About Me

Hi, and welcome to my site.  I am a long-standing transport enthusiast, with an interest in rail, buses and aircraft.  I have been taking photos for over 30 years, and hopefully putting them on here will give some pleasure to visitors.

By the nature of the beast, technology has advanced.  I started in the late 70s /early 80s with point and shoot cameras with little control, albeit always 35mm.  I acquired my first SLR, a Praktica B100 secondhand in student days, which although an improvement in image quality still had little in the way of creative control above stopping up and down. This rugged camera served me well until the metering died.  I then bought a Centon DF-300 which was actually a re-badged Minolta, until deciding to test the water with digital.

My first digital was a Vivitar 3835 point and shoot (a prize in a community draw!), albeit with aperture and shutter speed control, but the delay in shooting and small lens made it difficult to use for transport photography.  I then moved to a Fuji SX5800 bridge, which overcame some of these problems but autofocus was slow and there was still a shutter delay.

My next camera was a secondhand Canon EOS 1000D bought in October 2015, getting me back into interchangeable lens territory once again.  This lasted for two years, but picked up a mark on the sensor which refused to be cleaned.  Having worked around this through editig, I came across an EOS 600D body for a good price, and this is now my main camera.  I have two lenses, both kit zooms (18-55 and 75-300).  Shooting is in RAW, with raw conversion and initial editing in Canons DPP software.  Watermarking and final editing in Serif's Affinity Photo.

In terms of hosting, like many I took advantage of Fotopic, and built up a reasonable collection on there until they went out of business.  I then played around with a bespoke site on Weebly, but this didn't really work.  I then moved to Flickr, until uploading issues made me decide to move here.  All photos have been transferred across.

My moderate but poorly archived collection of print and slide shots is gradually being scanned using an aged but still serviceable Epson Perfection 2480 Photo flatbed scanner, which is kept operating under Windows 10 with Hamrick Software's Vuescan programme.  Adjustments have been made using Paint.net, but I am now starting to use Serif's Affinity Photo, which is a bit of a lewarning curve!

If you wish to use any of my photographs for any purpose, please contact me via one of the social links below (e-mail will generally get the fastest response).  Private, non commercial use is not generally an issue, commercial use would attract a charge.  Prints can be ordered via Smugmug but will of course have my watermark.

Enjoy the site; and comments, please feel free either on the photo concerned on here or via one of the links below.  I hope you enjoy my work.

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