Rant Air - Welcome Aboard!

It’s early early in the morning. 12:55 AM, to be exact. I’ve just put my daughter back to bed. We’d spent the last twenty minutes on our front lawn, staring westward in search of a rocket that was to be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central coast of California between 12:46 and 12:55 AM.

At about 12:48, we caught sight of the Delta II rocket - appearing to us as a bright orange glow with a long tail. It rose from the horizon into the western sky and arced southward on its trajectory to put it’s payload into orbit. We watched it go, accelerating, as it lost it’s bright orange tail to become a not-quite-as-bright orange ball skipping across the south-western part of the sky to a point where it was due south of us. It suddenly became bright white and, with a puff of white smoke, its main booster cut out and we lost sight of it.

We sat on the lawn for several minutes, talking about where it was going and what it was going to do when it got there. We talked about how fast it moved. We talked about who was flying it.

As I tucked her back into bed she said, “Daddy, I want to fly on a rocket ship when I grow up!” Handing her her moon-clicker, I kissed her on her forehead and said, “To the moon, someday.”

The visible portion of tonight’s rocket flight lasted perhaps three minutes, but hopefully the memory of seeing it go will last my daughter a lifetime.

I’ve never been a coffee drinker. I can’t stand the taste of the stuff, actually. Some types of coffees even smell horrid to me while they’re being brewed. Starbucks, for instance, always smells to me like it should be sealed in fifty-gallon drums by rubber-suit-clad hazmat workers, trucked to a remote location in a Nevada desert, and buried deep underground in cement bunkers so that it can’t harm human beings.

On most mornings, it doesn’t take any more than a small breakfast and a cup of orange juice to get my brain moving. But, since I’m an early-riser and AM flyer, I do need a bit of help waking up in the morning every now and again. I don’t drink very much caffein in the first place (compared to other people I know, anyway), so it doesn’t take much for me to feel the effects of it. Typically, I’ll grab an iced tea with a little lemon in it and that will be enough. But if I’m in an extreme morning rut, I usually head towards the diet sodas.

Yeah, I know carbonation isn’t all that great for me (especially early in the morning), and neither are the artificial sweeteners. But the amount of caffeine in a Diet Pepsi is enough to give my brain the jolt it sometimes needs.

And yes, I prefer Diet Pepsi to Diet Coke. Diet Coke, to me, tastes very acidic, not at all sweet, and has a wicked aftertaste. Diet Pepsi is crisper, sweeter (though not syrupy sweet), and has no aftertaste. My preference for Pepsi products is so strong that I will seek out a Pepsi vending machine (sometimes paying outrageous airport prices) rather than raid the galleys on my own airplane for a Diet Coke.

Because of that strong preference, I have a mental map of every Pepsi-selling vending machine, airport restaurant, and hotel in our system. In Boise, there’s a machine that sells 20-ounce bottles under the terminal. I can get a bottle from the burrito bar in Oakland. In Portland, there’s a machine that sells cans in the operations breakroom. The Drury Inn in San Antonio serves Pepsi products in it’s restaurant and vending machines.

But I guess there’s a reason I’ve stored such a truly unimportant piece of information like that in my head. Pepsi vendors are rarer than you’d think. Many airport’s food services are operated by a single management company. That company probably negotiates soft-drink service contracts, and if they go with CocaCola Company’s products, then the entire airport will serve only Coke products. And Coke appears to be bigger than Pepsi in terms of distribution.

I’m such a soda snob that I frequent restaurants at home more often if they serve Pepsi products. Abe’s Deli gets my business over Brent’s Deli for that reason (among others…the food is good at both places).

I’m mostly a water drinker who throws in the occasional iced-tea and has a soda maybe once or twice a day, so I don’t drink as much soda as it may sound. But when I do, I drink what I like.

I won’t write a whole lot here about the new Indiana Jones movie, since I wouldn’t want to completely spoil the experience for those who may just enjoy (I know there will be one or two of you).

