Radiant orange winter skies to end your flight to Nelson are a beautiful sight for any passenger.
“Beautiful”, from the airport lights and the sunset to the attentiveness, also swooped Nayland Primary School teacher Joe Bailey’s image to snap up best overall in the 2025 Nelson Airport Plane Spotting Photography Competition.
Taking off for the third year, the competition boarded 80 entrants capturing planes and helicopters, all while scoping out award-worthy composition and lighting and highlighting the airport’s hallmarks.
Nelson news photographer and visual journalist Martin de Ruyter and aviation content creator Sophea Ngoun judged the entries.
For Joe, a regular at the airport to pick up and drop off his sons visiting from university, the competition was his inaugural quest to photograph a swifter object than Central Otago landscapes.
On the evening he took his picture-perfect entry, he mooched around the airport at golden hour and decided on a lookout point near the car park entrance to capture a plane landing through a telephoto lens.
“I probably took about 20 because it was taken at various points as [the plane] came in,” he says.
“I was thinking about the movement of the propellers, and when you’ve got low light, it’s quite hard to capture that, so I had to keep that shutter speed up. But at the same time, you don’t want to freeze the propellers completely, because that movement really adds to a photograph.”
“I was making sure I was capturing because you can have lovely light, but once [the plane] crosses the landscape it’s lost, you’ve got to capture it just while it’s in that sky.”
Joe says he was thrilled his image soared to victory and was also grateful for the competition clearing him for takeoff to explore his new settings, having previously taught in Queenstown, relocating north six months ago.
He was bestowed the grand prize of a $500 voucher donated by Sounds Air, and his image will be emblazoned in the terminal alongside the 2023 and 2024 winners.
The competition’s youth category winner was nine-year-old Tāhunanui School shutterbug Tristan Merschdorf for “braving the elements” to capture a long exposure photograph of a landing plane.
Judge Sophea noted that Tristan’s image with the lights illuminating the runway and surrounding areas added to its sense of drama and energy.
Motueka’s Jill Braithwaite claimed the title in the smartphone category for snapping a Sounds Air pilot’s view landing at Nelson Airport.
