2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption: its efffects on Air Transport

The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull yesterday has had a significant impact on air travel around the North Sea area and even extending across the Baltic and into northern Europe.

The ejection of tones of ash into the air space of the region has grounded air traffic.

The reason for this is the fear that ash particles can cause the Jet engines used in all (major) modern air passenger.

Exactly this situation (an engine shutdown) has been caused in the past when a 747 was diverted to Jakarta, causing Air Safety authorities to shut down air traffic in the effected air space now.

This makes me wonder about exactly how "robust" our present system is.

Sure, volcanic eruptions don't happen every day, but what if they became more frequent? Iceland is well placed (and a well know volcanic location) to essentially bring air traffic to a halt in Northern Europe.

Its an interesting question, more so to me sitting here now watching the chaos around me which I have just so narrowly avoided (we essentially got on about the last flight out of that airspace this morning).

Perhaps it is a design restriction of the Jet engine (which works using high velocity air intakes and high speed blades) which makes it inherently more sensitive to air quality. I'm uncertain right now if this has any effect on piston engine air craft, which work quite differently and have air filters before the air intake.

Back in the eruption of Mt St Helens similar problems were encountered, I believe for the first time in modern history. Since Jet aircraft are such new things, perhaps with our short experience (of depending on this type of technology) that this may become an important issue as we move forwards.

Finnair gets us through

As someone who believes in complaining loudly, I also like to balance that with praise where praise is due.

I have in the past complained about the service of Finnair to match the climate of Finland (cold and damp or bloody freezing) and while gratefully sitting in Hong Kong at the moment I would like to take a moment to thank Finnair for their job well done in routing us home via another method.

The staff worked hard in the face of adverse customer attitudes. My experience on the counter with one woman who had been working flat tack for 2 hours was efficient un-rattled and professional. Sadly not all of those waiting to be dealt with can be described as such (though most were patient and tolerant).

As you may know there was a volcanic eruption in Iceland yesterday, and this has tossed tons of ash into the air.

Importantly for us at this time into the Air Space too.

We heard on the news of the eruption I checked that flights were running on the net before heading off to the airport.
However by the time we got to Helsinki (3 hours before our flight out to Heathrow) it seemed that flights were being canceled over the northern Air Space.

We joined a (swiftly growing) bunch down in the basement of Helsinki Airport (nice cold floors too down there folks) to sort out our canceled flight.

After a long wait (and order brought to the masses via a well functioning ticketing system), the staff we spoke with identified a flight leaving for HK right about then and shunted us swiftly to that.

A quick sprint across the airport to the departure gate and we essentially got our baggage checked directly in and we walked right on to the plane (which seemed to be being held for us).

Now sitting in HK (with no delay to our travel) we are reading that all flights out of HEL are on hold till Saturday and the situation is spreading across Nth Europe.

The staff's great responce, efficient processing and fine exception handling got us on our way

thanks Finnair

still gnawing on that: exploring camera ISO effects

yes, I'm still gnawing on this

The last few bog posts (combined with my being in the middle of packing up my house) have given me cause to gnaw further at this topic of open source vs closed Intellectual Property and what effects the move to digital is having on photography.

Make no mistake, I like digital. I like computers (notice where you're reading this?) and have spent quite an amount of energy getting to know my new media (I really only changed seriously to digital 5 or 6 years ago).

This is not to say that I do not appreciate film and continue to use 120 roll and 4x5 sheet substantially in my photography.

I don't use film because I'm a luddite, I use it because I know it will give me the look I want.

How do I know? well by knowing my materials.

A friend of mine over in Soundimageplus seems to have started gnawing the same pithy issue, and came up with the thought:

OK - at the moment Canon offer great choices and good value, but what happens when they eliminate their main rival? Will they be so customer friendly when they don't have to try so hard?

and given that he's a self affesed Lieca fan and a Nikon owner this is no trivial statement (though I think personally he's a card carrying camera agnostic with a strong bent towards impulse shopping, but don't tell him I said that).

Well some time ago I was digging around in the bowels of RAW files produced by the Fuji S5 camera (with an eye to moving towards that) and found they were simply stunning ... even if only (and perhaps particularly at) 6MP. You see their superCCD is really supper ... but any wedding photographer out there reading this already knows that ...

