ZK-ARJ

Those Jetstar photos inspired me. Keep an eye on the blog header when you visit. There are now 12 different ones which display randomly each time you load a page. I’ll probably add more as time and inclination permits.

For those new to this blog – please read. For the regulars – some reminders.

The photos you see on this blog site are but a small selection of my published photos. They are a teaser to give you a flavour of new additions to my collection.

The purpose of this site is both to provide some commentary on newly added photos, and as a mechanism for you to easily keep up with the new additions.

On the right there is a reminder on how to easily keep track of new posts with RSS. There is also a link at the bottom of the page which gives you the ‘feed’ address. Clicking the RSS link at the bottom will most likely automatically subscribe you to my feed with the default RSS reader software on your system. I strongly encourage you to take advantage of this as you will be able to keep up with many other web sites by the same mechanism. I currently keep up with over 40 web sites on a regular basis with ease in this fashion, including the sites you see over there in my Blogroll. You can learn more about RSS here.

Additionally, every photo shown here can be clicked to take you to that photo’s Flickr page where you can see much larger versions of the photo (up to 3.5 times the size of what you see here) and I also often provide a link to either my photostream on Flickr (a chronological page of all my Flickr photos) or special Flickr Sets of photos – usually for specific air shows. I also have photos of other subject matter which won’t appear on this site but may be of interest to you, including wildlife in significant numbers.

You can even subscribe to RSS feeds of the photos themselves directly on the Flickr site if you wish. I also use this method to keep up with some friends’ and family’s photos.

So go on! What are you waiting for? If you don’t already use RSS, now is as good a time as any to take the plunge. If you have any questions about RSS, leave me a comment on this post and I will help out as much as I can.

Some time ago, I decided to put all of my aviation photographs in a single Flickr set. This became very unwieldy, so now I have deconstructed things a bit to the following sets.

• Wellington Airport (new)
• Auckland Airport (new)
• Event-specific sets
• “Older photos”
• Aviation (other) (renamed from original “Aviation” set)

Apart from the “Older photos”, which I am leaving in place for now, this nicely structures the large number (currently 1760) of photos into manageable sets. The three new or changed sets are links above if you want to take a look. These are the sets that will continue to grow, whilst the others remain static by nature.

I am also in the midst of changing my tagging practice, so the type and location links on this site may not give complete results for a while.

The time has come to stop procrastinating and act!  Me, that is.

I am delighted to announce the launch of ZKARJ shoot!, an online forum for aviation photographers.

The mission of the site is displayed near the top of every page:

Have a passion for aviation photography? ZK-ARJ shoot! is your place on the web to discuss all matters relating to photography of aircraft and aviation related activities. Amateurs and professionals are welcomed to participate in the exchange of knowledge, constructive criticism and a shared passion.

While there are numerous online forums out there for photography in general, for various brands of photographic equipment and for aviation topics, I am not aware of any, certainly with a New Zealand flavour, that are all about aviation photography. So without wanting to detract from those other forums, I am launching ZK-ARJ shoot! as a focal point for this type of discussion.  I will personally still be visiting several other forums as although my main interest is aviation photography, I also have broader interests.

So, go take a look, register, and have your say.  You can click the link above, the one at right, or go straight there with the easy-to-remember URL shoot.zkarj.co.nz.

I’ve updated the Photos by location page to include links to Google Maps.  Some of the locations are not terribly accurate and I will work on tweaking those when I have time.

Thanks to some great info from W3Schools and some expert help in their forums, the old site is functional again.

I’ve populated the Photos by location and Photos by type pages with links for any location/type I have five or more photos for (on Flickr).

Also, based on initial work by my brother (another aviation photographer of note) I have created a handy NZ Warbirds Visual Guide page.  This page helps in identifying individual aircraft from the NZ Warbirds fleet.  It’s missing quite a few photos (my fault) at this time, but they will be populated before long.

Since I moved web hosts over the last week or so, the old ZK-ARJ site is not working.  Not sure what I am going to do with the 900+ photos there as most were scanned from prints and pale in comparison to the modern digital photos.  Should I just bite the bullet and upload them to Flickr?

I’ve just added a page (see link on right) with a couple of maps I put together with the tools provided by Google Maps.  If you’re looking for tips on great locations for aircraft photography, check them out.  So far there are maps for Auckland and Wellington.