SF Fleet Week 2012 Air Show

Well what a weekend San Francisco had.  These where some of the events scheduled there:

1. Fleet Week  A week of navy/military based events topped off on the weekend with an air show.
2. America's Cup, AC World Series race.  This was most of the week and finished on Sunday.
3. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival  This was at Golden Gate park on the weekend.
4. Castro Street Fair.
5. Italian/American Parade.
6. 49ers game on Sunday.
7. Giants game on Saturday and Sunday.
8. Couple of others I think I missed.

Anyway, Bart set record attendance with about 320K per day and other transportation increased.  So I think SF did a pretty good job dealing with all the extra people.

Our participation in this weekend was going to Crissy Field and Presidio for the air show and America's race.  This post will concentrate on the air show which was enjoyable and I do miss going to them.  (It has been aver 10 years since I went to an air show, now that I have a good camera, I need to go to more.)
So here are a couple of pictures of the Red Bull stunt plane.  (We where right of Marina Greens, which was center stage for the air show.)

Here are a few pictures of the Canadian Precision Air Team.

The F-22 did some high-speed runs and maneuvers.  You will notice just how plain that this aircraft look compared to the Blue Angels.  It is rather pretty itself.

Now for the Blue Angels.  Since the marine layer was in an out all day.  It was rather far inland, for the air show standard, when the Canadians flew, but was outside the gate when the Blue Angels flew.  Thus the differences in the pictures of the Golden Gate.  With that being said, the air had a tremendous amount of moisture in it for the shock vapor effect to be visible quiet often.

There where a lot of other birds around.  They where lower and in the foreground but did offer some unexpected pictures.

Here are more pictures of the Blue Angels.

The finally.

Overall, nice event and everyone enjoyed it.

China Inspiration

Posts about China, 5 of 7.

Inspiration.

This is a different type of post.  I have been mostly posting about what we saw, but I thought it would be good to post a bit about my feelings.  To start, I've shown some of my feelings already in other post, thus I would like to make clear that the things I saw are just different from the way I do thinks, they are funny to me or strange, just like some things I do will seem strange and different to my friends in China.  (I drinking ice water on a cold day and they drinking hot tea on a hot day.)  It does not imply either rightness or wrongness on either side, it is just the way things are.

To start with, I met my wife's extended family and many of her friends.  I will say that they where all very nice, sometime to the extreme and I hope I did not came across too ungrateful.  A lot of time they when out of their way to make me feel welcome.  (I'm not used to having others dish food for me, pour my drinks or having special places to sit.) Now how does this compare with other Chinese (non family/friends)?  Of all my trips to China, I am starting to see a pattern and that is, if they know and/or see you, there is a then an acknowledgement, thus a type of kindness.  (I think an example would show this better.  Crowd getting on a bus, it starts as a line of 1 person then fans out from there.  I was helping my mother-in-law to board the bus and people started to rushed the door.  Everyone payed attention to the door only, but when I tapped on a shoulder and pointed out the fact that my mother-in-law, who does have knee problems, was getting on the bus, those I made contact with stopped and people settled down a bit.  Once she was on the bus, it became a free-for-all again.)

This type of attitude is really bad in cars vs pedestrians.  I found that if I made eye contact with the driver, they tended to stop.  There were probably a few reasons for this, I like to think that it is the eye contact, but it is more likely they see a 6'5" American and thought he does not understand the rules, that he is suppose to get out of the car's way.  I joke that I would leave too big of dent in the car and that is why they stop or slow.  (No one every really stops.)  But in any case, the driving is no more that 25-40kph except for the highways and at that speed they can be safer.  (My wife asked about this and that is the response she got.  I suggested that if they learned to follow some basic traffic rules, they could actually not have so may traffic problems and get to their destination faster.  Maybe it is a good thing I don't speak Chinese. :-)

Now about a different subject.  Pollution.  I think this is kind of a sensitive subject, but to be honest it needs to be talked about.  There really is no concept of environment there.  I saw a lot signs saying 'Respect the Environment', 'Put litter in its Place' and the like, but very few people followed it.  It is very easy just to toss something out a window and let others pick it up and I think that is where the problem comes in.  The labor there is so cheap, people roam the parking lots and streets just picking up litter and/or sweeping dirt from them.  A street sweeper is just that, a person assigned to sweep with a broom, the street for 2 or so block.  (You will find many of them along the highways with their straw brooms.)

This gentleman was obviously not working in the street but he did represent those who did work along the highway.  They all used the same type of brooms.

Is this changing?  I am happy to say that I think it is.  I was talking with a high-schooler, they where learning English and I was teaching him good old American.  (Don't laugh, it is in high demand.  Also be thankful I was not teaching him writing. :-)  Anyway, we saw one stream covered with litter, I was trying to take pictures of the rapids/waterfalls but could not get a good picture.  I was grousing about the litter problem and he did agree, maybe it was because I was pointing it out to him or he did actually see it.  We did see hope, not too far up the stream we saw several people cleaning up the creek/river/waterfall.  They where really making a good effort to get all the trash out.  I also noticed that our conversation started to change and he was seeing things in a slightly different way.  (He almost said something to his dad, when his dad tossed a water bottle out the car window.  Culture norms about correcting elders will be very hard to overcome.)  So I am hopeful because of the kids, not really the young adult generation.

Overall, families are families.  The parents in China are the same as the parents here in the US.  We all want the best for our kids.  There seem to be helicopter parents in China just like here.  There are spoiled kids there and here.  But mostly there seems to be a lot of good parents in both places, it's too bad the spotlight get put on the bad ones most of the time.

