Kite Strings

http://www.ushawks.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=607
Understanding Tow Releases

Warren Narron - 2011/02/19 06:08:08 UTC

The photography is excellent, professional even...

http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=30971
Zach Marzec

Freedomspyder - 2013/03/07 18:48:37 UTC

About all I want to say about Tad is he sure takes some nice pictures of his strings.

Yesterday afternoon I completed an exhaustive total overhaul of my Flickr site:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/?details=1
and related editing of this one. No mean task - 142 (relevant) photos and Kite Strings - as of this one - has 5257 total posts.

(Note: The counters at:
http://www.kitestrings.org/
are, as of this post, reading:
5255 - Total
5202 - General
which means there are 53 posts in the ANNOUNCEMENTS (Welcome / About This Forum) division. There are actually 55 in ANNOUNCEMENTS and the total is reading two (too) low.)

The good news... All of my original and publicly accessible photos are available for viewing and downloading at full resolution - every pixel identical to those in my master copies.

The bad news... There are probably a lot of broken links floating around the web now.

Example... Go to:
http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31052
Poll on weaklinks
Page 12
Antoine's 2013/03/10 12:38:20 UTC post:
http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=118784
He has a link:
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8081/8331326948_84b2ebff1f.jpg
that originally looked like THIS:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/8331326948/

that currently looks like THIS:


Flickr used to pull a lot of obnoxious shit to pressure freeloaders such as Yours Truly to pay for accounts. Example... If I found anything in want of more Photoshop time I couldn't just replace the image - I had to upload it to a new link and, in order to keep things clutter free, delete the previous one. Not about paying a fair price for additional services, just forking over protection money to keep free from engineered-in misery. And I didn't even know that that was an option with a paid account - I would've paid a month's worth every now and then so's I could do occasional site maintenance work properly.

On 2013/05/21 Flickr did a major shift, eliminated the paid account option, and let everyone do everything - and more of it - for free. I can replace the photo with anything I want at any given URL so a link like:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/8306258400/

will stay true to my intentions but...

Flickr takes the original photo and makes a bunch of lower resolution copies available. My Minolta Dimage Z6 shoots 2816x2112 so a lot of my photos are at that width - although, of course, they can be cropped or spliced to anything. But using a 2816 width upload as an example Flickr makes copies at 2048, 1600, 1024, 800, 640, and down in addition to the original.

And the associated Image Addresses one uses for embedding and displaying various resolutions...

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8216/8306258400_58342fe594_o.png

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8216/8306258400_43251e5dcb_c.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8216/8306258400_43251e5dcb_z.jpg


...are all altered such that anything in existing posts becomes invalid/broken. Please take note and edit posts as necessary if you want embedded photos at enemy sites to display. I'll keep a record of the posts at which I find dead links.

Also... I was under the impression that regardless of the format of the upload the view or download would be JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert Group) and lossy.

Not so - currently anyway. If you save and upload in PNG (didn't know what that was until recently) without compression you get every unaltered pixel back. (Boy are those huge files - many multiples of the exact same images saved in PICT or Photoshop formats.)

So now all of my photos are uploaded and downloadable by anyone in PNG (Portable Network Graphics) noncompressed noninterlaced format.

All of my photos have solid uniform blue, as above, or green, as below:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/8306152861/


backgrounds depending on perspective. (Blue indicates you're looking from a side or from below the object, green indicates you're looking from above.) So it's a very simple matter to change backgrounds or select out the object for use elsewhere.

I embed photos at 800 because if I go to the 1024 step the right side of the viewed image starts getting chopped off. I've always assumed that was a limitation of the website but just figured out that it's a limitation of the computer's display resolution.

My thirteen inch MacBook Pro's display is 1280x0800. The twenty inch iMac is 1680x1050 and displays the page with the 1024 copy intact.

On the other hand the iPad 4 with the 2048x1536 chops the 800 a bit. Haven't got that one figured out.

But anyway... With the link I always provide above every photo one can always go to the source for the full resolution original or do a Plan B in the event of an Image Address problem.

Also on my photo site I have a number of images not publicly available that I use for this forum...
- photos:
-- that have been taken down from elsewhere so's the embedded links are dead
-- too large to display by embedding from the source - I can embed to an 800 width copy
- stills from videos that:
-- have been taken down
-- show key instants in the disasters

Speaking of videos that have been taken down...

We sometime recently lost a real classic:

Hang Gliding Fail
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mX2HNwVr9g
andyh0p - 2011/04/24

discussed at:

http://www.hanggliding.org/viewtopic.php?t=21868
Don't Forget your Hang Check!

I so love it when Aussies who always assume they're hooked in launch unhooked in front of multiple observors who always assume everybody's hooked in at launch.

I have copies of damn near all the videos referenced here I'll be able to extract and post entertaining stills and lemme know if you want anything.

