Steam Porfolio

Roderick Hoyle

WALTON-ON-THAMES
SURREY

Enthusiasm for engine number collecting created in me an urge for some kind of visual satisfaction to supplement the hobby - thus, drawing, modelling and photographing anything "railway". The desire to relate railway "shapes" to everyday scenes, plus the technical disciplines peculiar to photographic processing, creates its own problems and for me is an ideal hobby.

After wrestling technically and financially with larger formats, I finally gravitated to 35mm in mid-1964; I find this size satisfactory on both counts. It also provides plenty of negative material, a necessity for the beginner to explore technique; but having achieved a constant standard technically in recent years I now depend more and more on the element of luck. However, luck in this context can be interpreted as subconscious collected experience, bursting through at a critical moment - or Horace Walpole's coining "serendipity". Finally I must express my thanks to numerous railwaymen for their pleasant co-operation in my quest and to the photographic manufacturers for their products. Normally I use Ilford FP3 and HP4 films, Paterson developers, and Kodak and Agfa printing papers

Steam Porfolio

Paul Hocquard

LAVENHAM
SUFFOLK

Which active interest came first in me, photography or railways, I cannot now remember. It was possibly the former, although it probably rekindled the earlier of my interests which, as with most of us, started when very young. I spent school holidays at Newark and my earliest railway impressions were of apple green Pacifics and Atlantics at Kings Cross, with the occasional thrilling glimpse of a silver A4. It was always essential to arrive early so that time could be spent at the end of the platform wondering what would emerge tender first from the gloom of Gasworks tunnel to take us North.

Eight years ago I bought a 35 mm camera and immediately I was involved in a hobby which was potentially all-absorbing. I took endless photographs of trains, mostly too soon or too late, out of focus or with the wrong shutter speed. But my attempts at some sort of composition, combined with improving negative and dark room techniques, started to produce a few prints, which pictorially, were acceptable. A benevolent and tolerant British Railways produced Iineside passes which improved my scope but the diminishing number of steam locomotives, of increasingly grubby countenance, operating under English weather conditions, increased the odds against getting a good picture to an unacceptable level. It is amazing how the one single cloud in an otherwise cloudless sky obscures the sun just as you are about to record the picture of a lifetime!

Little by little, while I still took conventional photographs I also experimented with other ways of recording impressions of steam locomotives. Running sheds and stations became the biggest source of picture material. I found in such locations the necessary movement and human activity to make photography exciting, both pictorially and journalistically.

Everyday steam has disappeared from the English scene and out of it all, I have a few photographs of something which probably made a greater contribution to the social and commercial prosperity of this country than any other invention. I hope that these photographs impart some of the enjoyment I have had from my camera and the subject.