Some words about me...

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Hello, my name is Luis Rosa, I'm 33 years old, born in Faro, south Portugal. This is my favorite hobby, in this website you can see my photo collection since 1995, mainly all the airlines flying to Faro airport. Faro is the capital of Algarve, the most touristic province in my country. I also have a military section with photos from airshows and other airports in Europe and a "Golden Gallery" where I try to show different photos but always with the aviation theme behind.

Since always I have this "passion" for aviation, I grew up watching planes flying in front of my house while landing or departing from Faro airport which is 4Km away. Quickly I became hooked with the fascination of flight just by watching the daily movements and the splendour of an aircraft flying low and slow 3 miles from touching down Faro runway. Years later, around 1987, I made a friend in school who was decisive to my  "craziness" for aviation. His name is Cesário Gadelha and due to his heavy knowledge in aviation I was able to learn lots of new things about aviation and airlines and finally I had a friend to speak about this hobby (keep in mind that internet  was not available back on those days).

In 1992, and after I get my driving licence, I started to go to Faro airport on weekends, with Cesário,  just to spend some hours watching planes arriving and departing. Back then we were the only plane spotters at Faro, we didn't even know the expression "plane spotter". Shortly I made another friend who was Cesário friend and also was an aviation enthusiast, his name is Pedro Fernandes who had the scale modelling hobby, mainly for WWII planes. From this point it was almost like a religious behavior for us to go to Faro airport all wekeends just to watch planes. In those times we could not imagine that years later we would be work colegues at the same airport department.

Since 1992 I started to videotape all the aircraft movements at Faro, for 3 years I was into the aviation videos which was funny and an alternative way of recording my observations. In 1995 and after talking with some aviation photographers from Lisbon visiting Faro, I started to think that photography was a better form of saving the planes and airlines I was used to see at Faro, I was attracted by the possibility of making a collection like stamps and being able to share and trade photos with other enthusiasts. So, in 1995 I bought my first camera, a Minolta 500Si with a Minolta 35-70 3.5-4.5 lens. Quickly I realized that this lens was not enough to shoot planes far away from me, I needed a lens with much more focal distance so I bought a Vivitar 70-210 4.5-5.6 lens. For 1 year this lens was fine but I was still restricted when shooting smaller planes, for example like Fokker 50's. This forced me to save money to get a lens with more focal distance which was the Sigma 100-300 4.5-6.7 lens.

Since 1995 and during 4 years, the type of aviation photography I made was pure registration of different airlines / aircraft types, what we call the side profile photo, without any artistic care. Maybe because at some point I had photographed all the airlines and aircrafts flying to Faro, I started to make a different kind of aviation photography, giving more attention to composition, light, angle and perspective. Until nowdays I'm giving more and more importance to "artsy" attempts of aviation photography, sometimes I give priority to a different composition instead of the 50mm side photo. Following the desire to make different compositions and to have even more focal distance I bought a Soligor 2x teleconverter, cheap in price and cheap in quality, only used it under perfect sun light otherwise it reduces a lot the image quality.

After using the Minolta camera for 6 years it was becoming old and tired so in 2001 I improved to a better equipment, a Canon EOS 30 with a Canon EF 28-135 3.5-5.6 IS lens. Immediately I noticed a great improvement on the image quality because of the superior lens quality compared with the previous Minolta and Sigma lenses I was using before. After a few monthes saving money, I bought a Canon EF 75-300 4-5.6 IS lens to give me the needed increase in focal distance to shoot planes far away from me. At this time my next goal was to have a good 2x teleconverter so more monthes of money save and finnaly I added a Canon 2x teleconverter to my equipment. In January 2003, I moved to the digital world of photography with a new equipment, the Canon EOS D60, keeping the same lenses. In September 2003 I adquired a new lens, Canon 100-400 4.5-5.6 L IS, the quality of this glass makes wonderful images. My last acquisition was a wide angle lens, the Sigma 12-24 4.5-5.6. With this website I pretend to show the pure photographic potential of aviation, with no words, just images to share and spread with everybody interested. It's my personal view on the aviation world, reflected in images. I hope you like, thanks for reading this.

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