About Touch The Skies

Why Touch The Skies?

Do a search for "Boeing 737" on any of the major stock photo agencies. Chances are many of the images returned by the search will not be shots of Boeing 737s at all. They could be anything - Boeing 727s, Boeing 757s, even planes made by rival manufacturers.

Does it matter? Well, suppose you've just printed an article raising questions about safety practices at Rust Bucket Airlines, with an accompanying photo featuring a wrongly captioned aircraft. The boss of Rust Bucket Airlines will, of course, reply. Imagine his triumphant conclusion ...

"The reporter couldn't even get his photo caption right. What he claims to be one of our current Boeing 737s is really a 727. We got rid of our 727s years ago. This shows just how little credibility the article has!"

Weeks of solid investigative work could go down the drain because of indiscriminate keywording by a stock photographer.

At Touch The Skies we know our 737s from our 727s. We even know the difference between a 737-700 and a 737-800. We won't lead you astray. To help make sure of this, our site does not rely on photo keywording. Instead photos are classified and made searchable by means of standardised entries in drop-down menu lists.

This site isn't for aviation experts. It's for you.

At the same time we've worked hard to keep Touch The Skies user-friendly for people who aren't aviation experts. We have kept out unnecessary information like construction numbers. We've kept aircraft model numbers simple - for example, Airbus A340-300 rather than A340-313X, Boeing 747-400F rather than 747-446BCF (read more). We've only included location details when some part of the location is visible in the photo.

To make Touch The Skies as user-friendly as possible, we've included a "browse by aircraft type" facility. Here you'll find a listing of all aircraft types in our system with a brief description of each, broken down by broad categories (jetliners, business jets, helicopters etc). Suppose you need a photo of an Airbus long-haul jetliner that is currently in production. This section will help you quickly find out which aircraft types fit the bill.

Size matters. Honesty matters more.

We put this information in, and go to the trouble of keeping it up to date, because we believe in being transparent with clients. It's for the same reason that we include the image dimensions with every photo. These dimensions are those of the photo as it came out of the camera, possibly after edge cropping to improve the composition, but without any resizing (making the image as a whole larger or smaller).

We can enlarge images for you if you like. We use professional software for this purpose. But the point is that we won't do it without telling you. We will never try to pass off enlarged images as images shot at extra high resolution. With Touch The Skies, unlike some other stock photo agencies, you know what you are getting.