Terminal History

Posted on May 15, 2014 by marey mercy

At last, I have edited more pictures from my trip with my dad to the 1940 Air Terminal Museum. It’s the site of what was the original terminal for Hobby Airport, which opened in, not surprisingly, 1940.

This photo looks a lot like the photo on the website, the difference being I took this one. Also my dad is in the window. Other than those two things, it’s the museum sign, yep.

I was so excited to get out the back door and onto the tarmac that I didn’t take pictures of much else, but here’s a longer shot of the entrance:

I have to tell you that as I look at these photos of the front entrance, all I can think about is that I locked my keys in the car when we were there, and we spent a ridiculous amount of time standing around in that parking lot during the heat of the day waiting for AAA to show up and break into my car. Except, once that happened, we discovered that my keys were not in my car at all, and had fallen out of my purse somehow and gotten lost somewhere in the museum or behind it where all the planes were. So my dad and I, along with all the museum volunteers, spent an hour or two scouring the place looking for my keys, only to have me discover while talking to a volunteer and glancing down into my purse that they were actually stuck in a side pocket the whole time. Mind you – this is after AAA showed up and broke into my car. I was too mortified to tell anyone, and kept it a secret until I got my dad alone so we could share a good laugh over the absurdity of it (the whole time I thought they were lost I kept repeating “this doesn’t make sense, I never lose my keys!” over and over, turned out I was right). Then we both decided not to tell the volunteers a thing about it, walked out to my car and pretended to dig around in the trunk some more, and came back in claiming the keys had been buried under the trunk lining. Good times.

The museum’s foyer, restored to its original appearance. The museum hasn’t been open long, and does not yet have the funds to restore the second floor, so it is off-limits. Also, I think all of those people are looking for my keys.

One funny thing about the lost-keys fiasco was how one-track-minded the volunteers were about the whole airplane thing. Most of the volunteers and visitors were male, slightly older than middle-aged, and plane enthusiasts of one stripe or another. Many were photographers. There were a few married couples with small children wandering about, but overall it was an older male crowd. And me. It was also one of the friendliest groups I’ve been around in some time – full of information and ready to share. I had people suggesting good camera settings and spots to take pictures as well as offering background of different planes that were on the runway, like these planes, which are apparently planes from other countries that flew into the airport and were confiscated for one reason or another:

But back to the lost keys: so there we were, my dad and I, on my cell phone trying to call AAA and figure out the address to the museum. At this point I’m a little panicked because I don’t yet realize, of course, that I do have a way to start my car and get us out of there, and I’m wondering just how long we’re going to be stuck at the airport. Then in the middle of all that a man with a camera slung around his shoulder came over, exclaiming excitedly that a Frontier Airlines jet was about to queue up on the runway, and it was really rare to get a glimpse of one there, and I really should grab my camera and get ready to take pictures. I kept explaining to him, no really sir, I am on the phone with triple A, you see I HAVE LOST MY KEYS and am trying to find them, so no I really do not want to go take pictures of a Frontier Airlines jet right now, thank you. He totally did not get it. It was something else my dad and I laughed about later, how when a good jet came up the runway, no one cared about anything else in the slightest. Of course, when I looked up their airplanes on Google, they do look pretty cool, and I’m rather sorry now I didn’t just go outside for the ten minutes it would have taken to snap the photos and continued with my car key search afterwards, especially now that I know my keys weren’t lost after all.

One of the planes you can view from the tarmac behind the museum

We also missed out on the opportunity to walk with a volunteer down to “the hangar” as they kept calling it, to view some planes up close and personal that I gathered were kind of a big deal, but again, car keys.

It was such an enjoyable day, and I’d really like to get back there again. Of course, there’s the whole car-key humiliation to deal with, but it’s been awhile now so perhaps they’ve forgotten. I think the fundraiser this month is titled “Learn How To Fly Day” so I probably should sit this one out as I’d most likely lose the keys to the plane and ruin everyone’s day. But I gotta go back sometime to get a photo of a Frontier Airlines jet, if nothing else.

One of the many planes I will not be flying

Fab Pants

Posted on May 14, 2014 by marey mercy

Because I take and process so many photos, I am often pressed for what to title them so that I can keep track of them on my hard drive. I have to do something with them other than just use the numbered data they are given when uploaded to my computer, so I tend to give them whatever title pops into my head first when it’s time to save an edited file. The title that popped into my head when working with the shots I took Saturday was “Fab Pants.”

