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 WHAT IS AIRCRAFT SPOTTING?
It can't be denied. A lot of people in the
world are attracted to aviation. Therefore aircraft spotting is a world-wide spread hobby.
In Europe nevertheless you can find it
mostly in England, Germany and the Netherlands. In our country there are just a few
aircraft spotters. One of the main reasons is that in comparison with the earlier
mentioned countries, the Belgian aviation authorities are offering very few spotting
facilities. At all airport, the viewing terraces are closed.
The roots of this fine hobby are situated
in Great-Britain. It all started during World War II, when people were specially trained
to spot enemy aircraft during the famous "Battle of Britain". Today hundreds of
spotters are visiting daily the Europe's busiest airport. They are armed with telescopes and notebooks, in which they record the
aircraft registrations. Each aircraft (military or civilian) has a unique registration
code, just as our car. This number is divided in a country code (OO- for Belgium) and a
certain number of figures or letters to give the aircraft its own identity. One of the
goals of aircraft spotters is logging these registrations, to proof they have seen the
airplanes.
Not all spotters are interested simply in
registrations. On the continent they are more photographing the aircraft. A collection of
several thousand aircraft photo's or slides taken by one person is certainly not uncommon.
Some are collecting every aircraft, others are restricting their collection to a certain
type of aircraft.
There were some "special" rules
you had to keep in mind when you took photo's or slides of aircraft. For the slides we
normally used the famous Kodachrome 25/64 film. We always try to photograph as much as
possible with a 50 mm lens and the aircraft in full frame. Tarmacshots are very much
appreciated !
But also in the spottersworld, the digital
photography is becoming more and more common. I too, changed my equipment in
june 2004 to the CANON EOS 300D. The period of the slides definitively
ended for me. |

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Myself, I started
this hobby about 35 year ago at the old airfield "Ostend-Middelkerke". It was
the period of the legendary "cross-channel" traffic with the ATL98 Carvairs and
Vickers-Viscounts. At that time, security wasn't that tight and you could take very nice
pictures from behind a half a meter high fence.
That youth virus never left me and these days I'm now owning about 20.000
different slides of all possible types of aircraft.
Now I can gratefully use the highly
improved digital technics of photoprocessing, to share these collection with the
spotterscommunity.
All these slides and
digital pictures are available on
colourprints (10x15) or on high density Jpg's /Gif's at very competitive prices (Ask for
catalogue now ) |
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