Kit posted a question about a photo in “Here There Be Dragons.” We also get a lot of verbal comments from friends about photography. Ranging from offers to do coffee table books to disdainful questions about which version of Photoshop we use.
All photography in Crosswinds is digital, with minimal post-production. We don’t even own Photoshop.
I was a film guy. Post-production, other than cropping, feels sinful.
Remember film?
A friend who worked at Kodak’s old film division said their last days were like nuclear nuclear plague in Terminator — co-workers were terminated by the hundreds as the film industry went extinct in the digital age.
How do you compete when you make dinosaur pet food? Your customers were wiped out.
Now the only film Kodak makes is X-ray film. My Mom got loads of near-expiry film for free, for her instamatic camera. She’s thrifty like that.
Another revelation will blow away the Gadget Guys with the big DSLR 12-1200mm bazookas:
Nearly all photography in Flying in Crosswinds is done with a point-and-shoot camera 😛
There are some photos by passengers with digital SLRs. But it’s just impossible to handle that artillery and fly an airplane at the same time.
The SLRs do have amazing depth of field versatility. You can freeze an instrument like the vertical speed indicator in razor sharp focus and blur everything beyond the alcohol compass.
Blurring the outside view is an oxymoron in most aerial photography. Nevertheless, with with an SLR you can knock yourself out. Here, Kevin proves that at least a part of my steep turns are perfectly level!
My point-and-shoot camera’s real inferiority complex is with resolution. Even with my 13 mega-pixel image processor, I couldn’t make out that UFO at the old Crow Valley gunnery and bombing range west of Clark.
Kevin solved the mystery for me with his Nikon DSLR.
With our point-and-shoot, though, Carlo and I can snap pictures with one hand.
We can also quickly shoot fleeting traffic (Carlo once captured a territorial eagle bent on chasing us away from his sky).
Would be tough to set up an SLR quickly for a shot like that.
Finally, our camera will actually fit in our Cessna 152 flight deck!
Can’t do that with a bazooka!
I use a Nikon P6000. Aside from the one-hand convenience, it has one, devastating advantage over many, many cameras.
It has GPS.
Yup, Global Positioning System. Its GPS receiver records the exact position from the earth-orbit GPS satellite constellation every time we shoot.
When we vainly admire our pictures on Picasa (freeware on the internet!), they are automatically overlaid on Google Earth with minute precision, literally.
It’s how we know what river we’re at. I take a picture, overlay that sucker onto Google Earth, and voila!
And you thought we navigated by looking at the names of towns on school roofs!
I love that P6000. I’m a Nikon guy, anyway. I still have a Nikon FM dinosaur in a drawer.
There was a time when Canon’s lenses were ground and blown by Nikon. I used to tweak the Canon guys with this little factoid.
So I wondered when folks bought Nikon cameras and then used third-party lenses like Vivitar or Tamron. Nikon’s superiority in the 1970s was in lenses — we bought Nikon’s lenses, and then had to buy the Nikon camera body because it was the only one you could use with those lenses.
But equipment is not the real arena in photography. The best amateur photography I’ve seen was my Dad’s. He had a Leica IIIf, circa 1939.
No TTL, plain viewfinder, hand-held light meter. In the days when the highest film speed was ASA 64, his photography was pure magic. Proof that the most vital piece of equipment was two inches behind the viewfinder.
Kit, the photo was shot at 6,500 feet. Above the haze layer, the sky is almost painfully blue.
The purple tinge in the clouds is either a white balance artifact from our monitors or a phaser blast from the neutral zone.
Posted from Chicago, June 1, 2009
PBA098656011
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Hey Sir!I didn’t know there was a UFO down at Crow Valley!And I never thought I would see something like that las pic..I’ve always thought that we destroyed Mother Earth so much that I wouldn’t see the sky like that!It’s like the “Wild Blue Wonder”….
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🙂 Crow valley was the bombing and aerial gunnery target range of the US Air Force when they were based at Clark. I think the Philippine Air Force still uses it. Zambales is blanketed by IMTAs — military training areas.
We’re still destroying the earth 😦 But we’re doing it from ground up, so the sky is still the cleanest place.