Then every shot from that set that I process I just number; so far I’ve got a “Fab Pants 1” and a “Fab Pants 2.” This is all I’ve had time to edit since I last updated, but I wanted to share it so I had to reach a bit to come up with a blog post, hence the rather lame rambling I’m doing right now. By the way, for anyone who’s curious – I actually had my leg up on a chair when taking this shot. Then I used the composite technique to remove the chair when processing. I’m getting better at this whole thing, I think. Even added some decent shadows this time using the burn tool in Photoshop CS5.

I also thought I’d share that I suffered my first optical tragedy during Saturday’s shoot: I always wear a spare pair of glasses when I’m shooting self-portraits because there’s so much putting on and whipping off of the spectacles that I worry about stretching out my real pair. I have several spares to choose from but I use the weirdest ones since I care about them the least. I will usually keep the glasses on until right before I hit the remote, then I toss them onto the floor somewhere for the photo, and sadly, on Saturday after posing for the shot above my left foot came down right smack on top of them and broke them. I knew it would happen someday, and as I said it’s fortunate that they were a pair I didn’t like very much – although they looked great in photos, they were too harsh on my face to wear them out of the house, and my husband always said they made me look angry. I don’t think he’ll be sorry to hear they had to go.

By the way, it appears that Fly Fest 2014 has finally wound down, a torturous six days from when it started, with just a few stragglers hanging about that have yet to leave the party. Here’s hoping that’s the last aspect of the cycle of life currently breaking down inside our bedroom wall that we have to deal with.

Beach Macro Bingo

Posted on May 7, 2014 by marey mercy

I tried to use my macro lens while at the beach Saturday, but my attempts were less than successful. I really need to read up on how to use this thing appropriately; in my defense, it was incredibly windy which made shooting difficult, and I’d forgotten my lens hood so I was pretty nervous about being out in all that sand and wind. Plus – I have no idea what I’m doing. But crappy photos won’t stop me from sharing them on my blog!

It’s a shell…yep

My mother wanted me to take some photos she could print out in black and white and frame to hang on the walls of her house, so for awhile she walked around with me pointing at things and saying “That! Take a picture of that!” which was less than inspiring. She mostly wanted pictures of tall grasses for some reason, which was weird for me to photograph since it’s not something I normally would care to shoot. I haven’t processed any of those yet. In fact, most of the nature shots I attempted to take with the macro didn’t come out at all, which again I blame on the wind. It really was crazy windy, I swear. So – I took a picture of the grill of her Cadillac instead.

Since most of these shots were boring and/or sub-par, I began running them through Pixlr.

I think the Pixlr effect work well on this next one – original is first, then the edit:

I really do like the Pixlr’ed photo there – I call it “spaceshells.” I didn’t process too many other photos from the macro portion of my weekend, but here’s two more taken with other lenses that I worked on last night, just because.

A view of the pier railing

My niece

A Beached Tale

Posted on May 5, 2014 by marey mercy

Today I thought I’d just show you some photos of the beach house where we stayed over the weekend, as well as share a little story.

Another view of the house…

Or do you like the black and white version better?

We weren’t as isolated as we looked in that photo; immediately outside the frame on either side was another house. But we did have more room down at the far end of the island than a lot of the rental houses further up do, and the house was just lovely; one of the nicer rentals I’ve ever stayed in, actually.

Not only was the house nice and roomy with a great view, but all the furnishings were high-quality and the kitchen was well-equipped. For the most part, Doug and I rent houses only when we can take our pets along, which means the furnishings are going to be less impressive. Doug was staying home this time, though, so my pets weren’t with me, and anyway, my parents were the ones who rented the house so it wasn’t up to me (if it had been, I would have gone for a pet-friendly place as always).

