because several of the cars seemed to have the same heritage. For example, the Jaguar is from the team that became Red Bull, so they were probably owned by the same entity and there were some Williams cars too.
Here are a few shots of the generations of cars that were on display. It is interesting to see how much the size and look of the cars has changed as the rule structures have evolved and the technology has advanced. The 70s cars really do look incredibly flimsy, and it is no surprise that drivers died a lot in those days.
The Shuttleworth Trust has a Bleriot XI aircraft that is airworthy. This is not the first one I have seen because I saw the one Eric Presten kept in Sonoma, but I never got the chance to see that one fly. The Festival of Flight show at Old Warden had ideal conditions for flying the old planes and the Bleriot came out. They limit it to flying up and down the runway. No messing around with turns. Instead, they hop along the runway, turn around on the ground at the end and then come back.
It is not an overpowered aircraft, and I did wonder whether it would get airborne or not. It would bounce up off a bump and then fly along for a while, before settling back down. I don’t know how much they push the performance given that this is an extremely rare and valuable aircraft so maybe it could do more. However, watching it I did find myself wondering about what would make someone want to take something like this across the English Channel.
I have posted about our visit to Marwell after hours. What I didn’t include in that post was the snow leopards. They have a couple of snow leopards at the zoo and, when we came up, one was resting up on some rocks while another was more active. It headed to a hole in the rocks as we got there which had me wondering if it was going inside to avoid the visitors. However, it was passing through to another part of the enclosure where it then came right up to the glass walls and walked back and forth throughout the space.
It was so close and really looked amazing. Supposedly, the way to get their attention is to have toddlers with you. Not sure if they think they are snack worthy or not, but they do like following the kids. We didn’t have many in our group, but this one was still very active. I spent some time trying to work out where it would go so I could position for it and get a shot. Mixed results were had but sometimes the phone was all that was needed! What beautiful creatures they are.
If you are shooting at the time of the month when the moon is close to full, it should mean it will show up in the background at some point when you have afternoon/evening light behind you. Will it make it into your shot? Probably not. The angles the planes take vary and the moon is constantly moving in the background so, while you can anticipate it might work out at some point and hope accordingly, that doesn’t mean it will work. Of course, you can also forget about it for a while and miss a perfectly good moon shot too – who would do that though?
At various times when shooting departures are Seattle Tacoma International Airport, I did get the moon to show up in the shots. Would it be with the most interesting aircraft in the foreground? Probably not. More likely to be an Alaska Airlines jet since they are the most common departure (and also the one more likely to have made me not be getting a shot) but that is still fine. Here are some results from across various shoots.
Walking along the street on Spice Island in Portsmouth, I noticed that the road had rails in it. Clearly, in the days when the area was getting freight traffic, rail vehicles would have come in to pick up and drop off cargo. While that is no longer the case, the rails were apparently easier to leave behind than remove. Even some points were still on display. It looks like there was a small passing loop on the street. Now it is just cars that come this way.
One of my days at RIAT was spent down towards the threshold of the runway. This meant I was able to get shots of the approaching planes and, hopefully, their touchdown. I say hopefully because a couple of things were working against me. First, there were some distance to go boards that could be in just the wrong spot depending on where the plane touched down. Second, because I was close in and there was a lot of distracting stuff in the background, I was going with a lower shutter speed to give the sense of motion and blur out some of the distractions.
I didn’t have a high success rate with some of these shots which was expected. When going through them, I can be pretty aggressive at culling anything that is not super sharp (at least on a part of the airframe that will be the first point of interest for a viewer) but I do have to bear in mind that I am looking at a high resolution version of the image zoomed in to 100%. When it is a 1600 pixel image on a screen, it will forgive a lot of the detail problems.
Anyway, I got some shots of the jets on approach and then as they touched down. Some of them came out pretty well. I did also use the location for take off shots where, since the planes were just beginning their take off rolls, they weren’t going that fast and getting the blur required was a bit trickier. Some of those will, at some point, show up on here too.
We took a walk through the area around Hinton Ampner a few months ago. This was in the spring and was a time when the bluebells were at their peak. There is a footpath around the grounds that takes you through a couple of areas where the bluebells are at their best and there is little chance that you will be alone on this walk if it is a nice weekend. Even so, it did not feel like we were somewhere busy as we took the paths.
The focus for the flowers was when we entered Joan’s Acre Wood. The conditions here are clearly ideal for bluebells and we soon found ourselves transitioning from normal woodland flooring to a sea of blue. It is hard to get an image that really conveys just how much the flowers take over your senses. The blue is intense and contrasts starkly with the green of everything else. In person this is much starker. Hopefully some of these shots will give some sort of impression of what it was like. We were surrounded by bluebells and quite blown away by it.
Epic E1000s have shown up on the blog before and in less than ideal conditions. Sometimes you just have to work with what is available. It doesn’t stop me trying, of course, and when another one was due in to Boeing Field and the conditions looked promising, I headed out. When I was in place and they were getting closer, the sun was playing games with me. I would have some nice light for a while and then the clouds would drift back in again. They wouldn’t stay long and then sun would be back but the question was, what would it be like at the critical moment. At Boeing Field, I have often had good light further up the approach (and too far away), cloud over the ideal location and then sun again as they get to very short final but again too far for a decent shot. Would this be one of those days?
No! On this occasion, the conditions played ball and, as the E1000 came zipping down the approach, the sun was out in all the right places. I grabbed some shots and the blues in the paint really did seem to pop. I was quite satisfied. I did get one more Epic encounter at BFI before we moved away which was from the other end providing a different type of shot in good light but, after that, while there were lots of movements to BFI before we left, I didn’t have the chance to see them.