The aerodrome airfield had those rusty old hangers with respectfully ancient musty dust imbedded in the plane fabric. Yes, I said fabric, these planes were all fabric, no metal. They are wood. They are engines that are over 100 years old. One of kinds. Each engine serial number was revered because it had been passed from generation to generation and whose linage could be traced like your family tree.

This is the place to visit if you want to see vintage aircraft flying in the blue skies of upstate New York.  Tell your kids you want an early fathers day present….

If you get ever get a chance to visit the Park you’ll have a great day of shooting. The area is feature rich with people, cityscapes and boating.

A couple views the rebuilding skyline of NYC from Jersey Park Liberty Island.  We all have memories of special people in our lives who are our heros.  Its a time to reflect for a moment or longer the contributions of the individuals and the collective who were situationally compelled to sacrifice so much for our heritage and future.  I’ll soon be raising on my flagpole the flag which draped my fathers Arlington coffin and give thanks to his military efforts as a Captain in the USAF flying the B-36.

I was reading a story the other day about a successful response by FDNY pulling a person out of the water.  You usually think of fire engines when you think about the fire department. After a bit of researching, I read that it’s not well known that New York has one of the most sophisticated fleet of Marine vessels of any metropolitan city in the county if not the world.    This Image was taken last week at Jersey City’s Liberty Park as a FDNY boat scrambled and headed over to the skyline of NYC.

I spent the evening before in Liberty Park watching the construction of our Freedom Tower, I was taken back by this simple silhouette in DeKorte Park of the old Twin Tower skyline with a small bird temporarily perched in the skyline.  It sort of wraps up the history of the rebirth of the NY Skyline and the rebirth of the meadowlands being a viable sanctuary for small critters.

It can be amazing when the minds of men are focused on building a future heritage.  I was reading about how these meadowlands in colonial times were once rimmed with large cedar forests and in less than a few hundred years, 14,000 acreages were filled in as a garbage landfill creating an ecological disaster alongside the Hackensack River. Since the 1972 Clean water act, a lot of work and effort by the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission has resulted in revised zoning ‘with an emphasis of habitat preservation’.

I spent a quite morning looking for some of the 64 species of birds that now call the meadowlands home.  If you travel out to DeKorte Park bring your bug spray and suntan lotion.  As far as Image taking, you’ll want to bring your longest glass and keep your eyes peeled there is a lot to see. My simple tip, let the critters come to you, find a location that you like and wait….

Links

• New Jersey Audubon
• New Jersey Meadowland Commission

The NJ Meadowlands have a historic reputation to live down.  Most of its Hackensack river watershed was filled in with trash, polluting the air, sea and ground. Today however , the clean water act of 1972 , and politicians and activists have created a New Jersey Meadowlands commission, and the wetlands are no longer threatened.  You can see quite a few species of birds all within the of skyline of NYC.

While watching the images at Unique Photo by the guest instructor, Moose Peterson, he stop at a slide of a multicolor feather critter and asked. “anyone know what this bird is named ?”…I didn’t know the name but I knew that there were some images stuck on my hard drive back home, so I made a point to look up this critter and find something out about it.

This little guy’s breeding ground is in the tundra of Northern Canada, I have a tough time believing that they migrate to Florida for the winter. Seems like a long hike for a four ounce bird with a wingspan of 17 inches.

These New Jersey seagulls marauding the Meadowlands must strike panic in the other critters when in their flight path. I have been working on an assignment with Gulls and these NJ birds seem meaner than their counterparts in Florida or Massachusetts.  This shallow muck revealed at low tide is full of blue crabs, eels and other small tidbits and the gulls certainly know how to exploit it for a meal.

Even though it was near mid day, it was bit over cast, so the white gulls on a dark background gave my Nikon D4 and the 200-400 w/tc2 a good focus point. I was handholding this setup to practice my panning technique.  The D4 shot buffer is much more advanced that the D3s plus I felt that the focus systems was a tad more improved in focusing.  The fierceness of the face and the focus of the eyes and the bent wings made me think of the star fighter that are in sci-fi movies.

After the location workshop sponsored by Lexar and Unique Photo at the Meadowlands, NJ, I was wondering where the rest of my afternoon and evening would take me.  The idea for a trip to Liberty Park was a tip from Moose Peterson as we drove back to NY.  I knew of the park ftom some images he had posted some time back and knew that a sunset skyline shot of Manhatten was where I was headed.

The location was simply fantastic, lots of opportunities for photography. The six hours that I was there was my own mini-workshop for different lenses, light, panning, and just looking for situations to make the Uncommon of the Common.

Just after dusk I moved down to the harbor walkway and saw a number of people starting to spill out from these two large stainless steel 208′ X 30″ monoliths. I soon found myself walking backaway from the harbor, the site of the old twin towers to my back, and the site of the new freedom tower construction, to the opening of this 911 memorial. I knew this was going to an Image that need an fish or wide angle. These are instances when the preparation of always carring my old school 16mm and now also my 24 paid of. I walked furhter up the memorial and looked for a good postion to see the freedom tower, I had to push myself and camera in the wall to compose the shot. After a few shots with the 16mm (to fishy for me) I tried the 24mm, and the D4 sort of burped at me. The camera had not been set up for this non non cpu lens, old school and D4 be damn, I took my chances and spent some time adjusting for white Balance and just took my shot at various heights and framing correctly for full names and perspective.

The last two nights in the digital darkroom, getting the image to reflect those moments that I was inside the memorial took a while. The neatest improvements in Photoshop CS6 got me there. It is a new filer call adaptive wide angle.  It allows you to position lines to adjust the perspective distortion to your liking. Wide Angles will distort parallel lines and you cannot correct the situation in camera.

The early evening in the memorial as I took images had an endearing story when I meet and began talking with a man who stood on the wall with his hand on a name for a few minutes.  He spoke to me in broken english that he was one of the last men out of building-one just as building-two was hit. He spoke of the courage of NYFD and his focus on his family to survive the disaster and knowing that coworkers were left dead behind him. This memorial ment quite a bit for him and he was still shaken as if the event had just happened yesterday.

As luck would have it he had just written an article on a new technology that OWC had released to the marketplace.  The Mercury Accelsior is a PCI card that mounts directly to one of your open pci slots and becomes essentially a Solid State Hard Drive embedded at the fastest point of your machine.  The card can also be set up as your bootable drive and it can be partition and you can buy two cards and create a Raid.  I opted for the 240GB card, installed it in the 2nd from top empty PCI slot and did a full clean install of Snow Leopard and then proceeded to spent the next 20 hours or so, deactivating my applications and reinstalling everything on this one card.

Image of 240GB OWC Mercury Accelsior By Lloyd Chambers

The next weak link was memory. The new minimum recommended amount to run PS and edit your images is 24GB. Since my machine had half that amount it was time to order 4x8GB modules.  Prices had plummeted since my prior upgrade. Here was an easy boost for performance.

The next last part in the upgrade department was my two trusty 2TB Hitachi hard drives configured as a Raid-0 two years ago and holding every Image I had taken.  The capacity left was only 1TB and besides being slow, (the fastest part of the drive is filled with the oldest info, think about a record spinning, the data on the inside cloest to the spindle wips around) my long term system needed more capacity.  As I checked around, the recommendation was a 4TB Hitachi at OWC, but the drives were the older 5400 rpm. I put my order in for two, but had second thoughts and later returned them unopened after I headed out to the web and found that Hitachi had a 4TB drive spinning at 7200rpm and the price (OEM Boxed) was $160 less than OWC.  So my order went to J&R, I’d like to have done OWC but that was too large of a difference for just a retail box.

Special Install Note:  It took me 1 an hour of Google searching but I can confirm:. YOU CAN SWAP LOCATIONS OF YOUR RAID-O HDD from bays 2 and 3 to bays 1 and 2, without any problems. (please backup for prudence sake)

Finally I relocated my 120GB solid State Drive (SSD) from my Mac’s lower Bay 4 to my CD drive optical bay. I simply unplugged (which deactivated) my CD drive (I have external BlueRay) and plugged in the SSD drive into the CD drive connectors. There are two separate connectors in the optical bay, the other has my other 120 SSD drive, both are the 6G Pro version and later on I’ll Raid those two 120GB SSD and use as a scratch disk

So after all my MacPro innards are upgraded what’s the verdict ??

Freaking Fast !!!

You can head over to Lloyds site and he has defined some real world tests.  For me, pulling up my images from Photomechanic is 50% faster, from eight to four seconds,… Saving from Photoshop CS6 my post production Images with 2-3GB file size in PSB format is about 15-30 seconds faster. The weirdest thing is that some applications are instant on. No drives spinning, no fans running, just instant access. They simple POP up ready to go, especially programs written for Intel 64 bit.

All this new technology can spell disaster if it does not work its way thru a proper burn in period. My system redundancy is fairly well planned out and will work in parrell with all the new gear for about three months, then the next reconfiguration will happen and this will become the platform for the next few years.

Each of these pieces of tech are going to give you a performance boost. But if I had to select which one had the most out of the box benefit… it has to be this Accelsior card, it is a game changer, it is a bootable SSD drive, simple to install and you will have SPEED benefit right away. GREAT Stuff OWC !!!

Links:

• Diglloyd Blog re: Accelsior
• OWC Mercury Accelsior
• OWC Macpro Memory
• J&R Hithachi 4TB @ 7200RPM
• OWC Mercury Extreme SSD