One seriously nice kitchen

I am like my parents in that I’d rather spend a lot of money on a nice place to stay when I vacation, and spend less on outings and sight-seeing while I’m there. Then I tend to hang around the nice house most of the time and venture out only on occasion. My folks are the same way. A few times we wandered down to the public beach that was right beyond our private walkway, but for the most part we hung out on the balcony or in the huge family area – the wind must have been at least 30 MPH on Saturday and was almost intolerable, so I spent a lot of my time in this room, looking at the beach through the back windows:

Speaking of the public beach, our little strip of it offered an interesting day of people-watching, as beach-sitting always does. The most memorably mind-altered beachgoer had to be the twentysomething woman who drew our attention towards sundown. My niece’s boyfriend was the first one to alert us to her presence; we had just finished eating dinner when he walked over to the windows and said “hey, what is this person doing?” That led to all the teenagers heading to the window, where various exclamations were heard, all questioning the behavior of a person who was “just hanging out” by one of the many trashcans that dotted the beach (if you look in the photo below, you can see a few of them lining the sandy roadway). Eventually my mom wandered over to the windows with her binoculars, at which point they could all be heard squealing, “Eeewww! She’s leaning over it now!” I responded by saying that she’d obviously had too much to drink and was, shall we say, relieving herself of her liquor through less than pleasant means, but someone said no, it didn’t actually look like she was getting sick, but rather was just sticking her head in it.

Our private walkway to the beach

Well, who just sticks their head in a trashcan? Didn’t make much sense to me, so I finally got up to see what was going on. By that time, the woman had walked away from it; I could see that she was dressed normally for the beach (shorts, a swim top, a light jacket, barefoot) and was walking quite steadily towards yet another trash can; she then pulled back her longish hair with her hands, and leaned right down into it, sticking her head and shoulders all the way in. She did this for a few minutes – and in fact, did not appear to be heaving – then poked her head back up, looked around, walked around to the side of trash can, kicked it over…and then crawled into it.

And yes, I took pictures. I know what this says about me.

By this time we were all beside ourselves. We’d run through all the possiblities, but none of them seemed to fit. She did not appear homeless at all and was very clean. Her gait gave no indication that she was altered by some substance – she walked in a straight line (when not occupied by crawling into trash cans) and would even break into a run while making her way down the beach. But every once in awhile, she’d stop and stick her head, or her whole body, into one of the cans.

At first I contended that she was mentally insane, but again, that didn’t quite fit – she just didn’t look disheveled enough, although I could totally be wrong about that. My best guess is that she was tripping on acid, which might explain why she could walk so normally from time to time but then get totally distracted by this experience of sticking herself into trash cans. I tried to take the high road at first, but admit I eventually became as amused by her as everyone else (at one point, one of my nieces snuck down to inspect a trash can she’d visited, and came back to report that it was completely empty), and we monitored her progress all the way up the beach until she took a sharp left at a private walkway a good distance away from us and disappeared.

It didn’t stop there though – since my father had his guitar out and was noodling away on it while we all tried to figure out what this woman was doing, someone got the bright idea that we should write a song about her, to commemorate her trashcan-love. As soon as my dad heard this suggestion, he immediately began playing “Annie’s Song,” by John Denver, the first line of which is “You fill up my senses…” Which of course, completely cracked us up.

I’m sad to say that we still kept going; we actually sat down and wrote new lyrics for John Denver’s song (whom we re-named “John Dumpster” for the occasion) and then WE SANG IT. We are terrible people, I know. But since we’re already going to hell for this one, here are the lyrics for you to enjoy as well. We can all sing this together as we ride our hand-basket into the fiery pits of Hades:

You fill up my senses
Like a night in a trash can
Like the beaches in springtime
Like a walk through the dump
Like a storm in my stomach
Like a summer day’s garbage
You fill up my senses
Come trash me again

Come let me lean on you
Let me give my lunch to you
Let me roll in your lining
Let me die in your can
Let me lay down inside you
Let me always be with you
Come let me love you
Come trash me again

The last thing I’ll say about poor Trashcan Woman is this: the next day, I remembered I’d actually taken a picture of one of the cans the morning before, because I thought the saying on it was amusing – but by that time I’d forgotten what the saying was. When I pulled the photo back up and showed it to the family after all this though, it cracked us up all over again:

Oh Trashcan Woman, it all makes sense now

Beach Patrol

Posted on May 4, 2014 by marey mercy

The benefit of hanging out with my family when on vacation is that they don’t care at all if I spend the entire time taking photos and edited them on my computer. My husband gets annoyed if I spend too much time doing that, but no one in my family cared so I got to snap and edit away. In fact, my dad is as obsessive about his hobbies as I am, so while I was editing on the computer he was trying to learn some James Taylor song on the guitar.

