Three weeks of SOTQ May 25, 2024

three weeks of updates in one blog post!

We were away! No room for the spotting gear nor on the schedule, but here’s a snapshot of the Lego Store at the Copenhagen airport, cool!

This (err, a few weeks ago) week on Instagram

Interesting to see a picture pop up on my feed from a Instagrammer with 70k+ followers taken on a day that I was at the airport spotting as well. I was a few feet to the west and took a very similar picture! I’ll link to his instagram here. Thanks for checking out this lowly 80 follower instagrammer @the_binge_traveler!

35mm film does have tremendous resolving power, there are no “pixels” per-se, the film works on photosenstive materials in the emulsion (the thing that gives the film structure), so it’s hard to quantify in “megapixels”, the photosenstive ‘bits’ are randomly distributed in the cellulose material, so hence the grainy appearance characteristic of film. In today’s hybrid world, the resolution of the picture ends up being the scanned resolution. The lab charges ++money for higher res, so this is where home scanning provides a tremendous amount of value.

More GAS

My G.A.S. is itching and I’m window shopping so called “medium-format” cameras, these cameras produce big negatives, i.e. 6cm x 4.5-9cm. It comes at many costs though. In a way 120 film stock (for medium format) is sometimes less expensive than 35mm film, but you get much fewer pictures. Nominally 6x4.5 yields 15 or 16 pictures per roll, 6x6 is 12, 6x9 is a piddly EIGHT pictures for an entire roll. It still costs $8 to develop 120 film, so for that alone it’s $1 a picture. Yikes.

Spotting outings

As the Toronto ferry schedule goes to Spring and Summer schedule, I’m scouting a trek over to Hanlan’s point to capture aircraft on approach to CYTZ (and some of the flight school planes — which interestingly don’t have ADS-B so don’t show up on FR24 anyhow, but also are missing pictures on Jetphotos)

Queues update x3

Upticks on both sites this week. Doesn’t seem that the changes implemented by Jetphotos really had any major impacts at all to the queue lengths. They did bill it as “stage I”; JP really ballooning again to over 28000 images. Airliners.net fairly stagnant as usual

May 12

Site	Queue Length (# of photos)	Last fully screened day	Number of days
Jetphotos	27,663 (incr)	April 23, 2024	19 days (incr.)
Airliners.net	6,311 (similar)	April 20, 2024	22 days (incr.)

May 19

Site	Queue Length (# of photos)	Last fully screened day	Number of days
Jetphotos	27,972 (incr)	April 29, 2024	20 days (incr.)
Airliners.net	6,298 (similar)	April 26, 2024	23 days (incr.)

May 26

Site	Queue Length (# of photos)	Last fully screened day	Number of days
Jetphotos	28,820 (incr)	May 5, 2024	21 days (incr.)
Airliners.net	6,191 (similar)	May 4, 2024	22 days (decr.)