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