This was the neighbor’s beach house, actually; I took that one with my telephoto lens from our balcony as it was actually pretty far away. This was our house:

I took some quick snaps of the interior that I can edit later; it was a really beautiful house. I was deluded that it would take an hour to get there though; it was more like two hours. It was just me and my parents for a few hours, then my sister showed up with three of her four kids and their significant others. They’d had their senior prom the night before and seemed to really enjoy having a day on the beach. They wanted their pictures taken, and then after I took them they wanted to see them right away, so that’s a lot of what I have to share today.

My nephew and his girlfriend

My niece and her boyfriend – that date in the sand is the day they met. Cheesy, I know.

They dug big holes into the sand to sit in. They also dug cupholders.

I took those with my 17-40mm, but since I knew I’d want to take lots of pictures I brought along all my camera gear. I took a bunch with my macro lens, but have only had time to process one of them; it’s a good one though:

I forgot to bring my lens hoods so I started to get nervous about wandering around the beach with them because it was ridiculously windy outside. So windy, in fact, that all of the rocking chairs on the balcony were rocking without our assistance. Of course, I had to film this:

Here’s another I took with the 70-200; I liked how the bird looked like he was tilting in the wind.

I’ll finish up with this one, and tell one sad story: at one point in the afternoon, I was sitting at the dining room table which sits in front of the long row of windows overlooking the balcony and the beach; I looked up just in time to see a Beach Patrol helicopter fly by right in front of our balcony. I literally could have licked it if I’d been on the balcony – OK not really, but if I’d been outside with my telephoto lens and been able to take pictures, it would have looked like it. Sadly, I missed it, and it never came back by. Ok so here it is – it’s Sunday morning and my parents have Fox News on, so I have to hurry up and post this and get the hell out of the room, so sorry if this isn’t the most well-written post ever:

Plain Spotting

Posted on April 27, 2014 by marey mercy

Saturday morning, I got up early and decided to zip back out to the viewing areas I visited last week with my father and get some better shots of planes, in spite of my resolve not to do so and save my arm – I wanted to try out the higher shutter speeds and lower ISO settings I mentioned in a previous post. However, this trip was a total bust, at least in the sense of getting any new photos. It was a boon, I guess, in that I learned a few valuable lessons I can take with me the next time I venture out.

Lesson #1: When it comes to spotting planes, the details matter. I was given a false impression of how easy it is to pull into the parking lot of a viewing area and start snapping away when it all fell together so easily on my first outing. There were literally planes flying right over our heads every other minute that day, so I mistakenly assumed that would always be the case at this airport. As it turned out, arriving early in the morning was a bad idea, because the airport was not busy yet. And furthermore, due to the direction of the wind at the time, the planes were not even utilizing the runway where the two observation areas were located. So, I pulled into the parking lot, put my camera together, and waited. And waited, and waited. I could see planes taking off and landing a fair distance away, but they were nowhere near close enough to bother photographing. After driving back and forth between the two viewing areas for about an hour, hoping to catch a plane or two somewhere in all that time, I gave up and drove back towards home without one decent photo to edit or show. Later in the afternoon, long after I’d returned home, I checked the airport with the flightradar24 app on my phone, and sure enough by that time planes were all over the runway that would have produced results had it been in use that morning. So, lesson learned – check the radar app before leaving, and maybe make plane spotting trips in the middle of the day instead of getting to the airport early, to be sure traffic will be high. Moving on.

Lesson #2: Dress for a lack of success. Because I decided to head out to the airport at the last minute, I just threw on a t-shirt and some hiking pants (never been used for hiking of course) and some flip-flops, stuck my hair into an old ballcap, slapped some SPF onto my unwashed, makeupless face and headed out the door. The weekend before I’d gotten sunburned and sweaty taking photos of planes, so I figured there was no reason to gussy up this time. I was just going to snap photos for a few hours then come home, after all. Except, as was explained in Lesson #1, that isn’t what happened. After accepting defeat, it was only 10 AM, and I could have done any number of things with my day at that point since I was already out and about, and I had my camera. But I looked too disheveled and frumpy to bother. I’m not above zipping out of the house without makeup from time to time, but at this point my hair had not been washed in two days, my outfit was pretty tacky, and I just felt blech overall. I could have gone to the mall just a few miles up the road and done some shopping, had a nice lunch, then still been in the area when the winds changed direction and head back to the observation areas to snap pics, but I was too grody to make a day of it. In the future I need to take time to get ready for the day before heading out, in case I have to go do other things for a while and wait for air traffic.

