What should I look for? The pictures you posted look nice enough, but whatever is glaringly obvious to you is sadly not to me.

Most kind.

Hmm. In my language, one of these is an expensive Alfa Romeo, and the other is a military helicopter.

I'll chance my arm and guess you mean neither of these.

Could you elaborate?

Some might remember that I've been concerned that my ageing CRT monitor is simply not bright enough - with the result that pictures I edit myself to appear fine on it, appear noisy and over brightened on other people's displays.

And conversely, of course, a lot of others' photos appear very dark to me.

Well I've finally taken the plunge and bought a new 'puter, including a Samsung 226BW monitor, which came as part of the system. It has 1680x1050 native resolution, and it has completely blown me away.

It really is much, much brighter, and I can see detail in people's pictures that I couldn't before.

And, not surprisingly, many of mine, in particular this one, on which one of our competition judges remarked recently, do indeed look horribly noisy.

So, the moral of the story is, one has to move with the times, or suffer the consequences. I'll have to re-edit quite a few of my better photographs, but hopefully it'll be worth it.

Yes, me too very slightly.

Almost all instructors these days hold CPLs, so it may well be that it was all perfectly legal.

But there's a lot of ignorance, even amongst pilots, many of which believe (wrongly) that providing the pilot himself isn't being paid, the flight remains a private flight. I'm not a commercial pilot, so I don't know the finer details - as I say, just worth bearing in mind.

Incidentally, you may not be aware, that even if the pilot wasn't paid for his services, if the purpose of the flight was to take pictures for a paying client, this constitutes what's known as 'aerial work'.

And for an 'aerial work' flight, a Commercial Pilot's Licence is required, and in some cases, there are other requirements too.

Selling a picture you just happened to take while airborne, of course, is a different matter, and there will be grey areas in between, some of which will be clearer cut than others.

But if the purpose of the flight was to take a paid-for photo, and the pilot was not, at the very least, a CPL holder, it was probably illegal. In the aviation world, illegal flights are also automatically uninsured. Something to bear in mind, perhaps, if you wanted to do it on a regular basis.

It does sound like this is the most likely explanation. Though it's quite sharply cut off - is there a lot of built-up area out-of-shot to the right?

On the really amazingly good days, the pressure is low, there's quite a bit of wind, and very little haze even over the bigger towns. Rare though. Glad you had such a good time.

Mmm... reason I asked was because I was wondering if it was a pusher or a puller, in the context of the loss of definition on the right that you mentioned.

Sometimes if you try to photograph through an exhaust stream you get a similar effect, although I can't tell whether you would have been doing this the way you were sitting.

Another thing is that as you look round the horizon, the colour of the sky does change, especially as you approach the direction of the sun.

Again, hard to tell from the picture if this could be the cause, although from the shadows, the sun does appear to be from the right.

Of course - no need to apologise, it's nothing to do with me; I was just offering an opinion.

What was the aircraft type?

Haze? What haze? You're kidding, right?

The visibility is hardly ever any better than that in this country. In 16 years of flying I don't think I've seen it better than that more than maybe two or three times, and not much better at that.

It's up to you, of course, but that distortion really spoils it for me.