Opportunity and Cost: An Anniversary

I am still me.

It feels weird to say that. Or rather, it feels weird to have doubted that. But I guess that's what this past year has been: doubts about assumptions that used to come naturally.

Let's rewind: 1 year and 1 week ago, I strained my hamstring at pole vault practice. Again. And I decided it was time for a change. Two days later, I sat down at a friend's table with a box of tissues and wrote "Leaving Love Behind." A few days later, I sketched out some ideas in my composition book, went to the photo studio, and took a self-portrait that felt like it fit the gravity of that moment.

I wrote at the time that "I don't really know what the future will hold," but I figured that I would figure things out in time. There's no way I could have imagined the changes that were in store, for all of us, but I was dedicated to making the best of an unfamiliar situation, and I'm pretty happy with how the last year has gone.

Orange Haze

A gentle giant rumbled in the sky
In older times, when weather was a friend
With eyes shut tight, I'd feel the wind drift by
But patterns, large and small, began to bend

I grew up in the midwest, and it's a place that leaves an impression on you. Winters were cold. Summers were warm. Fall was the browns, oranges, and ochres of falling leaves and pine needles. And springs were the green and the crisp, bright sunlight that promised the start of the next cycle.

It rarely just rained. More typically, there was rain with a deep, rolling, distant reverberation of thunder, at times interspersed with a sharper, but still amicable sound of nearer thunderclaps. It wasn't a crack, so much as the sound of tearing a giant piece of paper, as the vibrations continue to echo through the material itself.

Those were the days when "go inside when it's lightning outside" was something that adults said, and that you did because you were told; not because you actually understood what could happen.

Sometimes, during the perfect thunderstorm, the gentle, humid breeze would feel so wonderful amidst the chorus of pitter-patters emanating from the raindrops landing all around you…

Doc Diaries: Experiments in Motion

One of my main photographic goals is to tell the story of the motion that happens in the world. I often use a number of common techniques (such as panning), and those typically get me to a pretty reasonable result.

But sometimes, I want to shoot for unreasonable. Sometimes I want to try something that seems almost impossible, just to see if it could work out. Sometimes I want to see not just what motion does look like, but what motion could look like.

The opening image was the result of one such rumination. "How do you take a picture that focuses on the sense of drawing a bow across the strings?" I love what I came up with, but it turns out that the key wasn't to plan, or do lots of math, or to have any kind of a controlled setup. The key was to notice my friend playing her cello, and to just give it a shot. I tried to get the focus where it needed to be, the camera handled the exposure, and I hit the shutter when I felt like the moment was right.

I think one point here is that some experiments are really simple, if you're the right person to run that particular experiment. It often pays to just give something a shot without overcomplicating things.

Stop and Go, Mostly Go (Rhythm of Racing, Part 3)

(Note: this post follows "On-Track Prep" in the Rhythm of Racing series.)

What happens after the green flag flies is a series of balancing acts. When all's said and done, performance is judged by the vehicle positions as the checkered flag waves, 25 hours after the start. In between, you have to pace yourself.

If you drive too slowly, your competitors catch and pass you, and you lose the ability to place competitively at the end of the race. But if you drive too quickly, you increase the risk of mistakes and collisions, you increase fuel consumption (requiring earlier and more frequent pit stops), and you increase tire and brake wear (both of which cause slower lap times, and also require earlier and more frequent pit stops).

So the challenge is to strike a dynamic balance — a strategy that takes into account the state of the race at any point in time — and to find a way to be ahead of your competitors at the finish line.

An ideal race (a "clean" race) has two states: racing and pit stops. Ideally, you avoid all contact (either hitting other vehicles or being hit), the drivers make no mistakes, every pit stop runs perfectly with no mistakes, and the car itself is fast and perfectly reliable.

Of course, that ideal is mostly a fairytale, and particularly so during overnight endurance races. Driver fatigue and crew fatigue lead to mistakes of all varieties and of all levels of severity. Spill fuel on the track during a pit stop? That's an unplanned stop for a penalty. Driver is distracted and misses the braking point? Maybe the car ends up off-track with damaged bodywork. Everything running fine, but your alternator kicks the bucket? Even the Mazda diesels can't run overnight without lights.

So the name of the game is to manage those risks, which is another balancing act. Pit stops need to be well-choreographed. Functions need to be slightly redundant. Each individual needs to have responsibilities, but if they have too many responsibilities — if their head is in too many places at once — that's a recipe for mistakes. People end up needing to check each others' work, because it's a lot easier for one person to make an error, especially when they've been on the grind for 12 hours already, than it is for another person to overlook that same error.

And the most common form of redundancy is the checklist. Run through it in order, add a checkmark when any task is done, and erase after the car is back on track.

Did the driver complain about a funky vibration that's not bad enough to take an unplanned stop? Add it to the checklist. Shift knob getting loose? Checklist. Motorsports can include a whole host of unexpected distractions (such as if a friend's car is involved in a serious incident), and those kinds of surprises can cause you to overlook an "obvious" issue that you were supposed to check. Checklists don't forget.

