On Wednesday Sam and I had a hearty brunch/lunch of food purchased at Whole Foods the night before and Gelato. Then we were on our way. By Wednesday the heat and humidity was so that the two block walk to the subway stop left me sweating like a pig. We took the subway to Jamaica and the AirTrain to JFK. The subway ride was terribly cramped even at 2pm on a Wednesday. Once we were all situated at JFK we discovered that the San Francisco flight out from the same terminal was delayed, so we’d have to wait for them to get their act together before our plane could board.
Our boarding was quick though as everyone just wanted to get back to LA. We were pulling away from the airlock no more than 15 minutes past our original departure time. However, an hour later we were still sitting on the tarmac in what the pilot called “rush hour here at JFK.” Our total runway waiting time would be somewhere near two hours. I used that time and the flight time to write my first five days of blog posts and select the photos that would end up in them.
I’m still learning about RAW photo formatting. Just today, after doing all the photos from the trip and then tinkering with these cloud shots, I figured out how to clean up photos with luminance. To put it in everyday terms – how to get the grain out of a grainy photograph. This would have been enormously helpful on the editing some of the night photos from J’s roof and times square.
After taking off, Sam grabbed her camera and looked outside. Normally I pay a lot of attention to the clouds and the view outside, but I was busy doing my photo editing thing. When I saw what she saw I grabbed my camera as well, the results are the above and below photographs in this post.
Because we were delayed our flight didn’t land till nearly 10pm. Thus, after getting the bus to the car parking and dropping off Sam it was past 10:30. (did I mention my car didn’t start at the parking log – yeah, that’s always fun!)
Because it was so late many of the 405 on-ramps in West Los Angeles were closed. This delayed me even more. Then, once on, the haphazard lighting and lane closures caused me to have to slam on my brakes twice coming up the hill towards mulholland. This was only the second time in my life I’ve ever felt the anti-lock brakes kick in (the other was when I was hydroplaning going down De Soto six years ago after a rain storm). I eventually made it home safe, only to comically trip over myself in the bathroom (I made the smart move of leaving the shower to grab something – making the floor wet) and slam down on the floor. My real bed time was somewhere after midnight and I spent the next day in a fog at work. There were a lot of fires to put out, which wasn’t easy for a zombie.