Lesson #3: Plan ahead. This ties into Lesson #2, but I now realize these plane spotting trips are not spontaneous outings, at least not for me as I live quite far away from either airport in our city. When I got home I read a lot about the observation area at our other, larger airport, and it sounds much busier and better than the ones I saw last week, but it’s an hour away while Hobby is only about 40 minutes. I was pleased to read this one has portable toilets, because let’s face it,one of the things I have to plan ahead for when driving an hour away to sit for another several hours in a parking lot is how I’ll go to the bathroom when I need to do so (my solution to the Hobby airport situation is the mall located not too far away). Not only do I need to plan what lenses to bring, and where to pee when the need arises, but I probably need to bring snacks and water and some sort of diversion to entertain me when there’s a lull in the action. Plane spotting, at least for me starting out, is probably going to be an all-day production to pull it off properly, and I should plan accordingly, and plan ahead.

All in all, I don’t mind telling you that I was seriously bummed once I realized I’d be taking no plane pics that day. I was in quite a funk as I drove home, but since I was out and I had my camera, I did stop by this lovely, busy park that’s not too far out of the way on my trip home; it’s one of the first places I went when I got my first DSLR and I’ve always considered going back now that I know what I’m doing. But there were lessons to be learned here as well. #1 is that my 70-200 lens is a real attention-getter. As previously stated, I looked a mess, and therefore was not feeling particularly social (plus I was bummed). But everyone who walked by wanted to ask me about that lens – one guy even yelled “70-200! Yeah!” at me as he jogged by, as if my lens was some sort of hair-band celebrity; another guy chased me down to tell me about the bird perched on a branch in the middle of the bayou that I ought to go photograph (ME: “My lens doesn’t have quite that much zoom,” HIM: “It doesn’t? Well it looks impressive enough to do it.”) So, I wandered about snapping a few pics un-enthusiastically until it started to freaking rain, and then I said to hell with it, I’m done for the day.

I tried to process the shots when I got home, but couldn’t whip up a whole lot of interest for more than a few – like this one of the aforementioned bird:

That’s actually a damned nice picture, and certainly not the sort of thing I usually photograph. The other one I liked was this one, taken as another dude at the park with a camera was lining up family members for a group shot in front of a fountain:

It came out a bit too bright and blue, but I like that the little girl is looking right at me. I tried this one in black and white but it was too contrast-y, so I stuck with the color.

And that’s it for now – although in the evening, I decided to pull myself out of my ongoing funk the only way I know how: I gussied up and jumped for the camera! But I’ll share those photos later. And I still have to finish editing the pics of the aviation history museum I never shared. As usual, more photos to edit than there are hours in the day, so let’s get to it.

Takes on a Plane

Posted on April 20, 2014 by marey mercy

As I waded through all my photos from Saturday’s outing to some planespotting sites at Hobby Airport, I had a few thoughts I’d like to share, and I’ll throw in a few more photos to boot.

I’ve realized I have zero interest in smaller, private planes. Yes, they can also fly, but the sheer size of a commercial jet or a military plane is what makes that act so impressive to me, I guess, while those little planes or private jets are so small they fail to wow me. I suppose what I’m saying is, when it comes to planes, size matters – at least to me. Plenty of little planes flew in to visit the museum’s fundraiser, and a few zipped past the observation areas when I had my camera out shooting airliners,so I snapped a lot of them – but I can’t bring myself to care enough about them to get them edited. Sorry.

I also noticed that when shooting the airplanes taxiing or taking off from inside the airport, all the heat coming off the ground distorted the image of the plane. Some of that can be cool if it’s strategically placed, like in the shot above where the heat can be seen distorting the picture from underneath and behind the plane, but when the whole jet looks squiggly it’s a problem. Not sure what to do about that in the future, but if I just shoot them in the air the problem is solved, so that’s one way to fix it. My photos, for the most part, didn’t come out as crisp as I would have liked them to be, but the truth is I only needed one really good shot to feel like I accomplished something with this sort of thing, and I think I got one this time out – it’s the one I shared at the bottom of yesterday’s post. For now at least, a lot of what I shoot will be sub-par, but if I end up with one real winner I’ll be happy.

