I'd like to be the first to personally welcome you to the AirlineFan.com airline photo gallery website. As a serious airline photographer, we believe your top quality airline photos should not be undersold.
We welcome you to upload your images to our website, and we give you the option to offer prints for sale (either 4X6 or 5X7) of your images. As your images are sacred, we don't allow people to right click on your image and lift it from the site for their own use. Our website technology prevents users from right clicking on your images for this very reason. Also, we don't sell your images short. Unlike our competitors that sell prints from their photographers' images for pennies and share even less pennies with their photographers, we offer the most generous aircraft photographer payout scheme on the net. Please visit our to About Us page for full details.
Unlike our competitors, here at AirlineFan, it is not only the latest airliner photos that are important to us, but we also treasure the historical airliner classics from yesteryear. We aim to become a showcase of airline photos taken by AirlineFans for AirlineFans, and we believe in upholding the key concept of what makes a good aircraft picture, as we shall explain below.
This website is run by a small team of long time aircraft photographers that appreciate the atmosphere and composition qualities that make up a good aircraft photo. We are not level and cropping obsessed Photoshop eccentrics. We cut our teeth in the 70s and 80s by shooting 35mm kodachrome slides of aircraft. When shooting slides, what you shot is what you got. Whatever the lens saw in terms of framing, focus, exposure and composition is exactly what appeared on the exposed film. There was no room for error, and only by honing photography skills in the field (or at the airfield) over time, could one attain perfection. It was not the same as doing a quick fix in Photoshop that we are so used to today!
Our screening team is very small and tightly controlled so that we can maintain a high degree of consistency. All future AirlineFan screeners have to subscribe to the philosophy detailed on this page, and we require that any potential screener must have at least 100 images approved on the site to qualify to make application to join our small screening team.
Even though many airline photographers are going digital, there are hundreds if not thousands of what we call pre-digital photographers out there with huge collections of negatives, prints and slides that are in search of a suitable venue to showcase their talented work from years past, as well as from today. Here at AirlineFan, we welcome your work with open eyes and a keen appreciation of the historical importance of your work, be it from the 1990s or 80s, or 1950s and 1960s. All you need is a high quality film scanner (which is readily available and affordable) to start scanning and uploading your pre-digital airline photos.
Yes we have heard the horror stories. Our competitor does not give too much credence to a shot of a Pan American Strat taken on black and white at PIK in 1957, and chances are it would get rejected for not having a good motive or for some other silly reason like too much grain (from a teenage screener who can barely muster a descent photograph without the aid of Adobe Photoshop!) Well that is not us!
We have also heard the tales about leveling. At AirlineFan we are not going to reject your shot because it is one degree off level, nor will we reject an image for silly cropping reasons. At AirlineFan we do not believe in cropping so tight that everything needs to be cut beyond one millimeter of the nose and tail. To the contrary, we are keenly impressed with aircraft pictures that have interesting backgrounds that add to the concept and era of the image. That is often the most important thing that makes for an interesting aircraft photo. For example, a 1967 obsdeck shot of a Pan American 707 with passengers deplaning and being refueled at HNL is an airlinefan treasure to be savoured. It is not an image that should be rejected because the doors are open, and the plane is cluttered by ground equipment.
If you are looking for an airline gallery site run by long time airline fans, that is geared for long time airline fans, then we are the website for you!
Henry Tenby, Website Manager - AirlineFan.com
