This past Sunday morning, I got up before dawn, got into my car, and made the two-hour drive to San Francisco Airport to do something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time — take pictures of planes.
Now, if you’ve been around this blog or my Flickr for any length of time, you may realize that I love transportation. I’m not sure if this is part of my love of travel, my general restlessness and desire to always be going somewhere, or just because I played with Tonka trucks instead of Barbies in my formative years, but more or less, if it moves and can carry people, I want to observe it, study it, and take pictures of it. I especially love planes — I’ve always wanted to fly (like a bird, not just with a ticket and a window seat) and I was SORELY disappointed when I went skydiving and it wasn’t at all like flying. I really need to try hang-gliding, or parasailing, or zip-lining, or something else. Suggestions appreciated. I know I’m weird — you don’t have to remind me. And no, Mom, I *don’t* have a death wish.
SFO is a particularly neat place to plane-watch because of the way the jets land RIGHT over the water. Oh, this also makes it a really cool place to take off or land when you’re ON the plane, especially when the weather is good and it’s daytime and you get an awesome view.
Anyway, so I drove up Bayshore Drive to find a free hotel parking lot to park in so that I could walk out to the seawall and find myself a good seat. I popped on my telephoto lens, turned on my camera, and…
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I’M SORRY DAVE, I’M AFRAID I CAN’T DO THAT.
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AKA Canon’s dreaded Err99 message.
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You know the old cliche about someone’s gut dropping? Yeah, it ain’t a cliche, it’s a quite physical feeling. Kind of like, “Oh please don’t let me barf. Please don’t let me barf.” Not only is this my camera we’re talking about, but I’m leaving for Costa Rica on Saturday–not enough time to get it fixed, and I REALLY don’t want to fork out almost $300 for a rental. No no no no no.
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Ran back to my car, tried switching lenses. No dice. Tried switching batteries. No dice. Tried switching CF cards. No dice. I could take somewhere between 3 and 8 pictures before the damn thing would give me the error message and I’d have to turn the camera off, pull the battery, pop it back in, and turn it back on again. SO NOT OK.
I had no autofocus, no display either through the eyepiece or on the back (it would go into picture review mode, though) and I had no idea what my settings were. So I spun dials and prayed for the best.
Have I ever mentioned that I’m horrible at manual focusing? I’ve tried, I really have. I’ve come to the conclusion that I just don’t see well enough, or my eyes don’t adjust well enough, or something, because pretty much everything comes out just soft enough to really tick me off.
So there I was, standing behind the seawall, trying not to cry when I realized this was not going to work. After I quit wanting to alternately cradle my poor ailing camera and pat it gently, and huck it in the bay while yelling obscenities, I figured I needed to make the best of a bad situation. I mean, I’d driven all the way out there to take pictures, right?
I quickly discovered that planes are fairly easy to manual focus on — easier than animals at the zoo, actually, and MUCH easier than birds in flight. First of all, they move fairly slow when they’re coming in for a landing. Second, they have a logo and writing on them, which gives me something to look at while focusing. VERY helpful.
Despite these two things, I still managed to ruin a fair amount of shots, but I got some neat ones.
San Francisco skyline.
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I love 747s. Sorry Joel!, 777s are pretty neat too, but these are just wicked cool.
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I'd love to take credit for planning this fun shot, but I didn't realize until I pulled these images up on my computer that I'd caught a bird in there. Nice. :-)
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Now here's something I don't see every day! Why?
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What's so special about this? It's a plane AND a bird -- a Cathay Pacific plane with a bird on the tail, to be exact. Hmmm... wonder who I know who flies for them...
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Oh yeah!! JOEL!!
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A bit of backstory -- at some point in the past, I promised my college buddy-travel buddy-good friend-pilot Joel! that if he ever landed in San Francisco, that I'd go take a picture of him landing. So here you go, man -- your new desktop wallpaper. :-D Let me know what your captain thinks!!
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As far as my camera goes, I still have no idea what’s going on. I can get it to work, but between the battery pulls, the total lack of auto-anything, and having no idea what it’s set on, I just can’t take it and rely on it. Sigh. So I’m borrowing a Rebel XT from work — it’s a model down from mine (8MP instead of 10, and some other small differences) but at least it’s free and in fantastic shape (I’m pretty sure it’s been used for fewer than 100 pictures.) I’m just glad I have that option — while this would have been a good excuse to get that 50D I’m dying for (ok, so I *really* want the 7D, but that’s NEVER EVER going to happen) truth is that I just can’t spend that kind of money right now. I have trips to take, darn it!! GRRRR. I have a feeling though that a camera body purchase is going to be in my not too-distant future… so much for that wide-angle lens I wanted. Sigh.
Oh yeah, and thanks Joel! for giving me an excuse to finally go plane-watching. :-)
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