Tag Archives: time

Outdoor Photography: It’s All about Timing

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What a difference two days and one hour makes.

Although I was very pleased with the “Desert Still Life” life photo I shot the other day, I wasn’t 100% happy with it. It seemed to me that when viewed at 100%, the photo was grainy. I decided to head back out to the same spot at roughly the same time of day to shoot it again.

I couldn’t do it the next day, however, so it was two days later when I pointed the Jeep down that ATV road, pulled out onto the ridge, and followed the dirt road there to the same site. When I arrived, it was a full hour later in the day than the previous shoot.

This is an amazing example of how important timing is in photography. These two photos show roughly the same image, but with a mere 49 hours of time between them. The one on the left is my original image; the one on the right is the later image.

Good Shot Bad Shot

Now I know what you’re going to say. The exposure is off on the second shot. It is. I exposed for the cactus flowers, which were in the shade — remember, it’s one hour later. And although I probably could have fixed this shot up a bit in Photoshop, I didn’t bother. Frankly, when I saw the condition of the flowers, I didn’t try very hard to get a good shot. I just tried for the same angle. The only reason I made the photo on the right at all was to show it in this blog post as an example of how things change from day to day.

The biggest change was in the flowers themselves. Those bright magenta blooms had mostly closed up. I don’t think this had much to do with the time of day. I just think that they were 2 days past their peak. I’d just happened to arrive on point to make the first shot when they were at their peak.

The point of this post is to clearly demonstrate that outdoor photography is all about timing. You need to get there at the right time of day when your subject matter is at its peak. If this means multiple trips to the same spot, so be it. If you’re serious, you’ll do it. You’ll go out every single morning or afternoon during the wildflower season, toting your camera and your tripod along with you just for the possibility of making the one photo that will make all the work worthwhile.

Think photography is easy? Think again.

Tax Time = Torture Time

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How did we let it get like this?

Yesterday, I did my own taxes for the first time in four years.

Understand this: I have a BBA degree in accounting. Having that degree always convinced me that I should do my own taxes. After all, if an accountant can’t do her own taxes, who can?

But back in 2005, my taxes were extremely complex. I sold a rental property and bought a helicopter. There were capital gains and losses and all kinds of weird things. Even though I’d been using TurboTax (and MacInTax) to do my taxes for the previous eight or so years — and doing it manually before that — I didn’t feel up to the task. So I handed it off to my husband’s tax preparer and let him deal with it. I’ve been doing that ever since.

TurboTaxBut after last year’s debacle with a new tax preparer who charged me more than $500, I decided to take matters into my own hands again. I bought TurboTax Home & Business. Yesterday, I sat down in front of my computer to do my taxes and my husband’s.

My husband’s taxes were the warm-up exercise. His taxes should be relatively simple, right? After all, he has an employer and gets a W-2 form. He didn’t buy or sell stocks, he doesn’t operate a business. He didn’t purchase or sell any property during the year. Yet even with the software, it took me two hours to prepare his Federal and State return. And when it was done, he didn’t like the answer and said he’d probably take it to a tax preparer anyway.

As we muddled through the process, however, I realized that my husband knows nothing about tax preparation. He didn’t know what any of the forms were and whether he’d filed them in the past. I’m not talking about those weird forms that only tax geeks know about. I’m talking about common schedules like A and C. He was clueless. For his whole life — and he’s in his 50s now, folks — he’d put his trust in a tax preparer, from his dad to local accountants to Hewett-Jackson. Whatever they told him was golden. He write a check or get a refund and be satisfied. After all, he didn’t have to deal with the bullshit of putting together a tax return.

After “completing” Mike’s return, I sat down to do mine. It took 4-1/2 hours. With a computer and software. And it isn’t as if I had to wade through a pile of papers to get the numbers to input. I use Quicken for my personal and business accounting. It does all the math for me. (It can also export to TurboTax, but I admit that I don’t trust them together for that.)

