Sky-Shot

Sky-Shot

Tam dives deep into the memory hole and pulls out this curiosity.

SLICK CHICK

SLICK CHICK: The Wild Story Of The USAF's First Top Secret Supersonic Spy Plane
Not A Pound For Air To Ground

Other posts about Kapustin Yar:

• English Electric Canberra
• Russian Missile Launch

Post about aerial photography: Lucky 666

Slick Chick

Mirage

Aegir Deepwater Construction Vessel (DCV)
Binnenvaart & Transport Nederland

There is something funny going on in this video and I don't know what's causing it. The camera is pointing at a big ship that is some distance away. As you watch the video you can hear the wind blowing and when it does, the towers on the ship seem to wave back and forth. Now I am sure you could create that effect with some fancy video editing software, but I don't think that's what is happening. Is the camera wobbling? I don't think so, if it did, the whole scene would wobble. The only thing I can think of is that the density of the air changes as the wind blows, and that change in density is enough to change the index of refraction and so distort the image. It also explains why only the towers are affected - air that is closer tot he ground is not going to traveling as fast and will not be subject to the same changes in density. Air that is higher up will be moving faster.

Fly to the Sun

Fall of Icarus - Andrew McCarthy

When you blowup the image the detail is amazing. McCarthy's website. Short YouTube video that got me started.

More Moon shot pics.

Lucky 666

Lucky 666

I got to thinking about WW2 in the Pacific the other day. My Dad flew as a tail gunner in a B-24 during the war, but he never told me much about it, so I'm thinking there ought to be some books about it, and there are. This one is pretty great.

Port Moresby, Rabaul and Bougainville Island

Lucky 666 is the story of Jay Zeamer, troublemaker, misfit and pilot enamored of the B-17 bomber. The story concentrates on Port Moresby on New Guinea, Rabaul on New Britain and Bougainville Island. The distance from Port Moresby to Rabaul is 600 miles, the same as the distance from London to Berlin.

The climax occurs when Lucky 666 is attacked by a mess of Japanese Zeros while they are attempting to photograph the west coast Bougainville. The Zeros preferred method was to attack head on as the front of the B-17 has the fewest number of guns available to shoot back and is the most vulnerable with the glass nose. The book tells us that after they have made an attack run, it takes the Zeros ten minutes to circle around and come back for another pass. I'm guesstimating a zero can make a U-turn in about 6 seconds, but that will only put them about 1,000 feet to the side of the B-17's flight path. They will also now be a third of a mile behind the B-17, so they will still be in range of its guns. Zeros fly over 300 MPH and a B-17 taking photos is only flying at 200 MPH, so the Zero will be able to catch up to the bomber. The Zeros don't want to just catch the bomber, they want go way past it so they can turn around and head back towards it so they are heading right towards each other. That tight turning radius means they will only be 1,000 feet away from the bomber as they go by which is well within range of the top, tail, waist and belly guns, so they might want to be a little farther away which means a larger turning radius and more time taken. Now the Zero has to catch up to the B-17, then it needs to get several miles ahead so it has time to make another U-turn and time to line up its sights and fire a mess of bullets at the nose of the B-17. So, yeah, I can see that it could take ten minutes.

Metrogon Camera

Trimetrogon camera installed in B-17

Aerial reconnaissance was done using Trimetrogon cameras which were a lash up of three Metrogon cameras arranged so they covered a wide swath of ground. This swath of ground was perpendicular to the line of flight. By taking a set of three photos every few seconds a great deal of land could be covered with one pass.

Relationship of cameras to ground for trimetrogon photography (three cameras)

Metrogon cameras used nine inch wide film. If we assume a resolution of 600 pixels per inch, that's like 30 million pixels. Modern 35mm film might have a resolution equivalent to 3,000 pixels per inch. Funny, I could not find an article that gave a good account of the film versus digital images. They all seem to be tangle of mumbo-jumbo. Seems to me you should be able to make straight forward comparison.

Fairchild K-17 Camera

The Fairchild K-17 camera also used nine inch film. I suspect the camera body is the same as the one used with the Metrogon. Near as I can tell, the Metrogon name comes from the fancy, wide-angle lenses they used.

Technicolor

The Biggest Lie in Hollywood | Technicolor
NationSquid

Crazy movie making technology. There is an ad for Bespoke Post that starts at the three minute mark and runs until 5:25.

