Using Alaska Airlines as a private plane

When you have the zoom lens available on a flight, you can take pictures from the air.. of snow covered mountains above the clouds..

Got to do this on July 4th as we flew out of Seattle..

The white balance is tricky as we have to go through the glass window and some of the light reflecting off the window as well as the sun's angle on the clouds makes it difficult to guess. 

Then of course there is HDR processing that helps remove the glare and automatically puts the highlights and details. 

 

Have never taken my camera bag with me on any business trip. If there is no smiling wife or kid, feel no motivation to grab the camera bag. Also, I will have to check in bags and not looking forward to that. Will figure out something on next rip to Asia.. Maybe just the camera and the 24-105mm?!

It is always great to have a nice zoom on hand.. sometimes and iPhone doesnt cut it.. this was one of those times.

Start with the clouds

It has been a good three months since the India trip. There has been a lot more traveling, all work related. Interesting places, experiences, people! A lot to write about.

However, work dicates I keep my travel locations confidential. It is a funny request given I meet so many familiar faces at various international airport waiting lounges. Also, there are only a handful of fab locations in the world one can go to these days, if you group it by country!

For now, the request has to be honored.. so let's start with the clouds!

This picture was taken somewhere at 33000 feet above an ocean, with the iPhone 5S

Think that is generic enough!

Now don't start asking me which ocean.. 

While I was going through iPhone pictures, came across another recent one taken at Big Sur where we went camping a few months ago. 

Both photos were sent through Photoshop for the same reasons. The first photo had way too many light spots from the plane window. So eliminated them on the middle of the picture. The second one had raindrops on the windshield which showed. Removed most of the drops that showed up on the road (you can still see the drops on the tree and sides). 

Here are two photos taken with the 5D Mark II the previous evening at Big Sur.

Have now found a new treasure trove of pictures on my iPhone. 

A friend who works at Adobe just got me a copy of the latest Lightroom! 

Apparently presets are a breeze with Lightroom. Will tell you how it goes soon.. 

Airshow by accident

Over the weekend we decided to take visiting relatives to Ghirardelli's Chocolate factory. It was my first driving experiment after surgery.

One mistake.. there was an air show in the city around the Pier area and that meant there was no way to anywhere near the Chocolate factory. After driving around for an hour and realizing there was no way to park anywhere close by, not to mention the "pee pee" calls from the kids, we had to make a hasty retreat back out of the pier area.

Luckily when we stopped almost close to the freeway entrance, the planes were still circling around and the camera was in the trunk!

Quickly mounted the 70-200 and clicked a few shots from the sidewalk. The wife was surprised by my impulsiveness but when we came home and she saw the photos, her jaw dropped..

"How did you take that one?" she asked.

Told her that support in buying the 70-200mm is much appreciated. When she realized that she was the proud financier of such worthy equipment, she was beaming!

Next year, we are going to the airshow and parking ourselves at a vantage location for photograph session!

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The one that always gets away

As most of you have seen in every form of news media, there was another plane bombing attempt over the Christmas break, which thankfully was not successful.

Now, the agencies which should focus more on "how the hell did this guy get the explosives on the plane" have instead focused on "how can we harass regular folk more" after this incident..

The latest reports read(this is from Times)

"In the final hour before landing in the US, plane passengers are now banned from standing up, using toilets, opening lockers and covering themselves with blankets."

What next?

In the final hour before landing in the US, plane passengers will have to get naked and freeze on their seats when the pilot says "freeze". They will not be allowed to move till the plane lands and the pilot says "unfreeze"?

Unfreakingbelievable!

One stupid dude gets through and now every airline passenger will suffer for it the next three years or so. Especially pity those who now have to travel with the elderly or small kids.

I still remember,

a. having to throw away my baby's milk at a security counter only to find that the plane carried no milk

b. my wife's 75 year old grandmother having to remove her mangalsutra(thali) at the check point and her refusal ending up in extra searches

c. so many shaving gels, toothpastes, etc. being tossed for their size (I still think if you are really a bomber, you would figure out a way to do the damage within 100ml of volume!) and the fact that the toothpaste clearly smelled like kids gum, had Dora on it and my little one was ready to even eat and show it was indeed toothpaste all falling on the deaf years of the security inspectors whose only qualification seemed to be a healthy hatred for humanity..

d. the extra long double, triple safety checks at international airports, for US bound flights only

e. my relative who was standing in his undies in front of everyone because his pant was not able to hold on its own when he removed his belt at the security checkpoint (come on now... if you have a big tummy which expands and contracts with every meal, you have have one of those wide belts and you try holding a boarding pass, a wallet and your pants all at the same time and trying to have your hands flat so the security dude can do his metal detector thingy on you!)

