Tag Archives: photo

Hippo Excursion Out of the Water

As goes large African animals, one of my favorites is the hippopotamus. I’m not sure exactly what it is about them that appeals to me so much but I find them fascinating. They can often be a bit disappointing at a zoo since they will spend long periods of time doing very little. However, we have had some good luck over the years. The one at Brookfield Zoo in Chicago once gave us an interesting moment and San Diego Zoo had a baby hippo swimming around during a visit there.

There are two hippos in Woodland Park Zoo and, when we arrived, they were both almost totally submerged in their pond taking it easy. This does not make for much photo action. Fortunately, a little patience paid off and one of them surfaced and proceeded (slowly) to exit the pond. It wandered around for a short while before returning to the water and taking up its previous position.

This disturbance caused the other hippo to wake up for a while. It didn’t exit the water but it did get its head above the surface and then it yawned a few times. Hippos have amazing mouths and a yawn makes them look so dramatic. I was absolutely delighted. A couple of yawns and then it was back to submerged and napping. I know they can be incredibly dangerous but they are still one of my favorite creatures.

S7 Max Both at Renton and BFI

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S7 is a Russian airline so not one that I normally get to see. Tokyo is the only place I have seen their planes in operation. They have a bunch of 737 Max jets on order. I saw one of them in a Boeing test bay on the west side of Renton one evening when passing by. The bright green colors are hard to miss. Fortunately, it was not long after this that I was at Boeing Field in the evening when the jet came in from a test flight. The light was pretty nice by that time of day but I don’t think it would have mattered with a color that vibrant!

Electric Surfboard Off Bellingham

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After our hike around Whatcom Falls Park, we headed down to Boulevard Park between Fairhaven and Bellingham to have our lunch. We sat by the water watching the activities out on the water. While we sat eating our sandwiches, someone came zipping along the shore on an electric surfboard with a hydrofoil. They were certainly pretty quick and headed off in to the distance. It was a while before they came back the other way which leads me to believe these things must have a pretty decent battery capacity. To any surfers reading this, have you given one of these things a go?

French Global 7500

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Bombardier recently completed their 100^th Global 7500. It is an impressive machine with excellent capabilities. If I was minded to buy a bizjet, it would definitely be the one I got but I just don’t feel like it at the moment. I haven’t seen too many of them yet so catching one is a nice surprise. This one was departing Seattle. I’m not sure how far it was going but, given that it is registered in France, I assume they were actually making good use of its range unlike so many of the owners of such jets. It seemed to have a nice fade in the paint scheme too. Maybe I will put something like that on mine when I get it.

Avants at Chateau Ste. Michelle

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I was chatting with one of my neighbors and he mentioned a car event coming up at Chateau Ste. Michelle, a local winery. This event was arranged by Avants and was a selection of exotic and unusual cars on display in the grounds of the winery along with wine and food to enjoy. Sounded interesting and Nancy was keen to try it out so we got ourselves tickets. On the day, the weather started out looking pretty bad but, since the event started in the afternoon, we decided to see how things turned out. As it was, the day became overcast but basically dry so it worked out fine. I’m not sure whether it actually reduced the number of people there or not but it felt busy but not crowded.

Exotics@RTC will provide a bunch of unusual cars but this had some very special vehicles and was definitely worth going to. I am going to have some specific posts on some of the vehicles but this is more of a general overview of what we saw. The cars were spread out across the lawns so were not crowded together. Also, while there were people around most of the time, the cars were often clear of visitors if you were trying to get a shot – even when it came to some of the most unusual vehicles.

There was wine from the winery to purchase as you walked around (assuming you hadn’t bought the more expensive tickets with packages of wine and food) and you could order food. However, the food options were not that impressive and didn’t seem to fit with the nature of the event. That would be my only complaint with the event as a whole. Whether you wanted race cars, hyper cars, vintage sports cars or even more unusual vehicles from Europe, there was something to see. Nancy is not a car person but she certainly enjoyed looking at the beautiful styling of some of the vehicles (and the quirky styling of others).

