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Post by Bill Von Sennet on Oct 24, 2010 21:52:30 GMT -5
We have been back from our second vacation trip for almost a month. I finally have the slide show ready. www.billvons.com/galleryClick on the first link for Sept 2010 slide show. All the pictures and the videos were taken by Mary Ann. The picture size has been reduced to 100-200k to make for faster loading and less file size and throughput on the server.
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Post by Tom Goodrick on Oct 25, 2010 8:35:19 GMT -5
That was a heck of a trip. I get tired just thinking about it. I like your photos. They are very well-done. What camera are you using for the stills? I am think about giving in to digital and getting a decent camera. My film cameras just sit in a backpack in storage. I have a Nikon 35mm and a Pentax 6x7 film cameras with many lenses.
When I was a student at the U of Minn in Minneapolis, I often made the trip up to the Boundary Waters Area, northeast of Duluth to camp and fish. That is beautiful country.
I am surprised you did not visit the Cirrus Airplane factory near Duluth.
I was brought up in southern Minnesota, in Owatonna and Rochester. Rochester is an interesting city to visit for a couple of days (in the summer) because it is an unusually well-run city that has been listed as the best small city in the US several times. It is the home of the Mayo Clinic and features a larger-than-normal proportion of doctors from all over the world. At one time the Mayor was a doctor from Hawaii - unusual considering the winters they have.
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Post by Bill Von Sennet on Oct 25, 2010 10:28:28 GMT -5
Mary Ann takes all the pictures.
The May trip pictures were taken with a Kodak X612 with a 12x optical zoom and 6.1 megapixels
She bought a new camera for the September trip a Panasonic Lumix FZ-35 with a 18x optical zoom and 12 megapixels.
She uses the same camera for stills and videos. We have two 4 GB cards rated at 6 (very fast). Every night we would download the pictures to the laptop and then burn a DVD-RW. That way we would have the pictures saved in two different places before erasing the SD cards.
I also bought a second Panasonic battery so we never had a problem with memory cards or batteries.
The file size of the pictures runs as high as 7mb, but for the internet I reduced the size to 680 pixels high and saved them at 80% quality using irfanview. The resulting file sizes are mostly between 100-200 k
The original videos were in .mov format (quick time) The one of the ship leaving Duluth was 3min and 29 seconds and 676,739 k We converted it to .wmv and shortened it to 1 min 52 seconds and the file size is 29,983k.
She uses it in the automatic mode. Just point and shoot.
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Post by Tom Goodrick on Oct 25, 2010 20:13:37 GMT -5
I like the specs and the price of that Panasonic camera. The photos are amazing, especially considering that you have reduced their file size. I had thought that you coud only get photos of that quality from a $1500 Nikon or equivalent. I will try to interest my wife in that camera. The fact that your wife took the pictures should help.
I was dissappointed to see you pass by NAS Fallon. I spent two delighful weeks there in July of 1961 when my Naval Reserve Squadron was takinig gunnery practice there. I suppose in this time of war, they don't exactly welcome civilians to the base. The base is at least 10 miles back in from the highway and the flightline is another several miles back in. There are always a large number of the Navy's finest in from the Fleet for desert gunnery practice. There were so many planes we had traffic jams directing our planes to the runway and got our hats blown off with jetwash from all directions.
That truly is an amazing trip and it is well-documented.
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Post by Bill Von Sennet on Oct 26, 2010 6:48:27 GMT -5
We haven't been able to get into either of the two military bases we tried to get in since 09-11-01.
We knew about NAS Fallon, but didn't see any activity except for a lot of cars turning north off of US-50 quite a ways east of Fallon. I didn't think that was the base, just some sort of navigation facility.
Wat did you think about our access to Roberts Bank (Delta Port) south of Vancouver? We were escorted that day by a local railfan. A high point was lunch at "The Flying Beaver" the CYVR float base. We got a table right up front with a view of all the activity. Lunch was very good. (They could have served boiled leather and I would have liked it.) Pictures from that day are in the Sept 18th section.
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Post by Tom Goodrick on Oct 28, 2010 9:47:21 GMT -5
I just looked at the photos from the Oregon coast. Those are more great shots. I especially liked the boat photos. The one of the Coast Guard 47 ft Motor Launch is great with the sea gull on the post watching your wife. They have a bunch of nice boats out there, very different from the boats seen on the East Coast or Gulf Coast. Those boats are designed to get their owners back into protected waters from rough seas. The Coast Guard launch is well-known in boating circles as being capable of getting in and out of those narrow Oregon inlets in the toughest of conditions.
I also watched the movies on YouTube - the first time I have been to YouTube. It is neat that the same camera does both good stills and good video.