But I will say that I thought it sucked. Actually, I thought it sucked out loud.

Almost 20 years we fans of the Indiana Jones franchise waited while hearing the rumor of a fourth flick. 20 years, Lucas and Spielberg had, to come up with a story line that could have topped the first three, and THIS is what they give us? A slapped-together, schlocky two-hour SciFi Channel made-for-TV-quality plot, over-used computer-generated scenery, and actors that really just didn’t seem to be interested in their roles anymore? What a load of crap!! And what happened to Indy?? Indy used to be cunning, resourceful, mildly offensive at times, somewhat of a lady’s man, and unafraid to be forceful or get angry if it helped him get out of a situation. Instead of that free-man’s free man that was Indiana Jones, we get over-the-hill Indy who seems to have been overly-mellowed (if not castrated) by age. Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, Mr. Ford! You just didn’t act like INDY in this one!

If I could un-watch this latest installment, I would. I was so angry when I left the theater that I ranted the whole way home about it (didn’t stop there, did it?), and I should probably apologize to my sister and her husband as well as my wife for being so upset about the whole thing.

So Mr. Lucas and Mr. Spielberg have, yet again, succeeded in completely ruining a movie franchise of my youth that I was particularly fond of. Lucas wrecked the Star Wars franchise with episodes 1, 2, and 3. Spielberg wrecked E.T. by re-releasing it with an overly “PC” edit. What’s next? Going to re-edit American Graffiti? Going to re-release Jaws with newly shot scenes that make the movie “what it was meant to be in the first place?”

I just won’t be able to stomach giving these two film makers any more of my money after this latest disappointement.

There was one good thing about the movie, though: I paid matinée prices for our tickets.

In the airline biz, one of the “perks” we as employees receive is (somewhat) free, space-available non-revenue travel. Provided there are open seats on the aircraft, we (employees and immediate family) have an unlimited ability to travel on our own airline, free of charge. We are also given up to 16 round-trip passes per year as a reward for productivity which we can give to anyone we choose. These are commonly called”buddy passes,” and are subject to the same space-available rules as our unlimited passes.

I’ve accumulated quite a few of the buddy passes in the last three years. And until recently, no one I know has been willing to use them. For that reason, the majority of the passes I’ve earned have expired before being used. But last week, a buddy and his wife and toddler son took several of my passes and made a trip to El Paso where his wife’s family is from.

As employees, we’re able to look fairly closely at projected load factors for any given flight (of our airline’s) we’d like to attempt to travel on. Using that information, I sat down with my buddy about a week-and-a-half and explained the situation to him. When we first looked at the flight bookings, everything looked like it would be a breeze. There were plenty of open seats on both flight legs to El Paso (BUR to PHX and PHX to ELP), and plenty of open seats on the way back as well. But looking again at the flights to El Paso on the day before he was set to travel revealed a different story entirely. A fare-sale had drastically increased bookings to the point where getting to El Paso on a non-revenue pass might be tricky. But my buddy was understanding (as well as well-prepared), and he was ready to head out the next morning to give it a try.

My buddy and his family had never traveled non-revenue before. Even though I had their complete understanding of the majority of the intricacies of traveling on passes, I found myself worrying extensively about their travel day. Non-revenue travel is something that often takes a little bit of getting used to (what with the possibility of getting bumped and having travel plans delayed being rather high), and since they’d never done the non-rev thing before, I was up early the morning of their departure to look ahead at their travel day.

I looked at flight loads, gates, on-time status, flight crews, travel times, alternate routings, and other things. Not that I’d have been able to get any of that information to them unless they were to call with a problem, of course. I just found myself worrying about whether or not they would encounter any difficulties and hoping they’d have a relatively pain-free first non-revenue experience. I found myself stressing out about their travel day MUCH more than I stress out about my own non-revenue travel.