To the point I discovered some interesting points. Canon it seems, (they won't admit anything) do some skulduggery in (probably the analog) signal processing pre writing to RAW on their incremental ISO that results in predelivery of combed histograms in their RAW data. For example:




So, before you introduce any banding into the picture yourself you start out with it. As my surfie mates would say back in the 80's

Choice

This was brought to attention on a forum back in 2006 after one programmer who was a photographer noticed the phenomenon. The response from Canon was via Chuck Westfall was this:

Hi, Peter:

I appreciate your interest, but we do not comment on our image processing algorithms. Our cameras are basically offered "as is," and we do our best to make sure that image quality is as high as it can be. Canon's official statement on EOS 30D image quality is as follows:

"The image quality of the EOS 30D and all other EOS Digital SLRs conforms with Canon's internal quality standard at all available ISO speed settings. We have no further comments to offer on this issue."

Best Regards,

Chuck Westfall
Director/Media & Customer Relationship
Camera Marketing Group/Canon U.S.A., Inc.

it was nice of them to discuss this to any extent ... wasn't it.

To be fair how many people have put Kodak or Fuji to task on their film stocks and got very far?

Probably noone (unless you buy 10 Km of 35mm stock at a time ... say in LA somewhere)

Of course the difference (in my view) is that as a film camera user I can say "no I don't like this film stock" and go use another one ... after all, its just a cassette of film I load into my camera isn't it... Heck I could (and did) mix n match brands within my camera system (especially the 4x5 LF one) but with a Digital I'm really trully wedded to a system.

As some may know a divorce is expensive

Now, Peter did some interesting analysis on the EOS cameras back then, and has published his data here. I'd like to take a moment to discuss the significance of the 5D and the the 30D data.

First, this is the data he got of signal to noise ratio of each of the ISO settings of the camera. As always higher signal levels (over noise) is better ... so a higher number is better. We know (or should know) that a camera goes "down" in quality as we push over its "base ISO". On the 5D that is 100 ISO

Peters data supports that notion and further suggests that by using fractional ISO you will drop down significantly in quality. In fact many fractional ISOs are lower in quality than 800, so you may as well set that.

Bet you won't find that in the manual.

This indicates to me that using auto ISO on the camera will quite likely result in lower quality images (assuming its not biased to choose the best ISO ... but then who'd know?)

The situation is even more interesting with the 30D. Where it seems the fractional ISO's are in fact the best with 160 being the best:


and a rapid trail off towards the 1600ISO end (with an advantage to be using 1250). These data are in "counts" which is a linear representation, some people may prefer seeing this as DB so he also presents that:



This just makes it more obvious that you don't use anything past 1600 on that camera (and if you took some test shots you'd probably see that too ... DPReview seems to have)

This is the step between 1600 and 3200 on their review



significant isn't it...

Peter reports

that 100 looks worse than 200 because at ISO 100 the pixels saturate at only 3398 counts and even though the dark noise is lower (StdDev = 2.11) the dynamic range ends up equal to (3398-128)/2.11 = 1550. At ISO 200 on the other hand the saturation is 4095

Thanks mate, re-reading this helps me with the observations I had with RAW testing on my G1 (some time recently).

Pete thinks that the intermediate levels are constructed ones, but looking at the data he's presented here I think that the intermediate levels (like 160) are the real base levels and the "proper" levels (100, 200) are the constructed ones .. perhaps for some fine efficiency tuning.

So as Peter observes:

Considering the above and that the 5D was released in September 2005 it is an impressive achievement and the camera still holds it own against many current (as of February 2008) cameras.

What I see is that technology has not really developed significantly since the 5D (and perhaps before) and that all the new stuff is just about regurgitating the stuff that the subscription editors already had in their pockets to dish out gradually.

the more things change, the more they stay the same

faults in the lakes

even when the lake is frozen, water and levels keep moving underneath it ...

Sometimes this creates a fault line along the lake pushing up chunks of ice



Of course in Winter the day is short and although the sun moves angle slowly it gets dark (ish) soon.

Depending on how you think, it can be quite lonely out there ... or it can be quite beautiful...



I normally don't like to share my solitude ... but I guess its not going to disturb me this time :-)