When I was finished, I saw the final numbers. I have to pay — I nearly always do because I’m too stupid to pay estimated taxes like I should — but the numbers weren’t quite as bad as I expected. (Of course, I had no clue what I’d made last year until I actually sat down to do my tax return.) But what’s mind-boggling to me is the forms TurboTax spit out. Here’s this year’s list:

  • Form 1040-ES Payment Voucher. There are four of these for my estimated payments, which I’m really going to try to send in this year.
  • Form 1040-V Payment Voucher. That’s the one I’m supposed to send in with my big check.
  • Form 1040Form 1040 US Individual Income Tax Return. Yes, it’s the long form. I can’t remember the last time I filed a short form. I may have been a teenager.
  • Schedule A Itemized Deductions. I’ve also been filing this one for years, although I’ve never been able to deduct medical expenses. I suppose I should be glad.
  • Schedule B Interest and Ordinary Dividends. I have a variety of investments that are not tax deferred.
  • Schedule C Profit or Loss from Business. I file two of these: one for my writing and publishing business and one for my helicopter charter business.
  • Schedule D Capital Gains and Losses. I sold some stock at a loss.
  • Schedule E Supplemental Income and Loss. This is for a rental property I own and my royalties on copyrights.
  • Form 8889 Health Savings Accounts. This is one way to deduct medical expenses. Save for them in a special kind of account and deduct your savings, then pay your medical bills with that account.
  • Form 8829 Expenses for Business Use of Your Home. I have an entire room in my home that’s dedicated to the mess I call my office.
  • Form 4562 Depreciation and Amortization. This is for my helicopter and other assets used by Flying M Air.
  • Form 8582 Passive Activity Loss Limitations. Apparently, I can’t deduct the tiny loss on my rental property because I don’t dedicate my life to keeping it occupied. Whatever.
  • Arizona Form 140 Resident Personal Income Tax Return. Arizona needs a piece of my pie, too.
  • Arizona Schedule A Itemized Deduction Adjustments. At least I can deduct my medical expenses in Arizona.

I should be clear here: it didn’t take me 4-1/2 hours to fill in these forms. It took me 4-1/2 hours to enter the raw data that TurboTax needed to fill in the forms. TurboTax did the job in seconds, completing just the forms it thinks I need and spitting them out of my printer as if they’d been typed by hand.

Frankly, I don’t think it’s humanly possible to prepare a tax return like mine by hand anymore.

And that’s my point. There are rules upon rules upon rules to the U.S. tax law. I remember studying taxes back in the early 1980s — it was a nightmare then. It’s even worse now. How frustrating is it to enter line after line of financial details on a worksheet or form just to discover that it won’t impact your taxes because it didn’t total more than 2% of line 38? Or perform a convoluted calculation just to see what percentage is taxable or deductible? Or answer questions regarding child care, home expenses, foreign transactions — the list goes on and on. Four and a half hours worth of questions and answers.

In this stack of paper I’m sending the IRS this week, there must be over 500 different numbers. What do they all mean? Do they really matter?

There’s an entire industry built on the annual torture of U.S. Citizens required to complete tax returns. I bought tax software to make filing my own return possible. It cost me $80 (discounted). Other people pay $50 or more to tax preparers to do the job for them. Hell, I paid $550 to get my taxes prepared last year! (That’s more than some people pay in taxes!)

And why? Because the tax laws are so complex and confusing that people with basic math skills simply can’t do it on their own.

Hello? IRS? Are you listening? Whatever happened to the Paperwork Reduction Act?

About My Watch

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Old one apparently gone to the dogs.

About two weeks ago, I realized that I couldn’t find my everyday watch.

