Photographing Airshows

Canon EOS 30D, Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L IS @ 200

1/800 @ f/8, ISO 100


I had a fantastic time photographing the Red Arrows yesterday. I only wish now that I had been a little more prepared. I didn't realise the extent to which one could prepare for such things. Well, the Red Arrows have a website, and the website details the display sequence for the 2007 display season. They even have diagrams of each move on the website.

There was a commentator - the team safety officer, Red 10 - who talked the crowd through the manouevres that were about to be performed. If I had known to spend some time looking at the display sequence, I might have been able to anticipate the moves a little better and get some better shots.

The photograph above is the Red Arrows' Vertical Break:



From a technical photographic point of view, the only thing I hadn't quite appreciated was just how amazingly fast these things are going. You need a seriously fast shutter speed to freeze a Hawk jet going across your field of view - 1/1000th or probably even higher. I have a few shots of the synchro pair doing the Opposition Barrel Rolls move, and even at 1/800th, the jet I wasn't panning across with shows significant motion blur. It's easier to get sharp shots when the aircraft are heading towards or away from you.

The Red Arrows

Canon EOS 30D, Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L IS @ 200mm

1/640 @ f/7.1, ISO 100


The RAF Red Arrows performed a spectacular display over the Clyde today for the farewell tour of the Cunard ocean liner Queen Elizabeth II.

I had never seen the Red Arrows before, except on television. It was absolutely amazing. A real proud-to-be-British moment.

Screen Annotation Tools

As you may know I also teach kids. One area I've been looking at recently is tools for annotating a screen as you're talking or presenting. There are a few on the Mac, but each emphasises a different kind of workflow.

What I'm trying to do is present transient highlights, circles, and annotations to draw attention to certain things while I talk. I'm not particularly interested in keeping these after the lesson is done, but I do need to be able to make the marks and remove them fairly easily. Also, it would be very useful to be able to draw with alpha, since part of what I'm looking for is a 'virtual highlighter pen'.

The four applications that I've been looking at are:

• Desktastic, by Panic.
  
• FlySketch, by Flying Meat.
  
• OmniDazzle, by The Omni Group.
  
• Skitch, by Plasq.
  

Each has their own strengths and weaknesses for this kind of dynamic annotation task. Let's take a look.

Desktastic

Desktastic has been around for a while, and is pretty minimalist in its intent. It has a line tool, a text tool, stamp and eraser. It also supports a couple of levels of opacity, although the maximum line width isn't quite large enough to make a good highlighter effect. For getting rid of everything quickly, there's a 'clear' button too.

Importantly for this task, Desktastic allows one to draw over the top of all other windows. For my needs, Desktastic works pretty well. Its feature set is perhaps slightly too minimalistic, but it will do the job.

FlySketch

FlySketch is a nice little app from Gus Mueller. Compared to Desktastic, FlySketch has a wealth of features. Its biggest problem, for this application, is that it can't run in an 'invisible mode', by which I mean that you can't hide the FlySketch UI and just have a clear screen overlay to doodle on.

What you can do with FlySketch is reduce the opacity of its window canvas area to zero, to give the impression of drawing on top of the other applications. However, you still have to manage bringing FlySketch to the front and deal with the possibility of the non-transparent parts of the window will occlude whatever you're talking about.

OmniDazzle

OmniDazzle is marketed as a screen highlighter, special effects generator and cursor locator. I've been pretty sceptical of OmniDazzle in the past, but it turns out to be really quite nice for this particular application, particularly the 'Scribble' plugin.

Scribble lets you define four different pens (combinations of line width and colour) and select them with ctrl-1 through ctrl-4. Ctrl-` clears the screen. My only complaint here is that OmniDazzle lets you define colours with alpha, but doesn't actually draw them with alpha on the screen (at least on my MacBook's Intel GPU). That rather lets down the 'virtual highlighter' application, but that's not the end of the world.

Skitch

Skitch is a bit more like FlySketch in that it's really about making annotations on top of static images. Both of these apps are not really in quite the same game as OmniDazzle and Desktastic, but I thought they were also worth a look.

Skitch has some great integration features with the online world - primarily myskitch.com and Flickr - but my main interest is in dynamically annotating a live screen, rather than producing annotated static screenshots. Skitch and FlySketch both have better drawing tools than either OmniDazzle or Desktastic, but they're not as transparent as I need them to be for this application.

