Thank you for looking at my photographs. The best way to find pictures on a particular theme is to look at my albums. There you will more easily find all my railway photographs, for example, which is what first inspired me to start using Flickr. Albums on other themes (lots of animals, places and cars, for instance) are after all the railway stuff.

I've spent most of my life in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, and spent many days in my youth trainspotting around places like Wath, Doncaster and Sheffield. The railway scene back then, in the 1970s and early 80s, was a different place to what it is now. Not only was there a vastly more interesting array of locomotives and rolling stock, but there was fascinating infrastructure everywhere, much of it left over from the days of steam. It was also far more accommodating to people who were interested in it. Although some places were definitely off limits, we used to turn up at Wath and Reddish and, as long as we asked, we would be allowed to look around the sheds by ourselves - no permits required. The railway of the 21st century is not like this, not least because many of these places don't exist any more, but even if they did they'd be behind pallisade fencing with CCTV surveillance.

My first camera was a 35mm compact Ilford 'Sportsman', and you can see some of the railway pictures I took on it in a dedicated album. Some are reasonable but many aren't; they still have nostalgia value however. My first 35mm SLR was a Pentax MV, a Christmas present in 1981. The first railway outing for this camera was to record the 'Deltic Scotsman Farewell' as it passed Doncaster. When it broke a few years later I replace it with a second hand Pentax ME, which was virtually identical. Then I upgraded to a Minolta Dynax 500si in 1994, which was a much better camera. In 2004 I began using a compact digital camera, then in 2006 bought a Canon 350D. The results improved dramatically, but as a fairly early digital SLR it had some shortcomings, and I replaced it with a 500D in 2009. Looking to upgrade in 2014 I decided to switch to the more compact micro-four-thirds format and bought an Olympus OMD EM1. A brilliant camera, I then upgraded that in 2019 to the MkIII version of the same camera, which is what I currently use, alongside the camera on my phone, a Samsung Galaxy S10.

Many of the scanned film photographs in my photostream were scanned with a Nikon Coolscan in 2007. I have since sold many of the original transparencies, which explains how some of them now show up in other people's photostreams. I am currently re-editing the original scans using Lightroom software, which is giving better results than the fairly basic Google Picasa which I had used originally. For most film photographs I also run them through Noiseware Community Edition software to smooth out the grain.