I had four watches:

  • A Swatch that I bought years ago when I didn’t mind plastic watchbands. I don’t wear it anymore.
  • A Minnie Mouse watch that I bought in Disney World a few years back. I like it a lot, but with my failing vision, I can’t read it.
  • A Bulova dress watch with a tiny rectangle face, four lines instead of 12 numbers, a tiny diamond at the 12 position, and a gold-tone band. This is my dress watch and I only wear it if I dress up and need to know the time. Which is so seldom, I pretty much never wear it.
  • An Eddie Bauer watch. (No snide comments, please!) I got it on sale for $40 at an Eddie Bauer store. It was waterproof to 10 meters and came with three denim watch bands. Which was a good thing because it became my everyday watch and I wore out all the bands.

It was the Eddie Bauer watch that I’d lost. I wasn’t terribly upset. Although it was my everyday watch, I didn’t have much of an attachment to it. It’s not like it was a collector’s item or a keepsake. It was a cheap, functional watch.

How I Figured I’d Lost It

I figured I’d taken it off one day and left it on the kitchen table or on my desk. If you saw my kitchen table or desk, you’d recognize the black hole-like tendencies. I’m the queen of clutter and there’s a lot of junk just sitting around, waiting to be dealt with.

But when I cleared off the kitchen table and my desk, the watch wasn’t there.

So then I figured I’d left it on my night table and that it had fallen into the little waste paperbasket beside it and had been taken out with the trash. That’s how I probably lost my Pulsar dress watch years ago (although I do suspect my cleaning lady back then; she may have cashed in on my carelessness).

In any case, the watch was apparently gone for good. Minnie Mouse wasn’t going to cut it unless I added a magnifying lens over the watch crystal.

It was time for a new watch.

Zulu Time

I’m a pilot and thought it might be nice to have a watch that also told Zulu Time. Zulu Time is the same as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and it doesn’t adjust for daylight savings time. In Arizona, it’s always 7 hours after current time (because we don’t have daylight savings time either). So if it’s 9 AM in Arizona, it’s 4 PM GMT or 1600 hours Zulu.

And yes, I can do the math in my head. But I figured, why not get a watch that just tells me Zulu time.

I did some research. Women’s watches, in general, are pretty useless. Faces too small, often too ornate. So I concentrated on men’s watches. But I have a pretty small wrist and they’d likely look ridiculous on me.

Torgeon T1502

Long story short, I found the Torgeon T15 ladies watch. It has a big face, but not as big as the men’s version. It has numbers and hands that are big enough to see and read. It also has the date and a nice precision second hand. But what makes it a pilot’s watch is the red Zulu Time hand. It travels at half-speed around the dial, pointing to an inner scale of numbers from 1 to 24. When set properly, it points to the hour of zulu time.

Notice I said “when set properly”? That’s because I couldn’t set it. I tried five times. For a while the damn hand decided it was going to hide behind the hour hand and ride it around the dial.

But Mike, my husband, collects watches and knows a lot about them. The other day, he set it for me. So now I’m good until July 1, when I need to change the date. I’ll probably just keep it a day off until I see him again.

Postscript on that Eddie Bauer Watch

About two days after I got the new watch, I dipped into the big dog cookie box in the cabinet to pull out a bedtime treat for Jack the Dog. Mike buys certain things at Costco, so they come in really big boxes. The dog cookies are in a big box.

I stuck my hand in and felt something that definitely wasn’t a dog cookie. Could it be? I pulled my hand out, grasping my old Eddie Bauer watch. The band had broken.

Now you might think that this is odd. After all, there’s really only one way that watch could have gotten into the box: I’d reached in for a cookie weeks before and had pulled out a cookie while leaving the watch, which had been on my wrist, behind. How, you might ask, could I possibly not notice my watch falling off?

I wish I had an answer for you.

Maybe my subconscious mind had just decided it was time for a new watch.

Flight Time = Experience

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And that can safe your life.

After guesstimating for a while that I had about 2,000 hours of flight time, I finally got around to adding up all those columns of numbers in my log book. Although I make entries pretty regularly, the chore of adding them up is only done a few times a year. I’m prepping for a Part 135 check ride this week and figured it was about time. I discovered that I passed the 2,000 hour mark back in October — about ten years to the day after my first flight lesson.