They ended up catching the first flight opportunity out of Burbank through Phoenix to El Paso. They ended up using some frequent-flier credits they’d had to get on that flight (since it was full) instead of using my non-revenue passes, but that was only because of a listing error on my part. I wasn’t aware that they weren’t allowed to make reservations with their frequent-flier rewards as a backup to non-revenue travel. Fortunately (for me), the gate agent there in Burbank was nice enough to explain the conflict to them and allow them to continue.

They’re flying back to Burbank tomorrow, and flight loads couldn’t be better for non-revenue travel. Light passenger loads on every flight. They should have no problem getting home tomorrow on my buddy passes, so no stress for me!

*****

An as-of-yet unconfirmed story heard from a flight attendant this evening on the van to the hotel had one of our airplanes diverting from its original flight plan to land at an airport other than its originally-planned destination. Apparently, a passengers “comfort companion” animal (a monkey, as the story goes) got loose and wreaked some sort of havoc in the cabin.

“Comfort companions” are animals that are brought on board airplanes by people who have notes from their doctors stating that the presence of the animal is required to comfort the animal’s owner. From what I’ve been told, we are forced to honor the doctor’s notes and carry the animals (thanks to the American’s with Disabilities Act and a several crazy lawyers), just as we are required to carry true service animals like seeing-eye dogs. “Comfort companions” are, of course,  very different than “service animals” in that they are typically not given any special training and don’t perform any specific function for the owner (other than to provide “comfort”). Service animals (seeing eye dogs and such) need no notes from doctors.

My observation is that, typically, people get notes from their doctors (friends, most likely) to allow them to carry their pets with them onboard (a practice my airline prohibits) without having to pay to check them as baggage. Yep. Another way to work the system.  I’ve seen comfort animals that run the species gamut, cats to lizards to monkeys. I’ve heard stories of comfort pot-bellied pigs. I’ve heard stories of comfort pigeons. I’ve seen people attempt to pass aggressive-acting pit bulls as comfort animals. I’ve even heard stories of a woman who showed up with a Great Dane and a note from her gynecologist about it being her “comfort companion.”

The crazy stuff you’ll see…

Last Saturday, I drove with a buddy down to San Diego to stake out a small piece of real-estate on Coronado from which to watch and photograph the qualifying runs of the Red Bull Air Race World Series.

My goal this year was to have my images show marked improvement in sharpness, composition, and “interestingness” over the photographs I took last September during the same event. Personally, I think I hit my goal and then some!

There are three reasons I improved year-over-year, I think. First, my location this year was better. By shooting from the Coronado side of the bay (rather than the San Diego side, as we did last year), I avoided having the sun streaming into my lens from directly in front of me all day, washing out my images and robbing them of contrast. This year’s location also gave me a stunning background in the downtown San Diego skyline, which really helped me impart a sense of speed to the image as the skyline blurred slightly behind the aircraft while I panned the camera to follow them.

The second reason I think my pictures improved from last year’s is that I had better equipment. Although I shot this year’s race with the same Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VR lens as I used last year, this year I paired that lens up with a 2x teleconverter (effectively giving me a 400mm focal length) and then attached the whole stack to my D3. Compared to the D200 I shot with last year, the D3’s far superior ability to maintain focus on fast-moving objects moving towards or away from me really made a big difference in the amount of images that came out properly-focused. Not all were “tack-sharp,” but there was a greater percentage of perfectly focused images than last year.

And the third reason I think my images improved year-over-year is because I have a better understanding now of the relationships between subject and camera movement and exposure settings (in other words, I’ve gotten better at photography). By being more careful in selecting my shutter speeds and f-stops, I had a higher percentage of quality images to total images. Last year, I shot almost 1200 images and came up with 133 images I consider to be viewable by anyone but me…but I only consider about eight of those 133 images to be professional-quality (though a true professional might disagree with my assessment). That’s less than 1% success rate (YUCK)! This year, I shot just under 760 images, and I have 74 that I consider to be professional-quality. ALMOST 10%!! MUCH better! And by taking fewer captures (i.e. concentrating to ensure I make good captures instead of setting the camera to continuous and hoping for the best), I had less work to do to process the images when I got home!

