Sometimes You Stick the Landing

And Sometimes the Landing Sticks you.

That’s what’s about to happen to my friend as he brings his glider in for a landing. The upper right corner of the photo shows the ridge line which starts at this end of Oahu and runs up the spine of the island called the Koolau Mountains. Just around the corner is the spot on the ridge from which the pilots launch. It’s a great view at 1100 ft above Waimanalo Bay.  Naturally, visitors find the thought of flying off the ridge intimidating.  The launch is the easiest part.  The pilot can choose the best moment to fly off the ridge.  Landing is a different situation.  Once you commit to land, you’ve got to adjust to the conditions as you find them. In this case, the glider had a little more forward momentum than my friend wanted. The glider is in a nose up stall position but it pulled him off his feet.    Unfortunately, the stall is about to bring them both to an abrupt stop. Fortunately, neither was damaged.

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Final Turn

The hazard of getting shots of white hang glider wings under bright sunlight is the ease of over exposing it. Especially as the wing is in flight and the background changes.  In camera raw with Lightroom you can bring it back to some extent.  It’s much nicer to nail it in camera!  Got it with this one

Moon Glider

From a few years back I got this shot of a friend of mine flying his hang glider past the moon

 

A Challenge

Outdoor photography can be challenging more so when subjects aren’t static.  You’ll find plenty of advice for landscape photography.  It assumes you’re deciding where and when you point your lens at a subject.  You also have the luxury of manually setting your aperture and shutter.  Even some outdoor activities operate in a “controlled” environment.  Activities like baseball and soccer take place within a defined area where the light doesn’t change to a significant degree over the course of a game. Then there are activities like hang gliding and paragliding where the conditions can change as the wings move across a sky that is rarely static.  Ideally a blue sky with some puffy white clouds is the best condition.  That’s when the automatic focus works to perfection and noise is nonexistent. The less than ideal is when you really have to work at it.  This image is an example of that.  The paraglider has landed with me looking into the sun. That is a problem under these conditions because the ridge is in deep shadow Since I’m  on shutter priority my aperture sets itself in kind. But the aperture on my zoom lens opens only so wide.  Fortunately, the sun over the wing gives a nice sunburst effect along with the lens flare which leads the eye down to the paraglider pilot.  I could have cropped out hang glider wing at the bottom but I like the added dimension and context it gives the scene.  The image out of the camera had a much darker foreground because my aperture could only open so much.  However with the help of Lightroom and the Graduated Filter Tool I could lighten the foreground as you see it without noise becoming an issue.   

Down, Over, Up, Around, Down

Light Flared Landing

Goto Landing Funky Twisty

 

 

Phoenix Arrives on Mars

Considering all the images you can see everyday that express less than the best of humans . It’s nice to celebrate an extraordinary achievement with this picture of the landing pad from the Phoenix spacecraft after it successfully landed on the Polar region of Mars on Sunday. With its landing the success rate for landing on Mars is now 50%.

Congratulations to all those who made it happen.