About Us
Let us brief you about us!
Stefano Rota
My name is Stefano Rota. I’m an airline pilot from Quito, Ecuador who is currently based in St. Augustine, Florida. You may know me from various aviation photography sites and magazines.
I began my career as an aviation photographer by tagging along with my older brother Sandro, back in the early 2000s at our local airport.
My photos were published for the first time in May 2003, and shortly managed to reach a very important audience both locally and internationally. This gave me the opportunity to be featured in the aeronautical marketing portion for numerous airlines in Ecuador, airports and authorities, as well as various aviation magazines worldwide.
In the meantime I had begun my flight training in 2006 and graduated in 2010 commercial pilot. After having flown various corporate aircraft, I obtained my type rating on the Airbus A320 family.
Aviation is what moves me, which is why I wish to share this passion with you through “Flight Level Studios”. Our vision and goal is to represent our hobby as a service providing anyone interested the opportunity to allow us to create aviation art for them. Our 20 years of experience speaks for themselves.
Sandro Rota
I am Sandro Rota, founder of Ecuador Aviation Photography (EAP). My story as an aviation photography, spotter, and historian began back in 1994. Back then I wanted to take photos of airplanes to decorate my room. Years later I learned there was a worldwide community of photographers and spotters.
My younger brother Stefano tagged along with me to take photos at Quito’s airport. He later began taking his own photos .
For many years our hobby was censored and frowned upon in our country, and we encountered various problems. That’s why in 2008 we decided to take a stand and show authorities there was nothing wrong with our hobby and founded EAP. It began as a blog to inform society what we did, and unite those who also liked this hobby.
Now a days things have changed for good in our country and region. We have formed an alliance with local airport authorities and have organized various Spotter Days inside the airport for local and foreign photographers. My work has been published on different aviation magazines and publications as well as local and international media.
Photographing aircraft has allowed me to discover more of our local and foreign aviation, and meet wonderful people, which is why I now organize aviation history tours to Ecuador and other countries in Latin America. Please enjoy the effort, and passion invested to immortalize aviation through photography.
Our Mission
Create top level aviation photography material, that creates the most value for our customers. We focus on every client, not on a type of client.
If you like our work, or are inspired by it, we will work with you. Allow us to get inspired together and create something remarkable.
We are focused on making aviation photography a common and known hobby worldwide, accepted and understood by aviation authorities who still don’t understand the purpose of this.
Our Values
We strive to go above and beyond simply taking pictures. We aim to deliver our very best work every single day across our services. Most of the time we just photograph airplanes as a hobby, which makes it evident we are here out of passion more than profit!
We are strong believers of privacy, respect and ethics. For this reason we practice this with aircraft owners, operators, pilots, and commit to it. We are here to make art.
“When it comes to Aviation, I dedicate what I have now, to my brother who gave me the inspiration for this, and the rest of my family who helped me build, and rebuild who I am now”
Stefano Rota
Picture by Cristian Ramos
"Yes... I'm a pilot and a photographer..."
A boss of mine at the airline I used to fly, disliked the fact I took aviation pictures. He used to question my colleagues about me behind my back as a mockery, asking them,
“Well, WHAT IS HE!? A PILOT? OR A PHOTOGRAPHER?”
At the same time, a couple of great friends of mine from the airline, saw my passion like everybody else has since I started. They sent this drawing to be made for me on my 30th birthday. A representation of what I am. A Pilot, and a Photographer.
This was an inspiration for me to realize that what I do impacts 99.9% of the people positively, and they actually see me like this drawing (Which is 100% accurate by the way).