Photo Credit: Taimy Alavrez, SunSentinel
They try to capture the most exotic big birds, and South Florida is one of their favorite haunts.
Hunters? No. These are aviation photographers, who call themselves "spotters," because they take pains to identify and shoot interesting and colorful airliners, corporate jets and military planes.
"It's a passion," said Eddy Gual, 70, of Miami, a retired freelance photographer, who has taken more than 200,000 photos of planes, and organized the shutterbugs under the Florida Aviation Photography Society about 23 years ago.
Coming from around the globe, including Japan, Australia and Germany, dozens of the spotters congregated on the roof of a parking garage at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International on Thursday and shot everything from small commuter planes to Airbus airliners.
"It's like bird watching, but instead we're looking for airplanes," said Manfred Turek, of Munich, Germany, who noted Fort Lauderdale airport is primo for the spotters because of its good vantage points and diverse operations.
"There's a large variety. You get the Canadian aircraft, Southwest Airlines, JetBlue and the Latin American traffic," added Suresh Atapattu, of Plantation, a biomedical engineer.
Armed with expensive Cannon and Nikon digital cameras and lots of long lenses, the photographers also shoot at Palm Beach and Miami International airports, as well as smaller general aviation airports.
Joe Pries, who drove nine hours from North Carolina to join the photo-fray on Thursday, said South Florida airports are usually drenched in sunlight, "and the sun's angle is critical for photographers."
John K. Morton, 78, of West Yorkshire, England, has vacationed in South Florida for 35 years to shoot airplanes. He also has published 14 picture books, featuring many of his 60,000 photos.
"I used to take pictures of steam trains in England, but in 1968 they stopped running those," he said. "I just started taking photos of planes, and it went from there."
Now that most photography is digital, many of the spotters display their work on websites, such as Airliners.net or have their own links. For instance Victor Lopez, of Miami, administrates NetAirSpace.com.
"I'm a third generation pilot, so it's in the blood," said Lopez, a quality control director for an aircraft company.
The photographers on Friday plan to tour Miami International Airport and hold their annual convention, where they will swap and sell their photos at prices ranging from 50 cents to hundreds of dollars.
Much like bird or train spotters, some try to capture entire collections of aircraft, for instance, every plane in an airline's fleet, or every Boeing 757 ever built. They also covet older planes on the verge of retiring.
Story and Photo: http://articles.sun-sentinel.com
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