The winner so far? Although it's not perfect, it's got to be OmniDazzle.

Hard Drive Update

I blogged recently about sourcing a 300GB Fujitsu laptop drive to replace my MacBook Pro's original 120GB drive. Unfortunately, that drive is 12mm high and will not fit in the MacBook Pro. My understanding is that the drive achieves its capacity by adding an extra platter, which makes it just that little bit too big for the machine.

I confess I didn't really appreciate that there were varying heights of 2.5" drive. I do now. I've returned it for a 250GB Western Digital Scorpio drive which, although of lower capacity, spins faster at 5400rpm.

British Pigs Are Worth It

So I'm spending another Saturday sick in bed thanks to little children and their diseases, with the complicity of parents who won't do their duty to public health and keep them away from the rest of the world. And, yes, I'm grouchy.

I'm catching up on the latest issue of The Spectator, when I come across one of these newly fashionable kinds of full-page adverts. I can only properly describe them as theses of capitalist victimhood. If you live in Britain, you probably know the kind of thing:

"we poor business people are so oppressed by the market that you should feel bad for us and ask your MP to, directly or indirectly, give us some of your money just so we can stay in business because don't you think we deserve to?"

This time, it's the turn of another subset of the British farming community with an overblown sense of their own entitlement to profit: the pig farmers, marching under the wonderful slogan of British Pigs Are Worth It:

British consumers are more concerned than ever before about where their food comes from. When it comes to pork, bacon, sausages and ham, the Pigmeat Quality Standard Mark delivers excellent standards of welfare. That means the pigs are welltreated and provided with high quality feed.

In fact, feed – mostly wheat – is about half the cost of rearing a pig. But wheat prices have rocketed worldwide: as a result, pig farmers’ businesses – which get no subsidies – are under serious threat.

Due to price pressure from supermarkets, farmers are now being paid around £1.10 per kg for a pig that now costs them £1.44 per kg to produce.

For every pig a farmer rears and sells, he is likely to lose over £20.

This can't go on. Today, we're launching our campaign to press the supermarkets to ensure that pig farmers are paid a fair and sustainable price. Continual pressure on the price of pork, bacon and ham will squeeze the life out of pig farming.

We need the supermarkets to pay an extra 34p per kg to help preserve British pig farming.

If this price rise were passed on to shoppers, it would only mean between 7p and 17p on the pack price of typical pork products.

We think it is a small price worth paying and we’re asking British consumers to back us.

An astonishing whine-o-gram from the first word to the last. Let's look at some of the highlights:

pig farmers’ businesses – which get no subsidies

Really? No subsidies? You poor dears! Welcome to my world. Did you know that software developers don't get subsidies either? Did you know that most businesses don't get subsidies?

Due to price pressure from supermarkets, farmers are now being paid around £1.10 per kg for a pig that now costs them £1.44 per kg to produce.

Ah, the supermarkets. Every Hampstead liberal's night terror. You know, selling something that costs you £1.44 for £1.10 sounds like a really bad business proposition. Maybe it's time to get out of that business?

For every pig a farmer rears and sells, he is likely to lose over £20.

Dear farmer, what are you? A charity donor? If you're losing £20 on every unit, why the heck are you in that business? Get out. Now. Build a B&B, turn your farm into a quad-biking course, start clay pigeon shooting days, just stop throwing those £20 notes in the bin, okay?

We need the supermarkets to pay an extra 34p per kg to help preserve British pig farming.

And British pig farming needs to be preserved, intact, at its current size and in its current structure exactly why? I'm not saying that there isn't a good answer to that question but, "because we're worth it" sure isn't that answer. Neither is "because the evil supermarkets, whom we know you hate too out of some misplaced sense of middle-class self-loathing and social guilt, are pocket-raping us daily". If there's a good reason that every farm needs to be saved, then let's hear it. Don't hide behind these stupid slogans and some vague mythical sense of the inherent nobility of animal husbandry.

I'm honestly sick to death of hearing farmers whine about their lot in life. Nobody made you be a farmer. Nobody forces you to continue to be a farmer. Nobody owes you a living just because of your inherent awesomeness - not Tesco, not me. If the returns on pig farming don't cover the costs, get out of the business.