Gavin Conroy

Gavin Conroy was born in Blenheim, New Zealand in 1972 and has lived most of his life in the area. Blenheim is only a few miles from historic Omaka airfield and is a good place for taking photos of a wide range of aircraft.

Gavin started flying at the age of 15 and flew solo at the age of 16. A keen pilot, Gavin continued flying and gained his Private Pilot License in the mid 1990s. He then started going for Warbird flights in various aircraft like Harvard's, and Nanchang's through to P51 Mustang and the P40 Kittyhawk and while doing so found his real aviation interest, Warbirds. A relative late starter to photography, Gavin decided to start taking aircraft photos seriously in 2004 and in 2005 flew his first Air 2 Air sortie. What started as an interest has grown rapidly and he now photographs anything that flies.

He is branch manager for a business that sells products to the Vineyard and farming industry and at times finds it hard to devote enough time to his interest but still manages to fly quite often.

He supplies photos to Classic Wings, Aeroplane Monthly, Australian Aviation, New Zealand Aviation News, and Flightpath. When away from the camera Gavin is the Secretary of Marlborough Warbirds and is on the airshow committee for the Classic Fighters airshow. He has plans to head overseas to photograph aircraft and although New Zealand is a small place there are a lot of amazing aircraft to photograph so for now Gavin travels the airshow circuit photographing aircraft.

New Zealand is a relatively small country so photographing aircraft is made a bit easier. These days he will hire an aircraft and fly to various parts of the country for selected photo shoots and this is normally done in a CJ6 Nanchang which has a good cruise speed and also doubles as a very capable camera ship. Not only that he gets to do some hands on flying as well. Omaka to Auckland is around 2.5 flying hours away.

When it comes to photographing WW1 and WW2 fighters he says "flying with these aircraft is really special and a great privilege. Capturing the aircraft in flight and flying with pilots I admire while recording history is a great experience.

Photo Gallery

Below are some examples of Gavin Conroy's photographs. Feel free to view these pictures for your own personal use, however, you will require Gavin's permission to publish them in any way. Click on any of the thumbnails below to view the enlarged image.

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