Here are my five favorite images from Red Bull Air Race San Diego 2008!

Take a look at the rest of the images here.
Last year’s images are here or here (for your comparison).

Incidentally, I’m looking for a good title for the last image above. Feel free to make sincere suggestions!

I just got back from Dallas, and I’m happy to say that I’ll be allowed to keep my job for another two years.

I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but every other year, First Officers at my company submit themselves to the Gods of the box on stilts for a proficiency check (or “PC”). The PC consists of a two hour oral examination followed by four hours in one of the company’s full-motion flight simulators. Typically, we FOs are paired up with a Captain who is also doing his yearly PC. I was fortunate to have been paired up this year with a captain I’d flown with before, which made things easy and stress free.

The check consisted of the typical stuff, and it is sufficient to say that I performed satisfactorily. There is never any fear (in my mind) about “busting” this sort of thing, as most of our company check airmen have a very good attitude towards the event. That means that they’re not looking to get you fired (and thus waste all the company cash it took to hire and train you), but instead are looking to make sure your knowledge level is still “up there” enough for them to be okay with putting their families on airplanes we’re flying. So when it comes down to it, a pilot’s level of proficiency has to be pretty low and that pilot has to be dense enough to not allow things to get through to them when they go through immediate re-training after boogering up a particular task badly enough in the simulator.

But even though a fall from flying status is a rarity on a PC, it does happen. There are a lot of things that influence the way a pilot’s brain functions, and the way a pilot’s brain functions influences the way they perform in the simulator. More often than not, there are extenuating circumstances in the pilot’s life that cause him to perform poorly. Too little sleep or stress at home can keep a pilot from properly wrapping his mind around his upcoming checkride.

For the most part, however, pilots will over-prepare for their PC. For me, that’s usually the case. I think my primary concern is that I don’t want to look like an absolute blithering idiot in front of a check airman and a captain who I may end up flying with sooner or later. Word gets around, you know. Being that I said that over-preparation is usually the case for me, it would stand to reason that there have been times when I have prepared insufficiently or just enough. This year, the “P” word (procrastination) got the best of me, and I found myself putting off my study at every opportunity to focus on more fun things. I didn’t find myself to be insufficiently prepared (since I did fine on the oral and in the sim), but I could perhaps put this year into that “just enough” category.

I’m glad its over. I’ve got seven days off that I think I’ve earned by flying so many four-day trips lately.

*****

As of May 11, I’ll have been with the company for three years.

Three years gone. Thirty-one left.

The last three years has gone by in the blink of an eye and crawled by like a slug on a cold sidewalk at the same time. All-in-all, it’s been a great three years no matter how I look at it.

Fourth year pay starts the day after tomorrow. $96 per trip averaging 105 trips per month. A guy could make a pretty decent living and provide pretty well for a family on that. It’s certainly a long way from where I was almost 10 years ago, when I was flying Saab 340’s and making $14.50 per flight hour.

I’m taking a break from packing up for yet another four-day trip. This will be my fourth four-day trip in a row. I had two at the end of last month and two to start this month. Next week, I’ve got a three day trip with a Burbank overnight on it, so it won’t feel quite as long as a regular three-day. Three days will feel really short after flying four-days so often lately, anyway. But just to keep myself from getting spoiled, I picked up an extra day of flying after next week’s trip.

I need the money, I guess.

*****

High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging is something I’ve been meaning to get a little more practice with. Yesterday, I took a trip up to the Getty Center here in Los Angeles to try out the new 14mm superwide lens on some interesting architecture. With an eye towards creating a couple HDR images along with practicing my skills at architectural photography, I was very careful about scene composition, exposure, and lighting.

