On Jan 24, 2012, at 18:40 , steve harley wrote: > on 2012-01-24 00:36 Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote >> I took the M9 up to Alameda for a photo walk at the USS Hornet on Sunday. It >> was really the wrong camera for the task, but I wanted to get to know it >> better and push myself a bit. >> >> Quickie output ... thirty five photos in this set: >> >> http://gallery.me.com/godders#100435
A most enjoyable set. In real life carriers are a lot dirtier, with grime and streaked dirty grey paint. The interior lighting I see in your photos looks much more even and bright than I remember. > this is very real; the details, for one who has some sense of the convoluted > systems on these ships, are very suggestive of the whole (i could do without > the people-shots, the airplanes, and the vignettes) > > just read a bit about the scuttling of the German High Seas Fleet, and a few > months ago read an eye-opening (for a baby-boomer at least) book on the > battle of Guadalcanal; i think warships, and how their little systems worked, > are perhaps the perfect expression of the 20th century machine age; looking > at controls and gauges, etc., one is forced to imagine the physical reality > of the people who operated them Spent 10 months at sea and in various ports in 1965/66 in the south china sea on a carrier that is even newer than the one your were on, CVA-31, the Bon Homme Richard, built in New York in 1944. The thing you can't capture with a camera, or even sense in port is the incredible amount of noise those things make when at speed (40-45 knots), the steam turbines in the engine room hissing and whining, the screech of the arresting gear playing out every 45 seconds, the rumble of that heavy cable being drawn back across the deck for the next 20 something pilot to thump his plane onto the deck, all diminished by the undulating movements and rumbling sound of the entire steel envelope you are in being pushed through water by 4 huge brass propellers. The ship creates exclusive sounds at differing speeds, from the aforementioned rumble to a sound like shaking a large china cabinet so it beats against the wall, but more metallic. I've also been on more modern carriers (the Lincoln) but only cruising from Everett to Seattle, never exceeding 10 knots, if that. And was most surprised once stopped in Elliot Bay, beginning flight ops! Launching one or two of each type of aircraft aboard, then recovering them. The Bonnie Dick had to have at least 35 knots of wind down the deck to do that! We tourists toeing the yellow safety line on the angled deck catapult, which meant the wingtips of the F-14s and 18s passed about 4 feet in front of our noses as they were pulled into the sky pointing right at downtown, a mile or closer to our bow. Then came 9.11.01, and these publicity cruises stopped happening here. Probably everywhere. Well worth the $20 fee, 'cause you got lunch and free roam of the ship. Thanks for reading my memories. Images in a year or so when I start getting my slides scanned. Joseph McAllister pentax...@mac.com The Big Bang was silent, and invisible in it's beginning moments. Photons were one of the earliest particles to develop, but I don't think any were able to escape for a little bit more. Once they could, there would have been a flash during expansion. No one would notice, of course, for another 4.2 billion years. Now we are trying to catch up by looking out, and back in time to that infinitesimally small fraction of a millisecond in an attempt to see what caused that singularity to become the Big Bang. This attempt will fail in any visual way, as the furthest galaxies and elements are now moving faster than light by recent theory, making the information sought beyond a theoretical event horizon. — update to the Pentaxian's thoughts on particle physics, so far. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
