About the Piemags Aviation Journal
The Piemags Aviation Journal is the writing side of a working aviation photography archive. It publishes two kinds of article: histories of individual aircraft and campaigns, and practical guides to photographing aircraft. Both are written by the photographer who runs the archive.
On this page
Who writes it
Paul Fearn. Aviation was in the house before it was a career. His father served in the Royal Air Force, he came up through the Air Training Corps and then served in the RAF himself, so aircraft were simply part of the world he grew up in.
A camera for his eighteenth birthday in 1986 turned that into a craft. He has photographed aviation full time since 2000, covering front line military jets, commercial airliners, business aviation, classic warbirds and air to air work. He is a qualified private pilot.
He has undertaken photographic commissions for military museums in Europe and the United States. He has worked in stock photography since 2008, and in 2019 he founded Piemags, a stock and archive library that now manages more than thirty million images across virtually every subject, alongside stills and video. Piemags also holds a historical archive of images, documents and prints spanning more than a century, used by historians, authors, modelmakers, museums, publishers and collectors.
He works from Bridgend in South Wales.
What is in the Journal
More than 120 articles, over 750,000 words. They fall into two streams.
Aircraft and campaign histories
Long pieces on individual types and events: the Lockheed Skunk Works, the Falklands air war, Concorde’s first flight, the Messerschmitt Bf 109, the X-15, Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis. These are written for people who already know roughly what happened and want the detail, the numbers and the sources.
Photography guides
How to photograph aircraft, and where. Camera settings for airshows, panning technique, lens choice, editing, licensing and copyright, and a growing series of location guides that give the practical detail a photographer actually needs: what flies from a station, when, where you can legally stand, what focal length the distances demand and what the light does through the year.
Every article carries its own sources. Across the Journal there are more than 1,200 references out to outside material: air force fact sheets, museum collections, government archives, manufacturers’ own records and contemporary reporting.
How the articles are researched
Aviation writing on the internet has a habit of copying itself. A figure appears in one article, gets repeated in twenty others, and eventually nobody can say where it came from. This Journal is written against that.
The standard applied to every article
- Nothing goes in that cannot be traced. No number, date, name or claim appears in an article unless it can be pointed back to a source held on file. If it cannot be sourced, it is left out, even when it is probably true.
- Primary sources first. Official service fact sheets, museum and archive collections, declassified government material, manufacturers’ own records and contemporary reporting are preferred to secondary summaries. Where a source is disputed, the article says so.
- Everything is checked again before it is published. The finished article is read back against the sources independently of the writing, specifically looking for anything that has drifted. Articles are corrected before they go live, not after.
- Past mistakes are written down. A running record of every error found is kept and checked against each new article, so the same one does not get made twice.
- Photographs are credited. Every image carries the photographer’s name and, where the image is not ours, the licence it is used under.
None of this makes an article infallible. It makes the errors findable, which is the part that matters.
Corrections
If you find something wrong, please say so. Errors are corrected and the correction is acknowledged rather than quietly patched. Museums, researchers and veterans who spot a mistake are exactly the readers this is written for, and a correction from someone who was there is worth more than another source.
The pictures
Most of the photographs in the Journal come from the Piemags Aviation archive and are available to license for editorial, commercial and publishing use, or to order as museum quality fine art prints. Historical images are drawn from public archives and are credited to the originating photographer or institution.
Imagery from the collection has appeared in magazines, the press, on television and across digital platforms. It reaches buyers directly through Professional Aviation Photography and through the major licensing platforms.
The rest of the network
This Journal is the writing. The photographs behind it live in three other places.
- Professional Aviation PhotographyThe aviation archive. Where images are licensed and fine art prints are ordered.
- PiemagsThe full library. More than thirty million images across every subject, plus stills and video.
- paulfearn.comPaul’s own site.
Piemags is PIEMAGS LTD, registered in England and Wales, company number 11786963, at 1 Heol Mostyn, Village Farm Industrial Estate, Pyle, Bridgend CF33 6BJ.