To get the right set of exposures for building an HDR image, it’s best to use an old trick Ansel Adams used to employ. The Zone system helps a photographer envision all the differently exposed areas in an image based on their luminosity. Scenes that have great variations in luminosity make the best HDR images, so I was careful to look for subjects that would give me the greatest range in luminosity over the series of five exposures that I would use to combine into each HDR image. From the results of my efforts, I learned that being careful when choosing your scene makes my HDR images really work the way I wanted them to.

Here’s the results.

This image is actually five images combined (one properly exposed, two exposed 1 and 2 stops under, and two exposed 1 and 2 stops over). The “illustrated” look is exactly what I was going for. It gives everything sort of an ethereal quality.

Here is the correctly-exposed image so you can see the difference.

I thought I was going to have a difficult time taking a series of bracketed images because the security staff at The Getty wouldn’t allow me to take my tripod into the museum. Normally, you’d want to use a tripod for these sorts of things to ensure that each image is perfectly sharp and exactly the same as the rest in the series. With the Nikon D3, having a tripod is less of a problem because of the camera’s ability to take up to 9 images per second. So as long as I’m able to hold steady for approximately 1/2 a second (and the slowest shutter speeds for the series is no longer than about 1/200th of a second), I can easily get a a nice, sharp five-image bracketed series captured. The high frames-per-second makes this camera a really versatile tool!

More of my HDR work can be seen here.
More of my images from the Getty Center can be seen here.

Well, it’s been another disappointing season for hockey fans in Los Angeles. Our Los Angeles Kings had another miserable season. Things are not all bleak and dark in the future for the Kings, however. There is now an established core of young players to build a hockey team around. Anze Kopitar, Dustin Brown, Alex Frolov, Patrick O’Sullivan and Jack Johnson are no doubt the future of the Kings. And with finishing last in the NHL this season (as of right now, the Kings are in last place with 69 points and three games to go, which is two points behind the Tampa Bay Lightning), the Kings have a good chance at picking first in the upcoming NHL draft. And this year’s draft is absolutely chock-full of talented young players, some of which are NHL-ready. So things are looking up for the Kings. It may take another season or two, but you can be sure I’ll be there at Staples Center to cheer my hockey team on.

With only three games to go in the NHL season, it’s time for me to shift gears from hockey to baseball. Today is Opening Day at Dodger Stadium. Just as in the beginning of every past baseball season, there is a LOT of optimism about the Dodgers. With the development of our young players (James Loney, Matt Kemp, Russel Martin, Chad Billingsley, and Andre Ethier) coming along very well, and with the addition of center-fielder Andruw Jones (who was signed as a free agent this past off-season), there are many who believe that the Dodgers are the team to beat in the National League West this season.

Mom and I go to Opening Day together every year, so we’re tooling up this morning for the 1 PM game. Sunscreen, cameras, lunch, a co-signer for the loan we need to take out to pay for parking, all are lined up and ready to go.

And here I sit at 5 AM.

Is it time to go yet?

Why do I call it a workout? The D3 and the 70-200mm f/2.8 VR lens weigh a combined SIX POUNDS!!

My right shoulder is SORE!

I took the new D3 down to Toyota Sports Center in El Segundo, CA yesterday morning to shoot pictures of the Los Angeles Kings while they practiced there. The practice lasted approximately an hour-and-a-half, and I took nearly 500 captures.

An indoor hockey arena is a very challenging location for a photographer. Typically, the lighting is hideously bad. Combine that with the white ice and the fast-moving action and you’ve got a very daunting task ahead of you if you expect to get any good images from a location like that.