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Post by Bill Von Sennet on Oct 30, 2010 8:12:27 GMT -5
Those coast guard crewmen sure earn their pay. They practice going out from Coos Bay and call it "breaker" practice. There is a video on you tube of a 47' boat getting picked up and thrown over at the entrance to Coos Bay. The ship survived, but I imagine the crew had enough of "going down to the sea in boats". www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqH6Am5-6XIDid you see the Seaplanes at CYVR sea base. That was on Sept 18th.
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Post by Tom Goodrick on Oct 30, 2010 9:27:41 GMT -5
This Dell with no Flash, does not see the item on the left but sees the ad!
It seems Best Buy no longer carries the FZ-35. B&H shows the FZ-40 for $26 more and a slight upgrade in memory. I see why these little cameras take such good pictures. The lenses are by Leica so at least there is some heritage to good European quality. Samsung is selling point-and-shoots with lenses derived from Schneider - another great European name in lenses.
Curiously, it seems both Nikon and Canon have quality problems with their small digital cameras (the ones under $1000). I looked at the camera display in Best Buy the other day when I bought my new nano mouse. I was not tempted to buy any of them. Both the mid-priced Canon and Nikon on display were malfunctioning. None of the others were appealing. The best Panasonic was the FH-25. Best Buy user comments confirm the quality issues.
Optical stabilization is an issue for me. The FZ-35 looks like it has a good one unless your wife has exceptionally steady hands. For me just holding one of those little boxes is tough and then you have to touch the tiny buttons. I'd sure like to get a big Nikon camera. But none of my lenses would be useful anyway - they are too out-dated with manual focus.
Medical expenses ate up my slush fund so it will be a while until I get one of those cameras anyway. I have to use Best Buy for touch and feel shopping and B&H once i settle on a camera. At the moment it looks like the Panasonic FZ-40.
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Post by Bill Von Sennet on Jan 11, 2011 23:12:47 GMT -5
I was buying something from Amazon and needed to pad the order to get free shipping.
So I................don't laugh..........ordered FSX
Ever since I heard I could fly FSX on line and still get ATC clearances from the sim I have been thinking about it.
I'll be keeping FS9 also (I have 33 different paint jobs for the DC-3).
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Post by Bill Hendrix (bgas046) on Jan 12, 2011 7:10:56 GMT -5
I forgot to ask you the other day, which version did you order?
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Ed Burke
Member
Healthy living is fine, but it's having fun that keeps us going!
Posts: 433
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Post by Ed Burke on Jan 12, 2011 21:23:31 GMT -5
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Post by Bill Von Sennet on Jan 12, 2011 22:55:40 GMT -5
I got the Deluxe Edition.
I will be flying the DC-3 airways FSX version with Norm Hancock's panel in the GAAR 2011.
One improvement I notice is that in flight planning you can drag the flight route anywhere you want and it makes a waypoint.
One un-improvement is that you can't raise the pilots seat to see over the nose of the DC-3. I have to use spot view to taxi and take off (until the tail comes up).
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Post by Tom Goodrick on Jan 13, 2011 9:11:32 GMT -5
We have always been able to drag the route as we wish to make a waypoint in FS9 and earlier versions. I do it all the time.
Perhaps I misunderstood. In FS9 you can drag the path to any pre-defined point such as an airport, navaid, intersection, etc to make that point a waypoint on your flight plan. It must be in your GPS data base.
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Post by Bill Von Sennet on Jan 15, 2011 11:11:56 GMT -5
Hi Tom,
In FSX flight planning you can drag the route anywhere on the map. If you want a 10 mile final, just drag the route to the approximate spot, no need for a waypoint, navaid or anything.
I found out how to see over the nose. CTRL Q in the 2d panel mode, and the old way in the 3D panel. CTRL Q doesn't lift the seat, it rotates the runway toward you. Not sure how that will affect the landing, and you have to use CTRL+SHIFT Q to move it back. I liked the fs9 way of pressing the space bar.
Besides the FSX default planes I now have DC-3 Airways FSX DC-3, Jens Kristenson Dec 2010 release of the FSX DC-4, Premiere Aircraft Design FSX Cessna 414A, FS9 Pilatus PC-12, FS9 Beechcraft Twin Bonanza and FS9 Beechcraft C90B XP
The last three took a lot of work on the panels, as some of the old gauges were from FS98.
I'm going to fly the DC-3 and the Twin Bonanza in the GAAR2011 using FSX.
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Post by Bill Von Sennet on Jun 16, 2012 11:24:11 GMT -5
The first big airshow is in Latrobe since we moved into our house with a view of the airport. Practice sessions are on Thursday 21st-June from about 11am to 4:30 pm on Friday from 3pm to 4:30pm The air show is scheduled to start on Saturday 23rd-June and Sunday 34th June 2012 at 11am both days with the Blue Angels being the last peformance at 3pm. www.palmerairport.com/schedule.html
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