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Logging aircraft or airlines photographed?

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  • Logging aircraft or airlines photographed?

    Do any of you keep any kind of formal "log" of what you capture, or at least unique airlines, types, etc? Just curious how you do that, if you do.

  • #2
    One easy idea is any time you see an interesting aircraft, pull it up on FR24 on your phone and take a screenshot. Then when you have time, you can just go through the screenshots on your phone and log it however you see fit. I do this in addition to the process below as it takes about five seconds to tap the plane on your screen and screenshot once all the data pulls up. One drawback for spotting is that a lot of planes on the ground don't show up on the map, so you may have to do a quick search if you see something taxiing or at the gate (helps if you bring binoculars in addition to your camera!). I do this even when I'm not actively spotting, I see a lot of planes out of my office window plus my home is in the approach path, so I've taken quite a few screenshots from my desk and backyard as well

    I have an Excel sheet where I track my photo activities, and for each spotting trip, I enter the start and end time (I just use photo timestamps for the first and last shot), the total number of pics I took, and then I track the dates that I: imported, tagged, geotagged, made initial picks (which photos look good), and made final picks (which photos I'll edit and hopefully submit to JP). Then I enter any notes I have about the weather/spotting conditions, how many people were at the spot, anything interesting I saw, etc.

    In Lightroom, once the session is imported, I enter the registration number(s) in the caption, and then under keyword tags, I enter the type (B737, A321, etc), airline, and what the plane is doing (landing, taking off, etc) as well as if there's any special features in the shot (for example, a lot of CLT shots have the skyline in the background so I have a tag for that). I also have a tag for "special livery". I like to be super thorough when I do this so I tag every single shot, but you could only go through and tag the things that are "highlights" and it'd probably only take a few minutes per session.

    If you go that route, another helpful idea is to get a plugin which allows you to export metadata. There are a bunch of them, I use LR/Transporter. LR's search function has gotten better over the years, but unless I'm just looking for a specific reg (which I can type in the text search box in LR), often I find it easier to find what I need slicing and dicing in Excel, plus it allows me to aggregate the data I've put into LR (for instance, to find that I'm about 1/3 of the way to my goal of capturing every AA aircraft ). Doesn't help that as a CPA, I'm way more comfortable in Excel than LR but hey, whatever works.

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    • #3
      Thanks for the detailed write up! I should probably create a Google Sheets specifically for this.

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