Real

Carroll Hall Shelby, the Texan who created the famous Shelby Cobra and uncounted other high-performance machines that turned the auto world on its ear, and made it a whole lot more fun for 50 years, died in Dallas Thursday night at age 89. He had been hospitalized for pneumonia. http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2012/05/auto-legend-carroll-shelby-father-of-cobra-dies/1 Sad day for the auto industry. He has done so much and was one of, if not the only designers to have significant impacts on each of the Big 3 Auto companies here in the US.

Oh, Travel Channel shooting there Sunday? Wonder if I can get my mug in there somewhere...

At least one day, maybe 2. Hopeful for good photography weather but I think I saw clouds most of the weekend

Mathematically its virtually impossible. It can run at around 1400 RPH. That means that the FastLane processed 1400 per hour for 4 hours straight? LOL. Fail. Maybe he shouldnt go on a halloweekend on a saturday. What a tool.

That was my hope. I never rode it so that would be the best option. Think of all that speed...airtime and such?

If you need a specific resolution let me know. I have no problems custominzing for your needs.

Thanks! Sometimes I can go through my shots and not feel that much turned out. What I look for and what others see are usually two very different things.

^This FTW. It just doesnt do anything. It goes quickly through the woods. What makes me sad is looking at rides like Voyage, Boulder Dash and what they did with the terrain and I look at the MASSIVE area that Beast takes up and imagine "What if?". Then I get sad. lol.

I felt like every turn was. Beast is as smooth as I can possibly remember. I rode it very late at night on Saturday. It was FLYING. Still not the most amazing ride and nothing Id write home about since it only does one thing and thats go REALLY fast through the woods but I had about as good a ride as I could have. It was super smooth. Fog had settled in that night with the supermoon. So the shed part was absolutely trippy since the fog was hovering in the shed and the light from the moon was being cast through the shed. Really awesome. Just wish all those straights were a bunch of hills!!!

Wait, this is actually an S&S designed ride? I figured it was some cheap knock off by how badly the rotations were. Wow.

Well the FastLanes seem to be old Single Rider lines. I have a video of me using the FastLane which I will edit and upload later. But its mostly me gloating about skipping by like 2hrs worth of line, Its 50 bucks for a single person. Then $5 off for each additional person. So for 2 people, its 45 per person. And then for 3 people, 40 per person, etc. I think you can reduce it down to 30 bucks per person.

And here we go - about 40 photos. 2000px on the long edge so if you click on them, they enlarge quite a bit. Enjoy This is right after the first Flight Deck photo I posted in the first post. Not sure which I like better but they were about 1/50th of a second apart.

Thats exactly how I learned how awesome the FastLane is. Heres something I typed up for someone who said FastLane makes the line twice as long: Ill post pictures in like 10 minutes but I wanted to throw that math out there. When you break it down, it doesn't really kill your time. Plus, those people who are FastLane - they aren't standing in the line ahead of you making your already 45min line a 60min line. Ya know? but if there's other logic to refute what I wrote, by all means.

Ha, I dont get it! I dont use it anymore, just Lightroom. PS is too busy for a photographers needs. Now I just restore the photo to as close to when I took it, make a few light adjustments and go. But only to color, clarity and basics, I dont fool with stuff like blur, etc. But I agree, even when I waited in line last year, I found KI to be a great park. Theres tree's, decent food and a nice selection of varied rides. But I just posted on Cedar Points facebook about how great the FastLane worked. I am just WAITING for someone to try and troll it. Gonna be awesome Oh and I have many more pictures I will have ready to post tonight to make this a proper Photo TR.

The most it will increase a wait over a period of an hour is maybe 10-15 minutes. In a couple cases, we filled empty seats but otherwise it worked very smoothly. I really dont think we held any lines up. Might be different with a huge amount of FastLane but unless its a huge group re-riding over and over, I cant see it really altering the line much. If anything, you take those people OUT of the main line, making it smaller. But when they get in line they may make you wait 1 more train to get on. I gotta assume in the end it works out to be about even. Except the park makes pure profit off the scheme. I like...nay, I love it.

