While I grew up near a military air base (Soesterberg AB), there was many a day I skipped school and took my camera to take pictures of the resident United States Air Force (Europe) jets of the 32 TFS and visitors to the Dutch part of Soesterberg Air Force Base. All through the 1970s and 1980s I concentrated on military aviation, though there were large breaks because of other interests (e.g. travel and photography).
In 1977 I was released from the Dutch Air Force, thus ending my enlistment which lasted 16 months. I found a job at Amsterdam International Airport Schiphol and have been there ever since (with various employers and in various jobs). Consequently, my interest began to shift from military aviation to civil aviation.
Since the early 1990s I became interested in the early stages of the airline industry and thus started to read about "propliners", as well as searching them out during my travels and aiming my camera on them for my personal collection.
It's not that I am just interested in getting the planes on film (or digital, these days), but I also like to know "what's what and was what" with the planes and companies that operated them.
Only in the late-1990s I started photographing modern airliners too, mainly because my son did and together we started making trips for this purpose.
Since history in a general sense is also an interest of mine, I tend to seek the history of aviation in general or airlines and airplanes in particular and this will be reflected in my website.
The intention is to use mainly my own photographic material, though sometimes I find the occasion too much to pass by or friends contribute to something I started.
The photographic equipment I have been using over the years include Olympus OM-1, OM-2, OM-4, Nikon FM2 and Canon EOS50E and EOS5. As well as a Mamiya 645S for black & white photography. The medium format camera was sold in 2003 to enable me to buy a Canon 100-400/4.5-5.6L lens, to improve the quality
of the telephoto photography.
In 2003 I found myself concluding that printing B&W photos in my darkroom had been replaced by working my scans and digital photos (in 2002 I had bought a Minolta Dimage S404) in Photoshop on my PC. Also, I hadn't done much landscape photography in the past few years, time was now spent with aviation photography and updating my database on multi-prop transports.
However, also during 2003 I started expanding my website with the photographic fruits of my travels, dating back to 1981... There is still quite a backlog to catch up on and time is limited, but in Dec.2003 I replaced my EOS 50E with a digital Canon 300D so new material takes less time to be added and some time should remain to added older material. 
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In Dec.2004 I had to update the subscription with my webhost, as the bandwidth did not suffice to answer the increased number of visits to my website, which is nice.
Photo on the left was made by Fred de Ruiter, one cold but sunny Saturday morning, in January 2006 at Amsterdam IAP.
When I started this website in 2001, I never dreamed the website and all the work that seems to come with it, would become so dominant in my daily activities. |
Someone sent me this photo, without information of source, adding following comment:
"This is a 5 MB Hard Disk in 1956... In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive ( HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data." |
 To email me, click on the image and write the correct adress as given below (replace -AT- by the @ symbol).  Sorry for the inconvenience, but this is because spam has increasingly become a problem.
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Work on the website (both on the travel- as well as the aviation pages) take more and more time (the website receives aprox. 1800 hits on average each month), but I enjoy to work the digital workflow...