I've neglected to say anything about politics.  I think most people deal with it just like the US, there is a government and we will deal with it when we have to, but there tends to be not much we can do about it and we have too much to worry about with our families to let it get in our way.  In the most part the government stays out of people's lives.  They just factor in 'gifts' like we factor in taxes.

So overall, I would say find a tour or group that is willing to travel the back roads and not just go for the shopping experience, unless shopping is your style.

Enjoy.

Camera Cleaning

This a quick post of cleaning my D7000.  First off I tend to not be as gentle with my camera as I should.  Heck take a look at photo-journalist, they live by their cameras but they also don't coddle them.  (Yes I understand that they use professional grade equipment and the build on them is much more sturdy, titanium and all.)  But the pro-sumer camera or even high-end consumer camera should be a bit more durable than say a point and shoot.  (Again with the fewer moving parts of a point and shoot, they can tend to be very durable.)  So with that being said I try to be careful but I do tend to take the camera to various locations.  The beach is a good example, how do you change lens at the beach especially with it blowing up an ocean breeze?  Once you remove the lens, does the camera body face down?  Or up?  Try to stand with your back to the wind?  Get dust and worst sand in the camera or on the lens?  Heaven forbid you get any sand on your hands, it is on the camera at that point thus when you change lens you could have sand falling off the lens or camera.

Typically I try to have the camera face down and stand with my back to the wind.  But even doing that, where do you place the lens you just removed?  How many caps do you remove from the lens you are changing to?  Where do set the lens?  If you are alone, this makes a difference and if you try to pack it back into a bag, that takes time, meaning the camera could be exposed.  If you cap the camera, you have to keep track of the caps.  (Heck, I lost my lens cap just because it hit against my body just right and popped off while I was hiking.  (I, my wife and daughter all tried to find it retracing our steps but could not.  I already have a UV/clear filter on the lens to protect it, old school.  And it has protected the lens from ocean spray and it even needed to be replaced, which is another story.)  Anyway, reading some photographers, they dispense of the lens cap completely since they sometimes miss a shot trying to get the thing off.  Me, I tend to be more lazy but the shot excuse sounds good.

Anyway, after a year of using the camera, I noticed that in certain light conditions I had spots.  This I thought was my filter but it stayed even when I changed lenses.  Thus I figured I had dust on my sensor.  After researching and talking with some people about cleaning the sensor, I decided that I would clean it before the trip to China.  I did not relish the idea of touching up thousands of pictures.  (Note that even though only a small percentage could be considered 'professional', a large percentage can be considered family quality and even in a family quality picture, a big old dust spot is not very nice to look at.)

Some people said the only thing to do was send it in.  Other talked about cleaning it yourself.  Air.  Brush.  Cleaning solution.  I even had people tell me that they would never touch the sensor for fear of damaging it.  My take on this whole thing, I did not have the time or want to spend the money on Nikon cleaning the sensor because I knew that I would dirty it up in short order, beaches and all.  Thus I tried to do it myself.  First the air, which did not work.  I did not really want to use the brush, so I skipped that.  I guess I did have an old anti-static brush which I did try to use along with the air just in case those dust particles where attached via static.  Nope that did not work either.  Lastly I bought the Visible Dust brushes and solution.  Watched the video just to make sure that I did it correctly and wow, this really worked.  People say this is expensive but how easy it was to do and its effectiveness left me a believer.

Now a couple of things you should realize when you do this since I had and read about people scared to touch their sensor.  Yes you are cleaning your sensor in a fashion.  You are cleaning your sensor assembly.  Your sensor has an anti-alias filter in front of it and it is this piece of 'glass' that you are cleaning.  So I took this approach.  I have toyed with the idea of removing this filter, MaxMax offers the service.  But what this does is allow for a bit sharper images since the filter slightly blurs the image to cut down on the aliases affect.  (Note that the new D800 comes with and without the anti-alias filter in place for this very reason.)  So I figure worst case scenario would be I scratch the filter and send the camera to MaxMax to have the filter removed/replaced with a clear filter or with an HA filter for astronomy photography.

But the cleaning worked and my wife is grateful since I don't have an excuse to buy a new camera and the pictures I took from China and afterwards have turned out good.

America's Cup

Here are a few pictures from the America's Cup AC series race that took place here in San Francisco on August 26th.  I was again at Ft Baker thus rather far away from the action.  All these shots are at 300mm and then cropped a bit.  There where several people there trying to figure out if it would be a good vantage point to view the race and avoid the crowd.  Thus it did not really work.

These where the smaller boats, but the once they change to the bigger boats, I still do not think it would matter much.

This picture shows one of the teams practicing with the Bay Bridge as the back drop.  This is both the old Bay Bridge and the new replacement span.  The large tower is new part and should go into service in about a year.  This is the Eastern span of the Bay Bridge.

Here are more pictures with part of SF as the background.  The bridge you see is the Western span of the Bay Bridge.

Shuttle

I've been pretty busy the past month or so, thus the lack of updates.  I do have a few more posts from China and one from the America's Cup race that was held here in San Francisco.  I will hopefully get to them before the next race happens.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the shuttle Endeavor as it passed through San Francisco on its way to LA.

I was shooting from Ft Baker at the Marin headlands.  They made two passes.  The first was from the Marin side to SF parallel to the bridge.  The second was from the inland bay, out to sea, perpendicular to the bridge.