Explain plane spotting to me

dmspilot said:
I did a little in my late teens and early 20s, but between living far away from a big airport and not wanting to spend thousands on a good camera and equipment, lost interest.
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I can't help with the interest or proximity to a big airport, but there's a lot of good used equipment for hundreds of dollars for a good lens (500 mm zoom) and camera.
 
Plane spotting is like bird watching, as anything that flys is amazing to watch. R/C pilots watch the whole flying experience (safely) from the outside, while certificated pilots see it from the inside. I can relate to both.
 
martym said:
Any airport without a viewing area should have the airport manager fired.
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and well place too. I've see a few poorly placed one. Can't really see the primary runyway active areas, etc....

I was spoiled, learned to fly at JGG, great patio for airport bums
Moved around a bit after that and never lived near another airport that had a decent viewing area...x41, pie, ryy, crg, sgj....not a decent viewing area at any of them, at least in the time frame I was there.
HEG has a nice view of the ramp area but not so much the runways
but just yesterday we were at Fernandina Beach on a car trip, and I dropped by fhb...they had a nice big covered open deck at the FBO. Only two chairs up there though.

I was home sick once and got sucked into some youtube rat holes of boat spotters sitting down at some inlet in South FL. Probably spotter cultures out there for almost everything.
 
I don't understand these watermarks that are in the style of an elaborate tramp stamp, and which then covers 1/4 of the image.
 
schmookeeg said:
I don't understand these watermarks that are in the style of an elaborate tramp stamp, and which then covers 1/4 of the image.
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Guessing they want to sell the pics. Watermark makes just downloading less attractive.
 
Does that actually work? All it makes me want to do is get a hepatitis test. But then I don't buy stock imagery.
 
As a professional photographer myself there can also be the technical satisfaction of perfecting settings and composition and always looking for that perfect subject in the perfect setting. Kind of like taking the time to watch a sunset develop.

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RyanShort1 said:
As a professional photographer myself there can also be the technical satisfaction of perfecting settings and composition and always looking for that perfect subject in the perfect setting. Kind of like taking the time to watch a sunset develop.

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I can't seem to find the airplane in that photo. The Starbucks sign looks nice, though.
:D
 
A few years ago I flew with a guy that'd bring his huge DLSR, and during the layover he'd take an uber from the hotel back to the airport to shoot pictures of airplanes. He'd intentionally bid overnights based on the type of airplane/livery available for picture taking. Really nice guy and I like airplanes as much as the next pilot, but daaaaaaamn. :D
 
Yeah, I struggle with this too. I have a couple college buddies that are really into flight sim, and I fly online with them occasionally, but they get so excited by the new livery they bought. I don’t blow any money on that crap. It’s weird to me.
 
Mine spots every now and again. I need to clean the belly. It’s dirty. o_O
 
Salty said:
I don’t blow any money on that crap. It’s weird to me.
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I don't understand it either, but I'm also into vintage computers, to the point where I've installed 3 phase in my garage to support my hobby. So I try not to throw stones!
 
kayoh190 said:
I don't understand it either, but I'm also into vintage computers, to the point where I've installed 3 phase in my garage to support my hobby. So I try not to throw stones!
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I’ve only got one. My original trs80, and I don’t keep it set up. I used to have an old Solaris server, but it took up too much space so I sold it. I would kinda like to have a vax-11 or something along those lines, but not enough to actually buy one.
 
kayoh190 said:
I don't understand it either, but I'm also into vintage computers, to the point where I've installed 3 phase in my garage to support my hobby. So I try not to throw stones!
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3 phase? What’d you install? I’ve worked on a few that needed 3 phase for the MG set…
 
DaleB said:
3 phase? What’d you install? I’ve worked on a few that needed 3 phase for the MG set…
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An Onyx2 IR3 rack. So much fun!
 
DaleB said:
Nice. I never got near any SGI stuff. I turned wrenches on IBM “big iron”; lots of the larger ones used 240 3-phase.
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I'm a big SGI fan. Unfortunately I had to give up the larger machines when I met a girl that moved me to 1000 sqft in NYC. But I still have my R8000 Indigo2. :D
 
I'm old, but haven't worked on stuff as old as that. One of my college housemates put a PDP-11 in the basement, and the disk pacs in the yard...because they wouldn't fit through the side door. The PDP's were single phase, but maybe the disk pacs were 3? Not sure. Later on, I did help plan a modern computer room that was three phase, but it was just 120/208 Y, so that we could feed racks 208v to get more servers on a circuit. We checked everything carefully, but turns out almost all computer gear will work on 208V.
 