Flight time is one of the few real gauges of experience that pilots have. While many passengers ask me how long I’ve been flying, very few ever ask the real question: how many hours have you flown? I know plenty of pilots who have been flying far longer than I have, but don’t have as many hours logged. Who is more experienced? I think hours is a better indication than years.

The more you fly, the more you really experience as a pilot. Let’s face it: shit happens. But it won’t happen to you if you’re not out there in a situation where it can happen. How can you learn how to deal with the kinds of weird things that happen to pilots if you’re not flying enough for them to happen?

You might wonder what kinds of things I’m talking about. Here are a few of them:

  • Weather is probably the most obvious — and most insidious, as anyone who has analyzed what happened to Colgan Flight 3407 near Buffalo the other day. Weather can be wind, rain, snow, hail, ice, turbulence, fog, clouds, and thunderstorms, among other conditions. The more weather a pilot has experienced, the more comfortable and knowledgeable he about flying in that weather. I’m not saying a pilot should take unnecessary risks. I’m just saying that no one can be a good, experienced pilot if he is a “fair weather” pilot who only flies in perfect conditions.
  • Aircraft capabilities can only be truly known through experience. Sure, an aircraft’s Pilot Operating Handbook (POH) will give you performance data and explain emergency procedures. And yes, you should know the contents of that book to fly the aircraft safely and legally. (This falls under FAR Part 91.103, which begins: “Each pilot in command shall, before beginning a flight, become familiar with all available information concerning that flight.”) But it’s only though experience that you can learn how an aircraft will handle in any given situation. CG a little skewed? What will that do to the controls? Landing heavy on a 95°F day at an airport at 5,000 elevation? With no wind? A crosswind? How will the aircraft perform? The more aircraft you fly and the more time you spend in each one will help you understand the different capabilities of what’s out there. It’ll also teach you “tricks” (for lack of a better word) that can help you cope in difficult situations.
  • Radio communication is another thing that smoothes out with real experience. New pilots who have 95% of their flight time in the pattern at their home airport know every controller and nearly every request they’re likely to get. But put those pilots in the busy airspace of another airport 100 miles away and they’re often completely at a loss for words. It’s even worse when that airspace is around an airport without a tower, where local general aviation (GA) pilots are getting in some Sunday flying. But the more a pilot flies and the more airspace he visits and interacts with, the better he will become as a radio jockey, communicating with Air Traffic Control (ATC) and other pilots. At some point in the experience curve, the pilot will stop reciting requests and responses by rote and begin actually communicating in a language he’s more comfortable with.

These are just a few things a pilot learns with experience. If you’re a pilot, you can probably think of others. Please share them in the comments for this post.

My point is this: don’t whine and complain when a job you want to do requires 1,000 hours of experience to get your foot in the door. The folks hiring you know the simple equation: flight time = experience. And you can never have too much experience when you’re a pilot.

Exact Sunrise/Sunset Times for Pilots and Photographers

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Important data…and a special offer.

This is an old post with links to old files. You can find the latest version of this offer and currently available files here.

I’m a geek and know it. Each year, for the past few years, I’ve gone through a convoluted exercise on my Mac to extract, process, and import the exact sunrise and sunset times for Wickenburg, AZ (where I live) into iCal as individual daily events. That data is then synched across all of my Macs (via MobileMe) and on my Treo (via the Missing Sync). As a result, if you ask me what time the sun rises or sets in Wickenburg any day in the current year, I can tell you — usually within about a minute — no matter where I am.

Why I Bother

Why do I have this information? Well there are two reasons.

