People at play - good take-off

[Alan T]

These are my archive shots for this challenge, from last February.

I bought a cheap expanded polystyrene model plane for my son at Christmas, and this was the first opportunity we had to fly it in still weather, on the as-yet unploughed and unsown field across the road. It's powered by a capacitor charged from a separate battery pack, flies under power for about 15 seconds, and then glides, sometimes a very long way.

[Alan T]

The plane's sophisticated hi-tech guidance system, consists of artistic bending of the polystyrene control surfaces,with sometimes surprising results.

Remarkably, given our forum rule changes, this time I wish to draw attention to the overhead cables. Here they provide a potentially valuable facility akin to the arrester cables and catch nets on an aircraft carrier. Actually we crashed before reaching the cables.

If we number the visible poles 1,2,3,4,5 from the left, Nos 1, 3 & 6 (out of shot on right) are telephone poles. Our phone line arrives by an entertaining route. It enters from the left to pole 1, where there is a junction box it doesn't use, carrying on as a heavy multicore cable to pole 3, and then a long way across the corner of the field to pole 6, out of shot on the right. It returns from a junction box there across the same corner back to the same pole this time as our single line, and crosses the road to the house.

In August, a brand new taller pole 2A was planted across the road from pole 1, where my son's head appears, carrying a new phone line from the box on pole 1 to the church behind our house, obstructing one of our bedroom windows views. My suggestion that our and the church's singleline run from pole 1 to pole 3 and then straight to and past our house to the church, saving one pole and hundreds of feet of cabling fell on deaf ears.

So you can see why aerial cabling is a sore point in my photography!

[selvin]

Alan,

I can very easily sympathize with your cable plight. This urban tangle seems to be forever present when I want to take a landcapse shot.

That plane gets aaround as evidenced by your second shot. No wonder he is so enraptured.

Aloha and thanks for sharing.

[Alan T]

Sorry, there's a nasty band of noise across the sky when I view the second imagein this threadhere in the forum, but the same file at the same size in Paint Shop Pro on the same monitor doesn't have the noise. It must be something to do with dithering. If I can produce a version without the mess I'll post it instead.