Albany Tom said:
I'm old, but haven't worked on stuff as old as that. One of my college housemates put a PDP-11 in the basement, and the disk pacs in the yard...because they wouldn't fit through the side door. The PDP's were single phase, but maybe the disk pacs were 3? Not sure. Later on, I did help plan a modern computer room that was three phase, but it was just 120/208 Y, so that we could feed racks 208v to get more servers on a circuit. We checked everything carefully, but turns out almost all computer gear will work on 208V.
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I had a PDP-11/05, a /34, and one other… some single platter drives, other stuff. Wish I still had it. I just didn’t have the space at the time. The first system I ever had access to, the one that got me hooked and led to a five decade career, was a PDP-11. Oddly enough, that first one was the only one I ever touched as part of that career.
 
Loved SGI stuff, though I was never a hardware/software guy. But as a user...wow. I used to do some high-end molecular modeling, and to this day I've never seen a system as good as the virtual reality CAVE environment I had access to in the early 90's, with each display wall powered by it's own SGI graphical supercomputer. Wearing CrystalEyes shutter lens glasses and wielding a Flock of Birds 'wand' to manipulate images was an incredible immersive experience. You could walk inside a protein structure and pull a drug candidate in behind you to look at docking sites and ways to improve binding.
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:D
 
I don't get it...I mean are there also people that stand on freeway overpasses and are like "Ohhh, look...a Toyota 4Runner!..." ?
 
Actually, sorta. If you'll look at car magazines and they say "First glimpse of new <whatever>!!!" and it is photos of a camouflaged <whatever>, then it is usually because of car spotters looking at cars and snapping pics of weird cars. They just happened to see later that it was a new <whatever> and they submit it and usually get paid for it. I understand some people can make a career out of it.
 
You should see all the amateur photographers that came out of the woodwork when someone decided to drive their Bugatti Chiron downtown to sip on a latte.
 
Shawn said:
I don't get it...I mean are there also people that stand on freeway overpasses and are like "Ohhh, look...a Toyota 4Runner!..." ?
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I know it's not cool to admit in aviation circles, but lots of people really do love airplanes. I think we just get numb to it after awhile. :)
 
GaryM said:
I used to do some high-end molecular modeling, and to this day I've never seen a system as good as the virtual reality CAVE environment I had access to in the early 90's, with each display wall powered by it's own SGI graphical supercomputer. Wearing CrystalEyes shutter lens glasses and wielding a Flock of Birds 'wand' to manipulate images was an incredible immersive experience.
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Cool! I was involved with VR back in the day and met Carolina (inventor of the cave) a few times. I also wrote a golf trainer using a flock of birds. Those were heady times to be in that community. Seemed like the future was right around the corner. Still does, 30 years later!

Carolina was setting up a cave for a conference (I think it might have been SuperComputing, but my memory is a bit hazy. One of the big ones in any case) and the power had been setup wrong. 220V into a 110V plug. As you mentioned, each surface in the cave was powered by a dedicated workstation. So there were four of them. They powered the first one up and only got smoke. They powered up a second, thinking "well, that sucks that we had a failure right before the show, but we gotta get this thing going". More smoke. Then Carolina came running across the show floor, having seen the carnage from a short distance, yelling "STOP". Luckily it was only the power supplies that were damaged and SGI was at the conference and got her hooked up.
 
kayoh190 said:
I know it's not cool to admit in aviation circles, but lots of people really do love airplanes. I think we just get numb to it after awhile. :)
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I get the love for aviation and airplanes…just don’t get the sitting in the side of a commercial runway to “plane spot” generic mass produced planes when you can look up on an app what planes are coming.
 
Shawn said:
I get the love for aviation and airplanes…just don’t get the sitting in the side of a commercial runway to “plane spot” generic mass produced planes when you can look up on an app what planes are coming.
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Not that I understand it either, but I think the photo taking process is part of it too. They know what's coming, but want to take a photo that's unique to what they've taken before. Different liveries, etc. Kind of like bird watching I suppose. Regardless, different strokes of course - certainly I have plenty of hobbies that don't make any sense to others!
 
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