Plane spotting, done properly

Spotting is legal almost everywhere, and welcome at a surprising number of airports — but the details vary by country, and the fastest way to ruin it for everyone is to be the person who climbed a fence.

Where to stand

Many large airports have an official viewing area, mound or terrace, and those are always the right first choice: you get a clean sightline, you're expected to be there, and nobody has to come and ask what you're doing. Failing that, public roads and footpaths around the perimeter are normal. Airport operations staff and police are generally relaxed about people with cameras standing in obvious public places, and much less relaxed about anything that looks like access.

The rules that actually matter

• Never cross a fence, gate or marked boundary, and never enter an operational area.
• Don't point anything that looks like it could be aimed — lasers obviously, but also be sensible about large lenses near a cockpit on short final.
• Photography restrictions differ by country. Some states restrict photographing airports or military aircraft outright. Check before you travel, not after.
• If someone official asks what you're doing, tell them plainly. It almost always ends there.

Which end of the runway

Almost every decision follows from one fact: which runway is in use, and therefore which way everything is pointing. Aircraft take off and land into wind, so the wind direction tells you which end of the airport is interesting today — and it can swap in the middle of an afternoon.

• The approach end gives you aircraft low, slow, gear down, configured, and pointed at you. It is where most of the photographs people remember are taken.
• The departure end gives you rotation and climb-out, which is harder — the aircraft is accelerating away and the angles close fast — but it is where heavy aircraft look heavy.
• Alongside, level with the runway, gives you taxiing and lineup, which is the easiest light to work in and the best place to read registrations.

Light, and which side to stand on

Put the sun behind you. That sounds obvious and it is the single most common thing beginners get wrong, because the comfortable place to stand is often the wrong side of the approach. Work out where the sun will be at the time you are going, not where it is now.

Overcast is kinder to bare metal and white fuselages than harsh midday sun, which blows out the top surfaces and fills the gear bays with black shadow. Low sun early and late gives warm light along the side of the aircraft and is the classic choice. Midday in summer is the worst light of the day for aviation photography and the most popular time to go.

Gear, honestly

A 70–300mm zoom on any modern body covers the great majority of civil spotting. Longer glass helps at big airports with distant runways, but it is not the thing standing between you and a good photo — position and light are. A cheap ADS-B receiver or a tracking app on your phone is more useful than another 100mm of reach, because it tells you what's inbound and when; the watch live page covers the trackers, and rtl-sdr.com the hardware if you want to receive it yourself.

Everything else is comfort and endurance rather than equipment: spotting is standing outdoors for hours. Water, something to sit on, sun or rain protection depending, and more battery and card than you think. Photo ID is worth having on you in some countries, for the conversation below.

The propeller problem

This is the one piece of technique worth putting on a page like this, because it is invisible until someone tells you. A propeller or rotor frozen solid is the mark of a beginner's photograph. Shoot a turboprop or a helicopter at 1/1000 and you get a machine that looks switched off and dead in the air — the blades stopped, the aircraft apparently falling.

The fix is to slow down until the disc blurs: broadly 1/125 to 1/250 for a propeller, and slower still for a helicopter rotor, which turns much more slowly than it looks. That is slow enough that you must pan — track the aircraft smoothly, squeeze rather than stab the shutter, and follow through after it fires. Your hit rate drops and the keepers look alive. Jets are the opposite problem and you can use whatever shutter speed keeps them sharp.

If someone asks what you're doing

It happens, and it almost always ends in under a minute. Be visible, be boring, and answer plainly: you are photographing aircraft, you are standing on a public road, here is the camera. Problems come from behaving as though you are hiding — sitting in a parked car with a long lens at the end of a runway looks different from standing in the open doing the same thing, and the second one is how to avoid the conversation entirely.

Practical courtesies that keep spots open: don't block farm gateways or passing places, don't park on verges that get used, take your rubbish, and don't trample crops to get a better angle. Spots get closed by landowners and councils far more often than by security.

Logging, not just photographing

A large part of the hobby is not photographic at all. Plenty of spotters log registrations — recording which individual airframes they have seen, in the way birdwatchers keep a list — and that works fine with binoculars and a notebook at an airport where the light is hopeless. It also turns a quiet day into a productive one, because a rare registration counts whether or not the photograph was any good. The watch live page covers how to look a registration up once you have it.

Weather and light

Wind direction decides the runway in use, which decides where you should be standing; that is the single most useful thing to check before you leave. If you don't want to work it out from the METAR yourself, runwayinuse.com answers it directly for a given airport, and shows the evidence it used — ATIS, wind, observed traffic and local convention — rather than just asserting a number. Overcast is kinder to metal than harsh midday sun, and low sun behind you in the early morning or late afternoon is the classic choice.