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.
During 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. For this I started the gallery Photo by Friends & Guests, which by april 2012 had grown to 32 pages and hundreds of photos.
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 and before that, briefly, a Hasselblad.
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In 2003 I found myself concluding that printing B&W photos in my darkroom had been replaced by digitally processing my scans and digital photos (in 2002 I had bought a Minolta Dimage S404) in Photoshop on my PC. My interest in travel- and landscape photography, which peaked in the 1980s and early 1990s, grew less; time was increasingly spent with aviation photography, researching individual aircraft histories, collecting 'skytrucks photobooks' reading up on aviation pioneers & bushplane aviation in Alaska & Canada and updating my database on multi-prop transports.
In the previous century I saw some of my aviation photography published in magazines and I dreamed of publishing my work in a book one day. When I started my website in 2000, this website became 'my book'. The online exposure has led to some of my photos being published in books produced by others.
In 2003 I started expanding my website with the photographic fruits of my travels, dating back to 1981... By 2012 this project had been completed.
In Dec.2003 I replaced my (analogue) EOS 50E for a digital Canon 300D; new material took less time to add onto the website, both on the subject of travel as well as aviation. 
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In Dec.2004 I had to update the subscription with my webhost, as the bandwidth did not suffice to deal with the increased number of visits to my website.
When I started this website in 2001, I never dreamed the website and all the work that seems to come with it (research both in books as well as online, contributing to fora) would become so dominant in my daily activities. As said, 2009 the interest in airliner photography went in decline; other interests, and the goal to be less of a slave to my PC, brought less time spent on the website. The EOS 40D and later equipment, with its feature to be able to shoot in low-light conditions (using ISO 3200+), comes in handy at singer/songwriter concerts I like to go to: Comedy: Eddie Izzard (Heineken Music Hall, Amsterdam 14Nov09) Paul Merton's Improv Chums, Theatre Carré, Amsterdam 05Jun10 |
| In 2013 I started a series of photo albums on Blurb.com, named '36Exp'(36 Exposures, a reference to the exposures on most common rolls of 35mm film: 12, 24 & 36.). The books can be ordered directly from the Blurb.com website. Most subjects, if not all, are expected to be on non-aviation subjects: http://nl.blurb.com/user/store/ruudleeuw |
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." |
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Although I have gone 'full-digital' many years ago, I have used Kodachrome (in later years Fuji's Velvia slide film) for decades. So I thought this message noteworthy: By 2012 Kodak Eastman itself was fighting for its existence, becoming a niche operator rather than a force to be reckoned with. Another big name missing out on the ever changing world we live in. |
Another one of "those without a flightplan"...
As an enterprising five year old, handling an Agfa Clack
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 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) took more and more of my spare time (the website receiving aprox. 1800 hits on average, each month), and while struggling to keep up, I enjoyed working the digital flow...