And please feel free to use this space for stills in a manner analogous to the way "Video" is used for that medium.
---
2014/03/31 06:20:00 UTC

01-0128

02-0325

03-0414

04-0504

05-0511

06-0601

07-0625

08-0719

09-0919

http://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1502/25742472613_920c937e94_o.jpg


I was there - Dead Horse Point - around sunset on 2013/03/12 with my sister's family looking to the west for Comet Pan-STARRS. Lotsa open sky on that horizon but not in the right place at the right time - clouds got the better of things.

Hang gliding long gone - there's a developed overlook where the launch used to be.

I'm rather fond of this one:

http://forum.hanggliding.org/download/file.php?id=17531


P.S. I wonder what type of knot is recommended for this application.

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3706/11575050113_46f664c5af_o.jpg

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2853/13337134515_ebc7f75a80_o.png

A little blogspot photo harvesting trick I recently figured out...

Go to, for example:

http://westcoastbrit.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-couple-of-weeks-ago-i-had-experience.html
earth turns and wind burns: Lock out on tow

The photos are all rather low to lousy resolution. This one:



embedded with copied image address:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IEapZFLxhZ8/UZ363AeoF0I/AAAAAAAAGxU/_Gh_bCLoZOE/s400/GOPR1181.JPG

is rather important because it somewhat clearly depicts the Rooney Link which very clearly doesn't provide protection from excessive angles of attack, high bank turns, and the like for that form of towing.

If, however, one replaces the 400 with 800 one gets:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IEapZFLxhZ8/UZ363AeoF0I/AAAAAAAAGxU/_Gh_bCLoZOE/s800/GOPR1181.JPG


Replace with 1600 and:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IEapZFLxhZ8/UZ363AeoF0I/AAAAAAAAGxU/_Gh_bCLoZOE/s1600/GOPR1181.JPG


If things get cropped off of the right a bit as a consequence of a smallish display (like on my 1280x800 pixel / 13 inch MacBook Pro) one can open the image in a new window.

I THINK 1600 is the best resolution available for blogspot photos - it's the highest number I've seen. But if you throw in ANY four digit number over the uploaded/original resolution it will display at max resolution. (In this example the original resolution was 1024 so 1600 is 576 linear pixels worth of overkill.) Throw in any number smaller than actual and it will scale down.

Wrong. I've found amongst the blogspot photos linked to here one as large as 2560x1702 - width and height. The precise URL that brings up the full resolution is:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PZqVK21Pm9k/TughPak1wfI/AAAAAAAAAIE/r_QWGBf-itc/s2560/Image+1_Moraines.JPG

Had that photo been rotated ninety degrees to make it:

1702X2560 - width and height

you'd use the same URL to get full resolution, Plug in whichever dimension is larger.

I've edited all URLs in all posts on the forum to link to max resolution originals and edited the image links to optimize the displays here for my 1280x800 screen. A bit after 900 (after 915 to be precise) the right side starts getting chopped off.

So the moraine shot miguel posted was looking like:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PZqVK21Pm9k/TughPak1wfI/AAAAAAAAAIE/r_QWGBf-itc/s320/Image+1_Moraines.JPG


now looks like:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PZqVK21Pm9k/TughPak1wfI/AAAAAAAAAIE/r_QWGBf-itc/s900/Image+1_Moraines.JPG


could've looked like:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PZqVK21Pm9k/TughPak1wfI/AAAAAAAAAIE/r_QWGBf-itc/s915/Image+1_Moraines.JPG


if I'd been a little more anal but 900 is a nice round number, and at full resolution:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PZqVK21Pm9k/TughPak1wfI/AAAAAAAAAIE/r_QWGBf-itc/s2560/Image+1_Moraines.JPG

http://www.aviaavtomatika.com/image/catalogue/work.007.3b.jpg?mtrrgt


I wonder why the designers put all those switches on the cyclic control stick. You got any ideas about that, Tad?

Anyone know this instructor?



This is cell photo of an actual picture.
The quality would be much better if I could scan it digitally.

BTW...I am the student and this would be the summer of 1982

Real good chance it's Yours Truly.

I totally suck at facial recognition. Need to run it by my brother and sister in such a manner as to not bias their responses. Like... "Here's a shot of Mike, one of my best buddies from that year at the Kitty Hawk ride factory." "Wow! He could be a twin of yours!"

If it is me... Sorry 'bout teaching you to foot land and not teaching you the hook-in check. Screwed up the two most critical elements of the flight. Oh well, at least we had you going prone the instant after your feet left the ground.

Happy you stuck with it. I figure the retention rate from those experiences was about 0.1 percent.

In well under a year from whenever that shot was taken I became three quarters dead from testicular cancer and, more so, the treatment (chemo). Also much thinner and the hair ended up all over the pillow.

P.S. After more scrutiny... He looks like my brother. And I think the white visor's a match. It's gotta be me. I'm trying to remember who all the other instructors were but I'm pretty sure there wasn't anyone else with whom I could've been confused.