common subject shot under cloudy and dull conditions

[Henry Tenby]

Just as a pleasant reminder, site members should be aware that photos of common aircraft (like current day Air Canada, Lufthansa, British Airways, Alitalia etc) must be taken under perfect conditions in order to be accepted to the AirlineFan database.

Shots of common aircraft under less than optimal photo conditions cannot be accepted to the database.

Photos of common aircraft are very welcome and happily accepted, but the photos MUST be taken under perfect conditions, which means subject is full frame, image is pin sharp, and the sun is brightly shining on the visible side of the aircraft.

Photos taken under cloudy and dull conditons, backlit shots, shots with clutter etc will not be accepted for common aircraft.

Sincerely,
Henry Tenby, webmaster
www.AirlineFan.com

[King F. Hui]

As I have stated in other section of the Forum, "common" involves 2 variable factors: time and place.

Air Srilanka to me in Vancouver would not be a common subject. However, if I were in Colombo, Sri Lanka, it would be a common subject.

If I were in 1970, a Pan Am Boeing 707 would be a common subject. However, if I have the same photo today it would not be considered a common subject.

Based on the above, I personally have problem determining what is "common". Every subject to me is NOT common. Photography is an art. Weather condition does not affect a good photo.

May be the web master can give a more specific and precise definition of "common subject".

Thanks.

[Henry Tenby]

Thank you for the very good question above King, which I shall now answer.

My view is that any current day shot of a flag carrier, commuter, or military aircraft be it Lufthansa, Air Lanka, Saudia etc taken at any airport (be it a home country airport or special destination airport) must be shot under optimial conditions.

If an Alitalia 777 makes a special visit to YVR under terrible weather conditions, it should not be uploaded to the image database section of the website.

The goal of the website is to provide nice visual images of aircraft to viewers. If an aircraft visits an offline location in poor weather conditions, spotters are more than welcome to post this information along with an image in the forum section of the website as we have created a special catagory for this purpose titled "Airline spotting/holiday/airport Reports".

There are many photo galleries on the net where people can upload less than ideal images of aircraft. But we need to maintain a high barrier for the quality of images that are uploaded to this website.

And that means all images of aircraft are welcome to this website as long as they meet these three basic conditions:

1) The aircraft subject must be somewhat full frame (no dots in the sky please) although less than full frame images are acceptable for artistic shots.

2) The image must be pin sharp without image imperfections such as dust marks, vignetting, hot spots, jaggies etc.

3) The sun should be lighting the visible side of the aircraft. Bright cloudy shots are fine too but backlit shots cannot be accepted (unless the image is of historical interest and was taken many years ago).