I did take some time today, once I figured out how to find EXIF data on the new Flickr layout, to check out camera settings and lenses used on planespotting photos I admire, and it does appear I could have set a much higher shutter speed and reduced the hell out of my ISO and gotten better results – my shutter speed was generally about 1/250 and I had the ISO upped to 640, while most EXIF data showed shutter speeds of around 1/1000 and an ISO of 200. Oops. Makes me feel better to know this, though, because a lot of people in the know commented that I did, in fact, buy a great lens for this sort of thing, and I was wondering why I got so many soft shots. Not that I’m complaining; as I said, I got several really nice ones and more than a few that are still satisfactory even if they’re not stellar, but obviously I want to improve where I can and do better next time.

Also, aside from looking for clarity, I’m not yet sure artistically what to consider a ‘good shot’. I’ve always had an instinct with my portraits regarding what to keep and what to throw away, and can easily narrow down a set to the ‘best’ shots; but with these I’m rather overwhelmed. Just when I think I’ve got a handle on what I like, I venture out to the internet and find an awesome photo that breaks all the new rules I’ve just set up for myself – at first I thought I only liked shots of the planes in the air, but then I saw some awesome stuff taken on the ground; then I thought I only liked close-ups, until I saw some cool shots of the planes disappearing into the sky. I know it sounds like I’m being crazy picky and analytical here, but not yet having an instinct for how to cull the best shots from a set is really overwhelming – I either think everything is good or everything stinks, and I have no basic preferences from which to start choosing. I think that’s partly because I really didn’t think I’d be able to take shots like this with any level of success; everything about it is so far out of my comfort zone (taking shots in public, of fast-moving objects, in an environment where I control very little about the shot itself) that I never really believed I’d be able to do it. But it turns out I can – I have a lot to learn, yes, but even on my first outing I got some decent stuff, and I managed not to make a fool of myself while doing it. I kind of actually appeared to know what I was up to while I was out there shooting, and the fact that I might actually be able to get a grip on this surprises no one as much as it does me. I expected the shooting experience to be different, but wasn’t prepared for how overwhelming the editing would be. I guess you could say I’m a bit “in the clouds” about it right now. Moving on.

I was a bit surprised to discover a hangar going up in flames in the background when I processed this one

One more thing: I took some time this morning to search the internet for the registration numbers of these airplanes, and what I found was pretty awesome. For example, this jetBlue’s recent flight history is here, and you can see the actual flight on April 19th when I took this photo listed. There’s no real reason to find this cool, except for the idea that airplanes – and airports themselves, really – are all about connection, and journeying, and departing, and arriving; all sorts of magical human stuff that fascinates me about aviation in general. It never ceases to amaze me that humanity has figured out how to put these huge metal monstrosities in the sky, and take flight. So, being able to capture a second of that happening, to freeze it mid-flight then go online and find out where that very airplane has been, and where it’s going (as well as finding all the photos of it that have been taken by others over the years) is incredibly uplifting to me – no pun intended. I guess when I look at an airplane I’m still a little kid in awe of it all.

Tomorrow there will be no more plane photos to share, as I think I’ve exhausted all the ones I felt were worth editing. But I will show some of the museum, and talk more about how the day went in general. Stay tuned! Or don’t if you’re totally bored and pissed that I’m not posting about makeup and wigs. I’m sure I’ll get back to all that soon enough.

Plane and Simple

Posted on April 19, 2014 by marey mercy

2014 isn’t halfway over and I’ve already fulfilled my photography bucket list – I held a real photoshoot in an honest-to-god studio, and now I’ve taken pics of airplanes. I wonder what I need to do next? I have no idea, but I am happy as hell with the airplane shots I got today. All in all, I completely filled up one 32G CF card and put a serious dent in the second, much smaller one I brought along just in case. About 1400 photos in all, and some of them were exactly what I was hoping for!

My dad and I behind the aviation history museum

The aviation museum was great, and I got some photos of the space, but I haven’t processed those yet because I was most excited about the commercial jet photos. Once a month the museum opens up the back tarmac to incoming planes and serves food as a little fundraiser; it provides photographers a pretty close-up view of a nearby airport runway. That was cool, and my telephoto lens served me well, but honestly, the best shots were to be had at the ‘family viewing areas’ located around the airport.