New Lightroom Feature I Don’t Have Yet

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I have seen announcements from Adobe about a feature that is coming soon to Lightroom which seems particularly appealing to me. When dealing with dull and overcast conditions, I shoot quite heavily overexposed. This gives me a lot more shadow detail to work with and also still allows me to pull back detail in the sky. On a dull day, a couple of stops of overexposure can work quite effectively. The Lightroom/Camera Raw editing only has a limited amount you can do with the exposure and shadows sliders so it is not ideal for this. However, the new version of Lightroom is going to use AI to analyze the image for a subject to be selected or a sky. What I didn’t realize was that this was already available in Photoshop. I decided to have a play with it there to see how it works and get a feel for the way it might work in Lightroom soon.

I opened the image in Photoshop as a Smart Object. I then created a New Smart Object Via Copy to duplicate the object. In Select, I picked Subject and it did a pretty good job of selecting the airframe. Some edges were a little vague but overall pretty good. I used that selection to make a mask on the upper layer. Then, I was able to open each Smart Object in Camera Raw and edit them each to optimize the sky or the background. Some tweaking was occasionally required to ensure that it didn’t look like a bad superimposed job but it worked quite well. Lightroom will have this function as a filter so I should be able to do something similar in there but we shall see when it gets released. If it works, it could be a great addition to the editing toolset. I wish I had known about it in Photoshop before to be honest!

UPDATE: The Lightroom update is now out and I have played with it a bit. I think it is even better than the Photoshop implmentation so I shall put together a more detailed post on how it is working out for me.

Cruise Ship Comparison

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The cruise ships are back in Seattle. A year of cruise travel didn’t happen while COVID was raging and no vaccinations were available. Now they seem to have found a protocol to make cruises viable. (Not something I would be trying but each to their own.) When we were down in the city for a weekend, we got to the hotel shortly before one of the cruise ships sailed. It belonged to the Norwegian cruise line and was a huge thing. It was not an elegant looking ship but it clearly had plenty of capacity.

It sailed off on its trip – presumably towards Alaska – and a little while later the other end of the cruise ship spectrum showed up. The National Geographic Venture is not a traditional cruise ship. They have small vessels that are able to make more specialized trips into restricted spaces that the large cruise ships could never get to. We have looked at their cruises to Alaska as something that we might want to do at some point. The season is over for them now so it was not clear what the boat was up to but it couldn’t have looked more different than the Norwegian ship.

Arlington Evening Flying Display

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After my afternoon out up in Skagit for the fly day there, I migrated with the guys down to Arlington. They were having an evening flying display that would include the Ryan I previously posted about. An overcast evening did not make for great light for photographing the aircraft. There were only a few displays to see so it wasn’t too much of an event but it was still nice to be out shooting planes again. Rene Price put on a good display in his Sukhoi and the Yak-18 display was a great example of what the plane can do. Interestingly, there was the occasional hint of sunlight from the horizon while it flew which would glint off the white airframe since it was high enough to see the light we weren’t getting.

Grumpy, the B-25, flew a bunch of passes having come across from Skagit. I guess with not much else flying, they were allowed to fly as many passes as they wanted. Other than that, it was a pretty low key affair.

Jaguar Details

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During the British day at Exotics@RTC, there were some old Jaguars taking center stage in the shopping area. I was checking out the grill on one of them and looked at the headlights. There was a little logo in the middle of the lights that I had not noticed when looking at previous cars. I guess it is an original feature but it could be an aftermarket thing. That seems out of keeping with the way these vehicles are maintained so I hope it is original.

Sneak a Turbo Beaver While I Can

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While walking along the main runway at BFI, the shorter runway remained in use. Since I was at the north end, that meant walking parallel to some of the movements. A Turbo Beaver was one of the planes to use the runway while I walked alongside so it would have been rude not to grab a few shots as it went by. I was using the M6 which is not my usual camera for action work but you go with what you have!