John was bitten by the aviation bug at about the age of 10 and this led him to study Aeronautical Engineering at Glasgow University in the mid 1980’s. It was during his student days that he developed a serious interest in aviation photography mainly shooting airliners and GA aircraft at Glasgow, Edinburgh and Prestwick airports. After graduating from university he spent nine years working for Rolls-Royce in Scotland before moving to Norwich in 1995 to work for AirUK. The move to East Anglia opened up a wealth of aeronautical photo opportunities and many summer weekends were (and still are) spent at air displays and fly-ins.  He has a passion for all types of aviation and finds GA aircraft just as interesting as military fast jets or vintage warbirds. Basically if it has wings and an engine John will be interested in photographing it, where ever and when ever he can. 

In 2004 he converted from conventional film cameras to digital and began submitting his pictures to Airliners.Net, which is widely regarded as one of the top aviation photo sites on The Web. He now has well over 1,600 images on A.Net covering a very wide range of aircraft types. Visitors wishing to view these pictures should follow the link below, type John Allan in the keyword search box and click on “Show Me The Photos” www.airliners.net/search 

For those with an interest in the technical aspects of photography the cameras that John uses are Canon EOS 20D digital SLR’s. All his lenses are professional standard Canon L series optics with focal lengths ranging from 17mm to 400mm. The air-to-air pictures of Vans aircraft on this site were taken using a 24-105mm f4 Image Stabilised zoom lens. The camera was set in shutter priority mode with a speed setting of 1/320th of a second. This shutter speed is slow enough to prevent “freezing” of the propeller movement but fast enough (coupled with the image stabilisation) to eliminate camera shake. This said John insists that the quality of the final images has a lot more to do with the skill of the pilots involved than his aptitude for photography !

e-mail contact: John Allan