One of the two airport viewing areas opened to the public around the runways

It’s late and my arm is killing me, so I’m going to share some shots and keep things brief for now, but I’ve got loads to say about the day with my dad. It was tons of fun and we are raring to hit up the much larger Intercontinental Airport soon, which also has viewing areas where one can take photos, so I can get shots of a bigger variety of planes. Since Hobby Airport is home base to one particular airline, almost all the planes I shot today were this company’s jets. I’ll see if you can guess which one it is after you see some of the shots.

One of the shots taken at the end of the runway right behind the museum

The runway behind the museum was pretty busy with planes taking off, and each time one taxied out to the end of it, it would turn around and face directly into my camera for a few seconds before turning off to the left and throttling up the engines. So I got loads of nose shots like that. Then one time this happened:

Have you figured out what airline it is yet?

I like the heat waves radiating out from the underbelly of the plane, and the placement of them, obviously. As the planes took off, the runway angled farther away from me, so I didn’t get any decent shots of them lifting off – I took a ton, but the plane is too small for them to be exciting. However, I did snap a few good ones as the planes sped by:

Even though most of them were blurry, I thought this one looked nice, and the blurring of the grass shows the speed at which it was already moving. The sky wasn’t all that pretty here, but as the day wore on it got better. Also it got hotter, and unfortunately I am now sunburned as I didn’t think to put on sunscreen.

This plane is called the “Kangeroo Crew,” and it partners with Texas Children’s Hospital to fly children in need to and from its’ medical facilities. It just happened to be taking off while we were still at the museum, and the volunteers there were all very nice men and women who were sure to alert me when an interesting airplane was about to take off – even if they had to chase me down to be sure I knew about it. Great people.

Believe it or not, there actually are other airlines at Hobby Airport besides Southwest, but to be honest, this American Airlines plane just wasn’t photogenic. The Southwest planes really stand out, and this one blends into everything so much that it provided very little visual appeal – at least, that’s how I feel about it. Still, I took pictures of it anyway, so there you go.

I really wish this shot had come out better; it’s a cool placement of the two planes, but it’s pretty blurry and the color was blah. We were at the museum during the brightest part of the day, so color was tricky. Still, almost a cool shot, and the only decent one I have of wheels leaving the ground.

Now, onto the shots I took from the viewing areas – these were where I could catch some real winners (and as is always the case for me, I’m saving the best one for last).

I did not manage to get this entire Delta plane into any of my close shots; they moved too fast and came in at an odd angle that made it hard for me gauge ahead of time how much zoom to use. So, this was the best I got, but look how close it is! Way better than what I could get at the museum. Check this one out:

I mean seriously! If the pilot had known I was down there, he could’ve waved at me and I would’ve caught it. These shots were taken at the end of the day, when I was sunburned and tired (due partly to the minor disaster of me locking my keys in my car at the museum – erm, sort of – more on this later) and almost out of memory on my camera, but next time I’m going straight to the viewing areas and hitting up the museum for french fries later. I have an app on my iPhone called Flightradar24 which tracks flight traffic all over the globe (but only if they emit from a certain type of transponder or something, still, it’s an amazing amount of flight traffic to monitor) and my dad sat in the car watching it while I stood outside with my camera ready; when he saw something heading our way he’d shout out where it was coming from and what it was, and in that manner we team-worked our way through the shoot. As I may have mentioned, my father is an airplane fanatic (although WWII airplanes are his thing) and he is as obsessive about his interests as I am, so he was totally game for all of this. In fact, I was the one who eventually conked out and had to quit – we were all about the airplanes from 10:30 AM to 3 PM.

And now, without further ado, the best damn shot of the day. This right here is THE EXACT SHOT I was going for – I didn’t care what type of plane it was, I just wanted to get this shot:

BAM! Perfection! At least in my eyes it is!! Notice how much nicer the sky is here, and well, that the rest of it is awesome.

Much more to come, including shots of the museum and a JetBlue airliner, which everyone at the museum made a very big deal out of when it lined up to take off, so it must not be a plane that regularly flies out of this airport or something. My telephoto lens made me proud (lots of planespotters at the museum confirmed I’d made a wise choice for this kind of photography in buying it) and my dad and I had a real blast and are ready to try it again. I’m just going to have to remember to wear sunscreen next time, and to not (sort of) lock my keys in my car.

