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Nah, ‘Aerial Photography‘, - sounds a little bit too pretentious when you see those hazy images taken at some occasions of flying in middle-late 90s. Like this one that I took on the departure out of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in April of 1996.

Or, - the one below,  shot when we were banking out on the departure from Yerevan, Armenia.

Just can’t remember exactly what year it was.. However, after a minute of reasoning I would come up with an idea of ‘ca. 1994-95‘, and the Yak-42, as a plane flown here. Of the latter I can be 100 per cent sure

It was amazing, how remarkably things were changing during the ‘Perestroika‘ years, and for a while afterward! For example, I would never dare to take my ‘Zorki’ camera on me, or even stored in a flight bag when I was going to my work before that,  in the Soviet period. Chances were such that you would not probably be able to manage through security, even though we weren’t the subject to be screened on X-ray machines, or whatever. ‘Watchful community on guard!’- was the way to put the most impenetrable barriers. And you could easily get yourself into the big trouble, cause for which might even be the mere fact of having camera, let alone its ‘witnessed use’.. Uh, about the ‘vigilant community’.. I should rather mention ’some specially assigned members of community’, - see, what I’m saying?

Same thing about shooting pictures at the airports and their vicinities by anybody else: veterans of ‘spotting, the Soviet Style‘, while reflecting back on those days, talk about ‘time limit’ for a squad of ‘OSOBISTs’ (security officers in charge at airports, normally affiliated with KGB) to catch a poor guy, who would unwisely decide to take chances, in the act of photographing ‘classified objects’. But despite all risks associated with this affair ‘full of adventure’, there were some ‘brave hearts’ who had guts to take pictures of their beloved airplanes even then! And, surely, it had nothing to do with ’spying’

I’m really enjoying a company of spotters from that time. A lot of neat stuff, a great chat too. Hopefully, they have been ‘pardoned’ with no retroactive effects in the future whatsoever