I mainly use them to protect the lens. I dont have the money to replace what I have. I save up for awhile, then I purchase my stuff. I will probably get a B+W but Ill wait to find one used on FredMiranda and save money. They retail for 60, I know I can get them down to 45 or so. Also, the push-pull of the 100-400 renders it impossible to weather seal but I will shoot in the rain (like I did last year in torrential rain at racing event) so I also will use it to help keep moisture out from the front of the lens. I just have to keep the middle part covered and protected. I had a CP filter and it was pretty neat. I just felt it was difficult to get the colors to look right. Sometimes it really oversaturated the blue in the sky. Adjusting it took too much time and I can do it in Lightroom 4 now with ease. Then again, that was like 3-4 years ago, so back then editing in Photoshop or LR2 wasnt nearly as awesome as it is now. Ill look at that ND. I have read a lot that the 100-400L is finicky with filters. A cheap filter will reduce details in the extremes which I shoot in a lot. But I should invest in this if I want to ensure my stuff elevates to high end photography. Beemer - Thanks! It might be because I focus right up onto the trains and the people riding them Diamondback is such a good ride. I really forgot and I think it moved up a few notches. I really enjoy the airtime I get in the back seat on those restraints. Its one of the few times I get slightly apprehensive because of how I slip back and up, not just up. I would trade several, several rides at CP for DB. And a years supply of Fast Lane passes for me and my crew Im not sure what there is to bitch about if you are the one using it. I mean i suppose if a TON of people purchased them in one day that might diminish the usefulness but even if I had to wait 10min for each ride it would not reduce my view of it one bit. The lines were what I expected for a beautiful, opening weekend (first full weekend) and tons of post-prom goers as well. Definitely evident by all the up-do's and shirts being worn proclaiming their "post prom Kings Island" trips. But I dont see anything wrong with it. It works out even better since I have a season pass. I dont pay for entrance to the park so I take advantage of their amenity. I know its been hashed around this site many times. Its a premium service. I doubt that anyones line was held up more than a few minutes, tops. Even on Flight of Fear, the longest wait I saw in any Fast Lane was 8 of us. So we took up 8 seats from a 24 seat train. And we even waited 1 train because they were alternating letting FastLane in every other train. Which is fine with me. Long as I dont wait in that gastly 120min line Im completely ok. System worked great. I felt like a VIP the whole trip. For 45 bucks, thats a cheap way to feel awesome. And be awesome But seriously, I think they may even get me to buy these at CP a couple times this year.

Whos name you cant recall?!!! FreddieW!!! (Wong) This was cool. Im not sure I draw the whole parallel to Inception. I get it, I just expected something different. Great masking though. Really, really clean.

Yup, it certainly was still under construction.

People incorrectly (IMO) label these as "Skip the Line" passes. Which I guess is "Technically" true, but it's more than that. It allows you to actually enjoy the park you are at instead of trying to rush around and ride everything while waiting in line all day. Bingo. I've never done this before except for at Disney. But I think the FastLane is more closely related to "skipping" the line than a QBot or Disney FastPass because they require you still wait, but you have an assigned time. This is even more awesome (slightly) because I don't even have to adhere to that! We would simply sit down, get something to eat and look at each other and ask "OK, what do you feel like riding?" When I think back on it, I feel like her and I were the only ones in the park. The lines were completely irrelevant. I almost forgot anyone else was there. That's not something you get to experience very often. How many of you can say that's ever happened and if it did, how GREAT did it feel? Yea. Its worth what they ask. Its like buying a VIP session for the day. To be fair, we wouldn't have done it had that lady not gave us her bands. I almost feel like they could really make a killing on these by handing out some free ones to random people in the last hour or two of the night. Will it hurt the lines? Nope. Will it give people a chance to experience what its like to bypass a 2hr line at their leisure? YES. Basically, it sold me. Other parks can thank that lady and KI because now I'm a believer in that system. Yes, now I am going to have to invest probably a 2 stop and 4 stop filter for the same reason. I got lucky and some of theses were still in a decent range. The 100-400's sweet spot is f8-f11. But yea, anything higher and your image quality sinks through the bottom. Gotta wait for my next paycheck. I need to finally get my UV for that lens. Been a year without a filter on it, I feel like I've cheated it already. Right now, might not be great shooting weather. Sat is partly cloudy, Sun shows rain. Not sure which day we are going. I need to lose about 20-30lbs before I fit back into all the rides. My desk job combined with being uber lazy this winter pushed me past the breaking point sadly. That's my lazy asses fault. So I may skip most of the rides and just photograph if its decent out.