Macro’ed Up

Posted on April 18, 2014 by marey mercy

First of all, I got confirmation at work today that next year I can move out of counseling and into a teaching position at the school. So yay to that. And also:

My macro lens arrived! Like my last eBay lens, it shipped quickly and seems to be in good working order. I wandered around the house and backyard this evening attempting to take close-up shots. The lens was a little tricky to work with, but mostly because I haven’t done any reading about the best way to use it; I just threw it on the camera body and started walking around snapping photos of things. Mostly I had a hard time getting the lens to focus, and I had to put my Speedlite on it to get enough light which made my camera pretty damn heavy; this may be my heaviest lens yet.

That’s a shot of the chandelier, BTW. I am pretty happy at this point with my lens collection; I think I’ve got a nice variety of choices to use in different situations and for different effects. At some point I’ll line all my lenses up for a photo of them, but I’m not in the mood tonight. It’s late already and I’ve got a full day ahead tomorrow.

This is a shot of the beveled glass in our front door. Apparently we need to clean it; didn’t notice that until processing the photo.

And this is some sort of decorative geegaw that was stuck into a floral arrangement. Damn, it’s also dusty. I’m going to have to do a better job cleaning if I’m going to keep using the macro lens around the house. Oh, who am I kidding. I’m going to have to do a better job paying someone else to clean my house if I keep using the macro lens around the house. #firstworldproblems.

This is a bracelet that was hanging on a jewelry box that sits on top my vanity. I have loads of bracelets and earrings that I never wear, so at this point they’re more like decorative accessories for my bathroom counter. Not as dusty as the other stuff though, so that’s a positive.

As far as jewelry goes, I’m not much for anything other than necklaces. I don’t wear earrings at all anymore, and even my so-called wedding ring is a simple band from Tiffany’s – I love it because it has a tiny band of Tiffany’s blue running through it, but it isn’t an official wedding ring or anything. I had one I wore for 13 years, but I developed an allergy to the nickel in it and had to replace it. When looking for a new ring, I couldn’t generate enough interest in anything I looked at to feel inspired to spend thousands of dollars, so I went with the sterling silver band with Tiffany’s blue and am fine and dandy with it. It only cost $150. Much less than this macro lens I’m using. I realize that at this point it would make sense to have a macro shot of my faux wedding ring, but I didn’t actually plan this little digression in advance so I didn’t take any. Moving on.

Well, what can I say? This is my favorite so far. Penny is hard to catch in front of the camera.

A Few More to Share

Posted on March 23, 2014 by marey mercy

I’ve processed about 20 of the photos from last Monday’s shoot, and my energy and interest is starting to wear down. Still, 20 shots isn’t a bad payload at all, so it’s all good. The levitation shots didn’t work out at all, so that cut down on the end results considerably, but I do still have some nice jump shots to process that won’t involve too much beyond the basic editing, so in the end I bet we get closer to 30 out of the whole thing, which actually may be a record for me.

Here’s a few more I’ve worked on in the past few days, which actually isn’t many because I’ve been doing other things, including getting obsessed with Mad Men about six seasons late so I’ve been binge-watching that, plus getting my hair done yesterday which took a ridiculously long time to look basically no different after I was done (roots touched up and a simple trim for $200 and it took almost three hours because my stylist was running all kinds of behind), plus my father-in-law has been in the hospital getting his gallbladder removed, so lots of other stuff going on.

I have to say, Candace’s son was amazingly well-behaved while we shot photos for three hours, but he was a little shy in front of the camera, doing more giggling than actual posing. Still I did get him to jump about five times, and this was one of the best ones (he didn’t quite grasp the concept of looking at the camera while leaping). What can I say – super-cute kiddo, and I’ll have a few more to process of him later (although he was part of the 85-mm lens switch without changing camera settings fiasco, so most of his portraits came out blurry).

And there’s one of his mom – too bad they’re not a more handsome family. huh (/sarcasm)? This was one taken with the 85mm too, so I futzed with it enough to hide the blurriness, hopefully.

And there’s another one of Tamara, for good measure. You know I love hair flying about! I had to bring my own fan though – that’s one thing the studio didn’t have.

This is one of many cool leaping shots I still need to process, although obviously I did process this one. I just remembered I still have lots of yoga shots to edit too – so it looks like I’ll get another good week of editing out of this shoot. Not bad for the $70 or whatever I ended up paying for the studio, and I can feel my interest and energy coming back just thinking about the nice photos still available for processing!

mareymercy.

Art, Horror, and Other Obsessions

Category Archives: Photography