If you regularly go somewhere to take photographs, and come back time and time again, you start to find better viewpoints, new unexplored photo opportunities and spots to watch things unfold. I think as photographers we should all have a few of these places, local to us but somewhere we can go and practice our skills and test out new equipment and techniques. For me Salford Quays and Castlefield are two such places, but a third is definitely Manchester Airport. After having been to this location about half a dozen times over the past few years, this summer I stumbled upon a way to get within about a hundred yards of the planes as they leave the tarmac (without climbing over fences or breaking laws). I usually crop, rotate and fine tune my images before putting them online, but the above photograph of an Air Berlin plane leaving the tarmac is not edited (other than resized for the web). It was taken with a 18-135mm lens and is not cropped. I feel I did quite well to capture the whole plane, leaving “space” in the image for the plane to move into. Although the runway isn’t perfectly flat, I like it like this, it shows a certain raw view of my photography.
Taking only photographs – leaving only footprints