Well this started off pretty cool. Saturday the wife and I made the executive decision to race to Kings Island at 6pm and try to make it there at night so we could process our passes, get a hotel and be ready to go in the morning. We did, with a few hiccups which I will document later. But we arrived, got our Platinum Passes processed and had time for probably one ride. I elected to hit up Diamondback and right as we got to the queue entrance and nice lady pulls us aside and says "Here, were leaving, have these for the rest of the night" and hands us 2 Fastlane wristbands. Seeing as though the line was still about 45-60min we thought "hey, cool" and put them on and preceded to walk into the Fastlane line. I didnt realized how awesome this was. We walked on, got on the back seat and were off within 3min. Now we only had 20min left. What to do? RIDE AGAIN. Boom. Walk past 45min worth of people. Oh, well now we have 15min. What now? Ride Beast at night! Not just night, Supermoon + fog at night! That will probably be my best beast ride ever and that doesnt say much since I still think its not very thrilling but the way the fog was lit up by the moon and the way it hung around the track was pretty sweet. After that we went home and pondered the whole Fastlane thing for the next day. Sunday morning and while it was 90 bucks, it was clear that needed to do it. Only took about 3 rides to realize this is where its at. Lines later in the day got up to around 1-2hrs and our longest wait was 15minutes - for Panda Express. We walked onto every single ride. I lost track of our count but we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly because there was no pressure to rush around. I was able to photograph at my leisure, eat and rest at our own pace and still ride till we couldnt ride any more. That was some of the best 90 bucks Ive ever spent. DO IT. If you are out of town, just plan on spending it and then enjoy the insane freedom to walk by hundreds and hundreds of people, walk right into the station, pick your row and GO! I only have 5 photos to share at the moment. Im sure some of you remember my huge topic I had with all of my Cedar Point stuff in high res. Its going even higher res this year but instead of doing the normal high speed stuff Im moving to capture the speed and emotions of the rides. With my Canon 7D high speed photography is a joke and is just really easy. Ill still take those photos because I need them for my library but youll see a huge shift into working panning into most of my shots. Ive gotten into this from all of my auto-cross/auto racing photography where its used to capture the speed of the car. I think roller coasters should not be exempt from this and since roller coasters work in 3 dimensions where as cars typically work in 2, it presents some unique challenges with focusing and capturing the shot. Youll see in my Firehawk, that due to this third dimension my focus was spot on the second row but the other rows and the 3rd dimension working, it produced an image that looks like I took it with a tilt shift. Once I get home tonight Ill process more photos. Cedar Point is this weekend. Hoping its another clear, beautiful weekend so I can go nuts with the camera. ========================================== Season Pass issues. So Saturday night when we were processing our passes the team seemed a little confused because we had CP Vouchers for Platinum PAsses and couldnt get past that. They tried to look us up (we had passes last year) and that failed. So they processed us as new. Mine went through ok, my wifes did not. Matt L. found us at the gate and took a picture of the card with his phone after we explained what happened and he said "Its alright, theres not much time left, head in and have fun. I will work on this tonight. Stop by in the morning (I already told him we were coming back) and it should be fixed. If not, have them contact me" I shook his hand and let him know that was outstanding customer service and thats when we enjoyed our Saturday night. We came in and still the pass was not working (It was coming up as a 2009 pass...??!!). We got with Matt and he remembered us and asked "Its still not working? Ok, come back later and Ill sort this out". Later was around 6pm and we found Matt again and he already had the plan in motion. He printed out a new Platinum Pass ticket, scanned it. Had my wife fill out her information and processed the pass. Then verified she was in the system. THIS IS CUSTOMER SERVICE. Matt L from Kings Island is where its at. I work in Customer Service and this is beyond even my own idea of excellent customer service. He was being pulled in 45 different directions at once but he handled one and went immediately to the next. I had no problem waiting for him to take care of a guest because I knew he was going to take care of us. This guy deserves huge props for the way he handled this issue (which ultimately, the girl who processed my wifes pass never entered in her information nor did she take her picture because my wife was never in the system!). Matt L - you rock. You restore faith in big corporate parks. Oh and did I mention he was funny and personable and didnt seem to show an ounce of frustration with all the problems he was dealing with? Kings Island had a winner on their hands. He definitely should be moving up soon. Taken from the top of the Eiffel Tower. 400mm FTW! This is not a tilt shift, just a simple panning shot but because of the multi-dimensional base of the shot, I got one of the coolest photos I can think Ive gotten in a very long time.

I saw this at the Detroit Auto show and I thought the same thing.

And thats actually impressive because thats the test run to see "what if the ride BARELY clears the lift hill". Im sure operating speeds will be much faster.

First, I hate you for being there when the Koala wasnt sleeping. Second...Heres one of my shots of the small bear Must be a common pose

Autocross event from Sunday. Many, many more keepers with the 7D. 1/25th of a second baby! STOP!

Yes! Thats exactly what I was hoping for! Spinning action over the hills. Thats going to be a riot!