He's right about the cameras.

Technicolor Motion Picture Camera

Same camera mounted on a dolly in sound proof box

Another view of the camera showing the very large film magazines

P. S. For another monster movie camera see Jackie Gleanson's Electronicam

Stu

Stu Savory and SWMBO

Stu posted A short history of photography. He has some curious pictures.

Camera Obsession

Testing the Camera from Rear Window (1954)
Bayliss Projects

I don't understand why, but I really enjoyed watching this video. The calm, soothing narration is almost hypnotic. Curious little bits of the Cold War show up now and again which is cool.

I really like Hitchcock's movies. I was kind of expecting our camera guy to look into what Jimmy Stewart saw through his camera and see if it was possible using the camera he's using. He doesn't do that, he covers the camera thoroughly, but doesn't look at its use in the film.

RUTAN 339 Space Ship Two (N33955)

RUTAN 339 Space Ship Two (N33955)

I remember hearing about this thing, what, ten years ago? I didn't like the pivoting tail assembly. Don't have a good reason for my dislike, it just looks like trouble, big flappy things stuck way out on the end of long, skinny sticks. If it had been a success I'm sure they would have eventually won me over. They made some test flights, one of the two crashed, and that seems to have been it. I could find no record of any of the planned commercial flights.

The carrier plane carries SpaceShip Two to somewhere around 12 miles high before it releases it. If this photo was taken from the ground, it would have required a really big lens, and careful planning of the drop. I'm thinking this was taken from a chase plane. That would have entailed its own set of problems, but it wouldn't constrain the carrier plane's flight plan.

Pic of the Day

Man Fall From Tree - Geert de Taeye
204 piece jigsaw puzzle

The fashion world is a strange and wondrous place.

In Flight Photos

Saab Viggen 37 Pilot taking a photo
270 piece jigsaw puzzle

Wonder if this is who he was photoing. 

Here's the same airplane emerging from its bunker.

Number 21 has since become a museum piece. 

Big City

Hidden City 2 - Navid Baraty
252 piece jigsaw puzzle

From Navid's website:

Over the years I’ve photographed various reflections of NYC seen in the windows of skyscrapers from high atop buildings in Manhattan. I couldn't believe my eyes the first time I saw how much of the city can be seen reflected along the sides of glass skyscrapers from on high. It felt as if I'd discovered a sort of hidden dimension that had always been there, waiting to be noticed.

The left half of the image is a reflection of the right half seen in the windows of a skyscraper. You might notice several thin vertical lines just to the left of center. Those are seams between adjacent sheets of glass. Likewise, the diagonal line that sort of looks like it could be a highway is also a seam, albeit more prominent.

Wiral Lite Cable Cam ► Review and Sample Footage

You may have noticed the cameras flying on wires above sporting events.  Those rigs look big and expensive. Here we have something an amateur could afford. B & H Photo has them for $400.

Camera shots from drones are all the rage these days, but drones aren't always the best solution. They're noisy, if you are above a crowd and they crash somebody could get hurt, and sometimes there are just too many obstacles to make flying a practical solution.

Air-to-Air Photography

Mummies photographing a DHL Boeing 757-200

Mostly I don't concern myself with how a photographer gets a picture of an airplane, but sometimes I do. A closeup photo taken when the plane is in flight, at high altitude, those kind of get my attention. Photos like that take certain amount of work. This is the first photo I have seen of that work in progress.

That's what Dietmar Schreiber does. His web site (airtoair.at) is full of airplane photos. This photo looks like it was taken from a helicopter, and since he has so many photos of this plane, it had to have been specially arranged. I suspect the jetliner was flying slowly, like 200 MPH, that would allow it to turn around and make several passes so the 100 MPH helicopter could stay within photo distance.

Car of the Day

1967 Plymouth GTX

I've always had a certain affection for Chrysler muscle cars. Back in the day I wasn't too keen on them, even though I liked the way they looked, they were full size cars, which meant they were carrying around a few hundred pounds more mass than the pony cars. Back then I was all wrapped up in racer-think about lighter and faster. That extra weight was going to slow those big cars down. Nowadays I appreciate a full size car, which can carry a crew and a full size trunk which can hold everything they will need for our next operation. Like carrying the gang to the grocery store with a trunk full of bottles for the recycling center. Yeah, a big 'operation'.