You should see aerial pictures of smog over the cities 😦
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Man!I’ve got to take my mom and dad and also my brother up to 3000 to breath some fresh air!When I flew with HAL last January,I saw the infamous “Manila Smog”!Dang,all I can say is it’s THICK!Good thing Bohol still boast some cleanliness in it’s environment.
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Kit, I have lots of pictures of the Manila smog. It gets thickest over Makati and doesn’t really go away until past Malolos to the north and Calamba to the south. It’s very apparent, and actually makes to want to take shallow breaths as you descend into that crap. It’s really bad. Yes, 2-3,000 feet of smog is thick! Imagine how much pollutants it takes to make a kilometer of air look gray 😦
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Ha,but sir,have you seen pictures of the skyline of Mexico City?Dang!Oh,BTW,how long have will you stay in the US sir?Nag dudutyfree ka pa po ba pag nasa Pinas ka sir?:D
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Only a week in the US, for business meetings.
I travel a lot in my job. Last year I was on over 70 airliner flights. There are only 52 weeks in a year, so on average I took a flight every 4 or 5 days. Believe me, I have no time for duty free. I would love nothing better than to stop traveling. I’m in a state of permanent jet lag, and yet when I travel on business I am expected to go right from the airport into meetings.
Between Saturday May 30 and Saturday June 6, I was in Bangkok, Manila, San Francisco, Chicago, Evansville IN, Chicago again, San Francisco again, and I will leave for Manila tonight. That’s just 7 days.
😦
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Ohh man,permanent jet lag huh?Any chance you would be going up to Baguio this June 12-14?:D
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No, I will be back in Bangkok, where I live, long before then.
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pictures (photos) do paint a thousand words, but in Tonet and Carlo’s post the words (and the flying jargons) do say a thousand pictures…often times even more vivid than what the DSLRs can take.
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Thanks for you comments, Cris. I’d been thinking of doing a photography post for a while. We get interesting questions about our images here, ranging from “Can we use the Pinatubo pictures for our school project?” to “Can you fly over my old high school in Alaminos?” to “Can you please take me up, I’m an NGO worker and need to see the barangay in … .”
A lot of Filipino immigrants abroad either don’t like the pictures or like the pictures because it reminds them too much of their homeland! 😀
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Wow, again, very nice pictures sir. I love the steep turn pictures 🙂 ‘Till when will you be there? I’m currently again on a business trip out of town and will probably be back in 2-3 weeks time.
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I’m in the US right now, Vince, on a business trip also. I won’t be in Omni until mid-June, I think. Father’s Day weekend, which is Carlo’s solo anniversary.
Two of the pictures were of Lazy Eights.
I have a lot of cockpit video of aerobatics, but all of them have the camera fixed relative to the airframe. Kevin’s pictures were great because he composed his shots relative to the horizon. So one gets a good appreciation of the airplane’s attitude.
I don’t know how he did it, he was holding his DSLR over his head a lot, not even looking at the viewfinder screen. Good pilots can even land with their eyes closed, I guess… 😀
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CAPTAIN!
You are in CHIcken in the CAr and the car won’t GO? If ever you have the chance, come up over to Evanston! 🙂 We can have a nice little Spanish tapas meal!
Regina
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Maestro, I though of getting in touch with you. I was in Chicago on Monday night because my connecting flight was cancelled, but I was rebooked early the next morning, and was totally jetlagged. I had meetings in Indiana for the next three days and then stayed overnight at Chicago again Thursday night, connecting to a flight out to San Francisco yesterday.
Both times I just knocked back at the O’Hare Hilton and tried to catch up on sleep. It would have been nice to see you. More chances next time — I have meetings later this year at our new offices in the Chicago area, I believe just a few minutes drive from Evanston!!
I wish I could find time to visit you and other readers and friends here. I owe some folks a visit in LA, and Tiger_57 who writes Flaunt the Imperfection (there’s a link in our Great Friends tab, above) is a great writer and aviation friend who lives in the Seattle area.
I’m leaving for Manila today. We just zip in and out of each other’s radar screens, huh 😦 Sayang. We were a few kilometers from each other, but I’ll be 12,000 km away in a day more. But I’m not really the one you should see … 😉
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