My Aviation photography images have all been captured at Hong Kong International airport (HKIA) located at, Check Lap Kok, on the northern part of Lantau island. The airport opened in July 1998 and has 2 runways with a third runway under construction. The current runways are 25R/07L and 25L/07R as they are situated parallel to each other and on a compass bearing of 70 and 250 degrees. The approach images were captured on the sky deck previously located on the roof of terminal 2 (closed Nov 2020). This allowed a great view of aircraft on final approach to runway 25R whilst also being quite close. Take-off shots were captured from a flyover near Cathay City over the approach road to the airport.
I was also fortunate a few years back to have been allowed to visit the control tower at HKIA It was a hot and hazy day with extremely low visibility which was not ideal for capturing planes in the air. I was however lucky to have been able to capture a beautiful close-up shot from the tower of B-HUI on tow. This Cathay Pacific 747-400 was later retired after its final flight to Taipei on 30th September 2016. The airframe was later broken up and the cockpit was taken to South Wales Aviation Museum (https://www.swam.online/cockpit/
My personal favourite is the sunset panorama of HKIA when I was lucky enough to capture the formation of a beautiful anvil cloud formation as well as some light trails from aircraft departing over the border in China. The HDR panorama consisted of 4 sets of 5 images, stitched together and resulting in a beautiful colour combination and hi-resolution image. It was a 3-hour hike up and back from the cable car station which allowed me to photograph the whole of the airport. I literally just got there as the sun was setting and only had a few minutes to set up the camera and tripod before the sun completely set.
