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Port Townsend Day Trip

Months with little travel meant we were interested in a day out if we could find something to do that made sense and wasn’t going to be unnecessarily risky to us or anyone else. We figured a day at Port Townsend was a good idea. The ferry across is not a problem because you remain in the car for the crossing. Once in the town, we were outdoors almost the whole time and it was going to be a lovely day.

We last came to Port Townsend when on vacation in the region a few years back. It was surprising how much I remembered about it. There were plenty of people in the town but it wasn’t busy. We did go into a couple of shops but they were limited on the number of customers at one time and so we only went to those of real interest. Lunch was outside and we even checked out the ice cream shop!

The waterfront is a nice place to be and there is a selection of jetties that you can walk out on to in order to get a view of the town. The architecture of the town is really interesting too and it seemed that a few of the buildings were in the process of being refurbished. It was fun to get out and about and see something different for a change. Fall is now upon us so making the most of the sunny days was good too!

CF-100 Canucks in Museums

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I can’t recall what prompted all of this but I found myself searching through my photos to see if I had any pictures of Avro Canada CF-100 Canucks. I knew I had seen one at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford but had I seen any others? I had been looking at the Wikipedia article on them as part of this theme and had seen where the remaining examples are. Turns out I had also seen one in Castle AFB museum. It’s a curious looking type but here are some shots including the IWM example from thirty years ago as well as last year.

Follow the Red Brick Road

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On the outskirts of Bothell, there is a small park with a red brick road. It is right next to the Burke Gilman Trail so I had ridden past it many times on my bike and frequently thought to myself I should check it out. I either forget to go there or am in a hurry on the bike and so, until recently, I had never visited it. A quiet weekend afternoon meant I had the opportunity and, more importantly, remembered to do so.

The route around the north of Lake Washington had been a dirt trail until the red brick road was built. When it opened, it increased the speed of travel from Bothell to Seattle dramatically and opened up the area. The road is now SR522 and is heavily traveled. It has long ago been re-paved but one small section of the original brick road has been preserved in this park. Along with the brick itself, there are some signs telling about the history of the road and the impact on the region as well as a couple of sculptures. I doubt people will be traveling from far afield to visit but I am glad I finally got around to checking it out.

Inlet Vortex on a Rainy Day

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Boeing was supposed to be making the first flight of the fourth 777X one Saturday, so I headed up to Paine Field to see it. The weather was not great with low clouds and rain and it was below minima for the flight, so we didn’t get to see the 777X. However, an American Airlines 787 was doing a test flight and it took off in the damp conditions.

As they powered up the jet, the moisture on the surface of the runway got sucked up in the vortex that forms between the inlet and the ground at high power and low forward speed. A dull day makes it easier to see this as well, so I was able to get a few shots of it. The lack of flying that day was a disappointment but this meant the days wasn’t a total bust.

Rabbit Rescue

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A slightly sad tale for this post. We get plenty of wildlife in our backyard including loads of rabbits. They come in to much the grass all the time. They are a combination of cute and inconvenient since they tend to spread a lot of seeds for things we don’t want in our grass. Such is the way of nature of course. Most days we will see one or more of them out there but they disappear quickly if we go outside.

One weekend morning Nancy looked out and saw one on the grass but not looking normal. We went out to check what was going on and the rabbit seemed to have some injury which was preventing it from moving properly. Without the ability to examine it, I thought its leg was hurt. We pondered what to do. Meanwhile, a bunch of crows started gathering on the fence sensing a meal. They flew off when we went outside but the rabbit had moved itself somehow behind the aircon unit. We know that nature has a course in these things but figured, if there was something we could do for the little thing, we should at least make an effort. If it wasn’t going to make it, so be it.

A call to a rescue service told us that we should bring it to them and they would assess it. Despite its injuries, the flight mentality was strong and it was not easy to scoop up. However, I managed to get it wrapped up in a towel and into a box on another towel and off to PAWS in Lynnwood. They did an evaluation and confirmed that this was definitely a fixable issue but not by them. Off to Sarvey in Granite Falls. This bun was getting quite a road trip. We dropped it off with them which is when I took the picture above. I hadn’t wanted to photograph it if it wasn’t going to make it since that seemed wrong somehow but, with someone taking care of it, I decided a photo was okay.

All this effort for one rabbit might seem strange when so many must die every day but it seemed like the right thing to do and it introduced us to two good organizations that deserve support.

Seattle From Elliott Bay

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The ferry ride back to Seattle was later in the afternoon. We were asked to stay on the car deck in our vehicles but we could walk around the deck if we wanted. Everyone around us was wearing masks – as was I – so I was happy to get out of the car in the fresh air and look at the city coming towards us (just depends on your frame of reference physics geeks). Here are some shots of the skyline from the boat as we got closer to the terminal.

Narita Freighters

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Every once in a while, I am looking for something in the catalog of images and it takes me on a journey to look through some other images. That can result in a blog post that doesn’t have a story. This is one of those posts. I have a bunch of shots from Narita while waiting for my flights home and that includes a bunch of freighters. I like freighters since they are often operators that you don’t normally see and they break up the flow of the familiar airlines. Here are some of those from my visits.

Stored Ferries

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Bainbridge Island is the location of Eagle Harbor. This is the maintenance base for the Washington State Ferries. Look at it on Google Maps and you will see a ferry moored up in maintenance or long term storage. However, since the onset of the pandemic, the ferries have been operating at a reduced schedule. This has continued even though traffic levels during summer have increased markedly. This reduced schedule means not all ferries are in service and a bunch are stored at Eagle Harbor. Shooting in to the sun is not ideal but it was the only available shot. Here are some of the ferries either in storage or awaiting a return to the full schedule.

Experimenting With Avoiding Heat Haze

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Summer weather means lots of sunny days but also means lots of heat haze. I was at Boeing Field one sunny afternoon and there were two jets parked across the field that I wanted shots of – one was an Illinois ANG KC-135R and the other was a Falcon 20. Looking through the viewfinder, both of the were shimmering in the heat haze that a warm and reasonably humid day brings. This is the downside of summer in the Pacific Northwest.

Not long before I had watched a video on YouTube about photographing Saturn through a telescope. The image of Saturn was all over the shop but they were using a software technique to take multiple images and build a more stable and sharper final image. It worked reasonably well and this got me thinking about how to do something similar. In the past I have used Photoshop to blend together multiple images to remove the moving elements of a shot like people or traffic. I wrote about it in this post.

I thought I would see if something similar could be done. I put the frame rate on to high and steadied myself before firing off a few seconds of shots. I wanted a lot of images to provide the best opportunity for the statistical analysis to find the right solution. Importing this in to Photoshop as layers and then auto aligning them allowed the analysis tool to do its thing. I don’t think the result is quite what I want and I may experiment with different analysis methods – median versus mean for example – to see which ones are most effective. However, there is clearly a smoothing out of the distortion and, if I needed to get a shot on a hazy day when there wouldn’t be another chance, I would definitely fall back on this approach to see whether it produced something more usable.

1930s Architecture at Its Best?

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There was a building at the bottom of the dam at Grand Coulee that was part of the dam infrastructure. Looking down on this building, it seemed so in keeping with a certain generation of architecture. Concrete buildings were in vogue at that time and they were very functional and lacking in much in the way of aesthetics. Given that this was part of the work generation program of the Great Depression, maybe the focus was on function rather than form. I wonder what someone would do with such a requirement if they were commissioned to design such a building today.