More security measures will be underway over the next few months they tell us.

If I cannot be part of the solution, would like to be part of the problem.. not the terror problem, but the airport security problem!

Going forward they should make a new rule that all passengers will be given a plastic poncho/jump suit kind of thing before the flight. It will come with a "built in undie" and that will be the only thing they will be allowed to wear on the flight. The jump suits will be color coded by airlines and will have advertisement logos on them from sponsors.

All other things like poonals, aranaikayars, thalis, etc. etc. will have to be packed with the clothes and jewelry and put in the suitcase. No carry on baggage of any kind will be allowed.

You will be weighed before and after you come out of any restroom and MRI'ed to verify that there are only expected changes in your body after your restroom session. As an added bonus, airport doctors who watch your MRI will give you a free prescription for your problems they find during the scan. They might even reassign your seat with respect to the bathroom location, based on what they find in the scan.

This way no need to search anyone.

Time to start "airclothing.com" and start getting those sponsors for the jumpsuits and make some money.

Oh wait, isn't that how they transfer prisoners on airplanes in the movies?

Next time maybe if our entire family takes swimming lessons and starts rowing fast enough, we could go visit relatives in India by boat?

Seriously, flying is going to be soooo overrated!

On another note, what was this guy thinking? Blowing up a few people on air and a lot more on the ground is going to do what? (other than make those TSA inspectors snap on new gloves and smile their evil smile). Also, even with all the convoluted logic of 70 virgins waiting for this dude after he kills himself and everyone around him (all media tells us that the number 70 is accurate, although no one seems to have come back from the dead to verify the headcount of the virgins), what use are 70 virgins if you have blown your groins to smithereens?

More than a quarter of a million people perished in a Tsunami five years ago and the world keeps turning.

Now what can we do to stop more of these "undrawer" bombers from getting on planes? How can an average airline passenger dude like me help? ( No, I will not stop complaining about how airline travel has become a crappy experience..)

Please tell us how to make things normal again or at least go in the right direction?

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Future of Flight - day trip from Seattle

Boeing has a museum of sorts and a tour of their assembly line in Mukilteo, Washington.

It was impressive, to say the least. But we constantly learn that technology and grandeur alone are not enough to carry the show.

First the impressive stuff.

They had the Rolls Royce Trent engine on display. This puppy is supposed to be the latest and greatest to power the 787 (yes, we saw three being built on their assembly line and one near completion) but the guide did tell us that everyone is going for the more proven GE engines!

If you are a materials engineer who did work on composites and you are in the high tech industry, this is as impressive as it gets to watching materials meet mechanics with a whole bunch of electronics thrown in, and we are not even talking about those cool aerodynamic wing tip designers !!!

They had sections of the plane on display, and an evolutionary history of the 7x7 series we are so familiar with today, in a self tour bay.

Let us say that the new 787 is a smaller plane than the 777 but is more spacious and fuel efficient and can go from Vancouver to Sydney non-stop! How? How? How?

Well, they switched from Aluminum to Composites for the entire body, a thing that was the holy grail of materials scientists for over 25 years! You see, these composite structures cannot be welded that easily and cannot be reformed or reshaped either. So you have to get it right the first time and we all know how difficult that can be!

There is also a lot of ergonomic improvements. The whole cabin area looks streched in x and shrunk in y (might be a problem for tall folks, but my guess is finally Boeing and its customers have figured out that the average person is 5 foot 5 inches and it makes sense to go wider and shorter).

They had a nice display with the cockpit. Kind of cramped and your head just spins after seeing all those dials and knobs and makes you realize why the "driver" (Jr. slang for pilot) is so important.

There were no cellphones, cameras, anything electronic allowed on the factory tour. So no pictures of the half built planes I guess.. Also the release date of the completed 787 is a closely kept secret. All we know is the first plane goes to All Nippon Airlines and is having technical difficulties!

Now, for the comment earlier about not everything being perfect. Boeing does not understand the concept of customer service (being one of two companies that makes such monster planes, probably never had to understand the concept!)

We asked for six tickets for a tour and they gave us 3 each for two different tours and did not bother to mention that they split our group! So our subsequent plans got all messed up and they had a big issue with accepting the fact that they screwed up!

That episode apart, the tour guide was extremely nice and the rest of the tour was uneventful.

Expensive but if you are a high tech or flying enthusiast, a must see if you go to the Seattle area!

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