On the NHL-sized ice at TSC, the lighting is fluorescent, which are TERRIBLE for picture taking. There aren’t nearly enough lights to begin with. For that reason, a photographer will find himself cranking up the sensitivity (ISO) of his camera in order to get shutter speeds fast enough to capture the action without the subject’s motion blurring the image. The problem with most digital cameras is that when you increase the ISO, the amount of image noise the sensor creates increases as well. It’s kind of the same as grain on 35mm film…the higher the ISO, the more light-sensitive the film, but the more grainy your images will be. The D3, however, has been lauded as one of the most noise-free digital SLR cameras ever produced. A new type of image sensor is the reason for the D3’s excellent low-noise-at-high-ISO performance. With my old camera (the Nikon D200), I’d be cautious of pushing the ISO up beyond 1000, as the images the camera captured were so overrun with sensor noise that they were almost unusable. That would severely limit the types of pictures I could take with it in conditions like Toyota Sports Center. With the D3, however, image noise is hardly noticeable until you set the camera to ISO settings greater than 4000. And even at ISOs greater than 4000, noise is still held to acceptable levels through ISO 6500 (the noise of the D3 at ISO 6400 seems to be about on par with the noise of the D200 at ISO 1600). Under the fluorescents of the practice rink, ISO 2000 to 2500 were just right to give me shutter speeds around 1/500th of a second. That’s plenty fast enough to stop any action cold. A fast (large aperture) lens set to f/2.8 also helped, of course.

Here are a couple images I shot yesterday.

Netminder Erik Ersberg deflects a shot into the corner…

Center Anze Kopitar winds up a wrist shot…

Centers Derek Armstrong and Anze Kopitar battle to win a faceoff…

As you can see, the D3 is VERY capable in low-light situations. Most professional photographers would have remote strobe flashes suspended in the rafters above the ice in order to help them expose properly. That’s not necessary with the D3.

The one thing I noticed about the D3 is that its auto focusing system is a whole lot more sensitive than my D200’s. The D200 tended to hunt a bit for focus when pointed at subjects with relatively low contrast, but the D3 locks right on to low contrast subjects. It surprised me at times, since I was used to the fickleness of the D200’s autofocus system.

I also noticed that the D3’s image sensor, though it is way beyond the technology of the D200’s sensor, still couldn’t pick up the color purple properly. All the images of players who were wearing their royal purple practice uniforms came out funny, with their uniforms registering as blue to the camera’s sensor. It’s a problem with all cameras, and not just mine. Even the video cameras they use to broadcast the games on television register and render the King’s royal purple as the color blue. Below are some examples.

This is the uncorrected shot. The uniform has a blue hue to it.

Here’s an example of the color the way it’s seen to the naked eye.

That problem is easily correctable in Adobe Lightroom by using the hue sliders in the development module. The trick is trying to remember the way the color really looks!

From what I learned yesterday by giving my D3 its first workout, this camera is everything it has been cracked up to be. I’m looking forward to getting out and using it in even more challenging situations very soon!

More of my L.A. Kings practice photos are here.

The other night, as I struggled to sleep soundly in my hotel room in lovely downtown Odessa, Texas, I had a really cool dream.

I dreamt that I had driven to my local camera shop, cashier’s check in hand to put my money down on the ever-backordered Nikon D3. After waiting for a few minutes to talk to Howard (my normal camera guy), I told him that I had brought him my deposit. He said, “Well, I’ve got one here! You can put the deposit down and wait if you want to, or you can take the one we have in stock right now!”

In the dream I was giddy…grinning ear-to-ear. What luck to show up at my camera shop of choice expecting to put money down on a new camera to begin a month’s worth of waiting, only to be told I wouldn’t have to wait!

I landed in Burbank yesterday with a plan for my afternoon off. Home I went to change. Then to the bank to draw the cashier’s check for my deposit on the new D3. Then to the camera shop (I hit every red light on my way there). Sidle up to the counter to talk to my good buddy Howard.

“Hey, Howard. How’s it going? I’ve finally saved up enough to put money down on a D3. How long do you suppose it will be before you guys get one in stock?” I asked.

Howard laughed. He laughed the laugh of a guy who was thinking: I have no idea exactly when we’ll see one. What he said was…

“About three hours ago.”

Giddy. Ear-to-ear grin.

I have yet to put it through it’s true paces, but let’s just say that I am absolutely overjoyed with this camera. It is LIGHT YEARS beyond my D200 in speed, sensitivity, sharpness, and construction.

You might say I’m D3lighted. D3lerious, even.