Curiously, the image on View From The Porch suffers from the jaggies and the same image posted here, doesn't, even though we are using the same platform (Blogspot).

Resolution

Salvage Catamaran VB-10,000 cutting up the MV Golden Ray - Tamara Keel

You may have heard that big, fat container ship has contrived to get itself sideways in the Suez Canal completely blocking the channel and causing a huge pileup of cargo vessels at both ends. View From The Porch and daily timewaster both have posts up about it. This picture is not that ship, this is another disaster that happened off the coast of Georgia a couple of years ago.

I cropped the above image from a high-res photo that Tam posted. In Tam's post the ships are just a red and yellow blob. If your camera has enough pixels it can compensate for not having a zoom lens. The downside is that a few images can really eat into your storage space. Of course storage space is cheap these days.

1 Terabyte USB memory stick from Amazon < $40

Unless you are renting space on the cloud. It's still cheap, but it incurs a monthly charge. $2 a month buys 100GB from Google. My cropped image uses one-tenth as much space as the original. The original is only about 1/4 of a megabyte, which is negligible on this scale. However, I scanned a batch of old 4 x 6 photos at 600 dpi and each one of those required about 50 megabytes. That amount of space on this thumb drive would be a fifth of a cent. On Google it would be a tenth of a cent a month. Take a thousand photos and you're talking about a cup of coffee.

Airplane of the Day - English Electric Canberra

Classic British Aircraft English Electric Canberra
Chuck Pergiel
I've come across the Canberra before, but it never stood out as anything special. However, a couple of days ago I came across a story about a 1953 mission photographing a secret Russian rocket research facility and my interest was piqued. I hope to put up a post about that mission, but you know how things don't always go as planned, so we have this as a stop gap.

I kind of wondered about the name, I mean the English are weird that way sometimes. Here it's kind of prosaic. ". . . it was given the name Canberra after the capital of Australia in January 1950 by Sir George Nelson, chairman of English Electric, as Australia had become the aircraft's first export customer."

Update February 2021 the Canberra has been retired, so this video is at least 15 years old.

Update January 2022 replaced video with one that might be the same. It's from the same guy. The original is available on a Persian channel: Classic British Aircraft English Electric Canberra

Update December 2025 replaced missing video with the original that I downloaded from the Persian channel (Aparat.com) using TubeNinja.

I Smell Smoke Part Six

 

Erickson Aero Tanker's Tanker 60 - a 1958 Douglas DC-7B

Operating out of Redmond Oregon

Due to be retired this year

Same image without and with Auto White Balance

Bruce found an explanation about why my photo of the sky showed a yellow sun when it was obviously a red sun.

The Oregonian had a report in this morning's paper about why this years forest fires are so much worse than usual (yes, they are much worse) and what the powers that be are doing about it. The last paragraph is kind of telling.

“I thought the entire [Governor’s Council on Wildfire Response] engaged in good critical thinking,” Donegan said. “They were intellectually honest and took off their partisan hats. It was a big tent approach. Then you get to the legislative process and a lot of those more familiar battle lines reemerged. That was obviously very disappointing.”

 

Camera of the Day

Fox Photos photographers use a long-focus lens mounted on a Graflex camera to capture the fifth Ashes Test at The Oval in 1938 © Getty Images

Compare with these WW2 military cameras.

Via Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

Ancient Photograph of the Day

William Sachtleben and bicycle, Turkey, June, 1891 - Photograph taken by Thomas Gaskell Allen
UCLA Library Digital Collections

Andy is listening to an audio recording of Across Asia on a Bicycle by Thomas Gaskell ALLEN (1868 - 1955?) and William Lewis SACHTLEBEN ( - 1953). Summary:

In 1890, two Americans newly graduated from college set out to travel around the world on a then-new invention, the modern bicycle. In 1893 they returned, have covered over 15,000 miles, at that time the "longest continuous land journey ever made around the world." This is their account of their trip across Turkey, Persia, Turkestan and northern China. It described their adventures traveling along through regions few outsiders ever visited. And include climbing Mount Ararat (they didn't find an ark) and a meeting with the then Chinese Prime Minister. And numerous photographs selected from the 2,500 taken on the almost 3 year trip.