Okay, so you've made it through the night. You met the brilliant red tones of a Thunderhill dawn and you're still on track, still turning laps, still in the race. The overnight stretch is particularly dangerous because of reduced visibility, and the early morning is equally dangerous, when the sun hangs low above the horizon, shining directly into the drivers' eyes at points around the track. 2014 was the second year running that a car has raced full-speed into a stopped vehicle under cover of darkness.

But you made it. Well done. I have to imagine that surviving the night and seeing the sun shine again is an amazing feeling. But there's still a long way to go. You and your co-drivers haven't gotten much sleep, and it's still a good four hours until the checker. Anything can happen.

…and you've got to be prepared for when it does. Put yourself in this situation. Twenty-four grueling hours down, just one hour to go. You're running second place overall in the race, and you've got a 10+-lap lead on third place. That was the situation when the #00 Award Motorsports / Ehret Family Winery car came in for a routine pit stop, which would be their last of the race. Fuel, tires, driver swap, and then the checkered flag.

But surprises can happen even when it feels like you're out of danger. When it feels like you've already beaten the beast. During the pit stop, a piece of worn-off rubber caught fire under the car (probably after falling onto the hot brake rotor). At the precise moment when the fire was slowly starting to build, the final driver was still stopped, adjusting his rear-view mirror, and completely unaware that anything was amiss.

At this point, remember: brake fluid is flammable. Oil is flammable. Gasoline is (obviously) flammable. Heated rubbers (such as the seals and gaskets in the brake caliper and suspension components) are flammable. Though unlikely, there was the potential for the fire to become a big deal. And any kinds of leaks, after 24 hours of hard racing, would increase the likelihood of the fire continuing to grow. At under 2 minutes per lap, it only takes a 20-minute delay for the third-place team to make up that 10 lap difference and pass you.

But that's not how this one ends. The crew was on the ball, and moments after I spotted the burning piece of rubber, a crew member grabbed a nearby extinguisher and doused the wheel. The team would go on to take the second step on the podium.

The full Rhythm of Racing sequence:

• Part 1: Morning
• Part 2: On-Track Prep
• Part 3: Stop and Go, Mostly Go
• Part 4: Break. Fix. Repeat.
• Part 5: Disaster
• Part 6: Reunion

Red Bull Flugtag 2012: Falling With Style

After literally years of anticipation, I finally attended my first Red Bull Flugtag this past Saturday, November 10th. The sun was out, the aircraft had a light headwind, and visibility was clear. That is, conditions were perfect for the teams to fly straight downward and cannonball into McCovey Cove.

For those not familiar, Flugtag ("fly day" in German) is an event that invites people to design and construct purpose-built flying (and/or falling) machines, to be judged on some unpredictable combination of distance, creativity, and showmanship.

The Flugtag world record of over 200 feet illustrates the distance that a well-engineered, well-flown craft can accomplish. What I saw on Saturday, though, was essentially a demonstration of how stylishly a craft could trip off of the edge of the flight deck and casually face-plant into the water.

The event started off with lofty ideals and delusions of grandeur. As the MC directed our attention skyward, two skydivers from the Red Bull Air Force descended in a graceful and utterly controlled manner, beneath well-designed and well-constructed parafoils that were tried and tested.

As the poem goes, though, "even the best laid plans of mice and men do oft go awry." And after the two skydivers stuck their respective landings, the era of "tried and tested" was well and truly over.

The crowd seemed to have a great time throughout the event (as did I), and many of the competitors seemed to put all of their enthusiasm into the competition, but as an engineer, I was admittedly a bit saddened by how few of the craft managed to glide any appreciable distance.

The hangar area was open for two hours before the competition, which officially started at 13:00. Toward the end of that preview period, the teams that had built flying (rather than falling) apparatus could be seen checking their flight surfaces and generally preparing to give it their best shot.

Despite this preparation, many of the aircraft (or launching devices) encountered malfunctions which restrained their distance. For instance, the Flugtag Barons (pictured) had a well-engineered biplane, but from what I could tell, their rolling launch platform failed to fully detach from the plane after it left the launch deck. The plane managed to drag the launch trolley along in a surprising feat of aeronautic stability, but it landed well short of where it might have.

After the preparation, the flight attempts began. There were generally two types of craft: those with aspirations of flight, and those that really didn't have functional wings. In the photo, the pilot from The Nine Amigos team leaps off of their shark-themed craft as a wheel fails at the edge of the launch platform. All of the team-members are Coast Guard helicopter rescue swimmers, which inspired their theme.

After each attempt, the event staff made quick work of clearing the landing area so the next team could go. With help from the SF fire and police departments, the turnaround time was quick enough to not break the momentum of the event. In the photo, a member of the cleanup crew attempts to lasso a large, red, stiletto heel craft that was piloted by drag queen Frida Lay of the Chicago-based team Hell on Heels.

Every once in awhile, though, the stars would align and a well-designed, -constructed, and -flown craft would carry on for a bit of distance. In this case, it happened to be one that also had fantastic decorations. Team Sugar Skull 138 flew a día de los muertos-themed craft to a second-place finish.

When all was said and done, only a handful of craft made it anywhere close to the 40-foot mark, which makes the 200+-foot world record mark all the more impressive. Perhaps it simply goes to show just how difficult it is to build something that will defy gravity for such a distance. Even so, as the movie Toy Story reminds us, when you can't fly, you can still fall with style.

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