For one, I’m a pilot and I often need to plan for flights in the future. For example, suppose a client wants me to take him from Wickenburg to Sedona for a day trip on a specific date in March. While I’m allowed to fly at night, there are three mountain ranges between Wickenburg and Sedona that get very dark at night. My personal rule, established for safety, is to leave Sedona no later than 30 minutes before sunset. That gives us plenty of time to cross all three mountain ranges before it gets dark. So, with a glance at iCal or my Treo, I can find out exactly what time sunset is on the day in question and tell him when we have to leave Sedona.

As a pilot who often flies photographers around places like Lake Powell, this becomes really handy. The best light for photography is early in the morning and late in the afternoon. This isn’t a theory at Lake Powell — it’s a fact. Knowing what time of day sunrise and sunset happen helps me to plan flights in that area.

Of course, the sunrise/sunset times at Page, AZ aren’t the same as in Wickenburg, but they’re close enough to get approximate timing for preliminary flight planning; I usually check the exact times before finalizing.

I’m also a photographer myself. So it’s important to me to know what times are best for photography.

How I Do It — Briefly

Time PaletteI get the exact time information from a program called Time Palette. I bought this try-before-you-buy program years ago. It had the information I needed, but no export capabilities. So I asked the software author to add them. He did. (Try asking Microsoft, Adobe, or Apple for a specific new feature you need in one of their programs and see how long it takes for you to get it.)

The hoops I jump through to export the monthly data and import it into iCal aren’t worth discussing here. It’s technical and boring. But each year, I improve my solution to make it a little quicker and easier for me.

Special, Limited-Time Offer

I realize that there are probably a lot of other pilots and photographers out there who could benefit from this information for their localities.

So I’m making this limited-time offer: I am willing to create iCal-compatible ICS calendar files for 2009 local sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset data for anyone who asks from now until January 2009 month-end. All I need from you is the name of your city/state/country and your exact time zone name. I figure that if enough people ask, it’ll motivate me to completely automate the entire process so it’s even easier for me next year.

You can use the comment form for this post to request your custom ICS files:

  1. Enter your name (first name only is okay) in the form’s name field. Don’t put the name of your company or blog or anything else.
  2. Enter your real e-mail address in the e-mail field. This keeps it private so only I can see it. And no, I don’t harvest this information for other use or sale. But I will use it to send your files, so if you put in fake information, you won’t get the files.
  3. Enter your Web site or blog in the Web site field if desired. You don’t have to do this, but why not?
  4. In the big comment field of the form, enter the following information (1) your city/state/country, (2) the closest large city/state/country with an airport (in case your city isn’t in the Time Palette database), (3) the exact name of your time zone, (4) whether or not your city observes daylight savings time, (5) a brief summary of why you want this information, (6) the name of the ICS-compatible software you plan to use the file with, and (7) any other comments you might want to share.

Please don’t leave out any of this information. If you leave out something really important — like the location or time zone — I either won’t be able to generate the information for you or it will be wrong.

One request per person, please. Full calendar years only — no special date requests.

I will create and send out these files as I find time. I’ll probably do them in batches. Don’t nag me. Don’t complain when you don’t get yours right away. I occasionally do work for a living.

I admit that I’m more likely to be motivated to create and send out a batch of files with a donation to my coffee fund. (Hint, Hint)

Don’t use the Contact form for this blog or my e-mail address, if you happen to have it, to make a request or ask questions about how I do this. I will delete your message and will probably ignore any other request you make through proper channels. My long-standing rule has not fallen: I do not provide support via e-mail.

And if you want this information for your locality, ask for it now. I’ll stop considering requests on January 31, 2009.

Disclaimer: I do not guarantee the accuracy of this information. It should not be relied upon without independent verification for any mission-critical operations. I will not take any responsibility for any use of this information. Use it at your own risk.

Download a Previously Created File

As I create these files, I’ll put them here for download by others who live in the same city. (I won’t create files for people who don’t have the courtesy to provide an accurate e-mail address, so don’t even try it; I’ll check first.)

The following files are already available for download; help yourself if you live in one of these cities:

2009: