Welcome to the latest incarnation of the Six Bells Junction Photo Gallery. In the gallery you will find examples from my own personal photographic collection which now covers four decades of railways, worldwide. Just click on "SBJ Gallery" on the left hand side menu and it will open in a new window.

I am presently in process of scanning my entire slide and negative collection (using a Nikon Coolscan IV slide/negative scanner) and indexing it all in an Access database (more info). I'm currently giving the indexing task priority over uploading photos here so please bear with me as it is a massive task. I have also made some of my photos "more public" on the Railroad Picture Archives Website, you can see those photos (not all the same as can be found here) by following the link directly to Gary Thornton's Railroad Picture Archives....but if you do please be sure to come back to here sometime! If you are "into" American traction then the Railroad Picture Archives Website is bound to please you as it exceeded 500,000 photos uploaded in late 2006 and is growing daily.

I began my "photographic career" in 1977 with a Kodak Instamatic which took a 126mm film. The results were not exactly brilliant, but these days often the rarity of the subject matter outweighs the quality or composition of the photo and thus a few of my early photos have found there way into this gallery. In 1980 I celebrated passing my 'O' Level exams at school and my parents bought me my first 35mm camera - a Cosina CT1A, a very basic manual camera but one that taught me a lot about 35mm photography. Before long my Father upgraded his Olympus OM1n for an OM2n and I bought his OM1n from him and so began a long association of mine with the Olympus family of cameras. My 18th birthday present was an OM2n and my spare money was being spent on lenses, mostly Tamron as they could be fitted to most camera makes via a changeable mount. By the 1990's I had gone through various of the later "electronic" Olympus models including an OM40 (of which I had several bodies under guarantee as the reliability was so dire) then I moved back to basic manual camera work again when I bought a second-hand Nikon FM2 body. I even had an Olympus compact camera so was often on the same trip taking colour slide, colour print and black and white photos! Turning up at a friends wedding in the mid 1990's without a camera I was handed a Canon EOS auto-focus and after an initial problem finding out how to get a film in the camera ("just shut the back and it winds on automatically" - it was like black magic to me!) I discovered it was very easy to use. Not having to think about focusing meant more attention could be paid to composition.

I soon swapped all my 35mm manual focus equipment (except my Olympus OM2n - I still have that to this day) for a Canon EOS. After a couple of years ownership I sold the Nikon FM2 body for the same as I paid for it. Over the next few years I recall having a couple of the EOS range before, in 2000, more black magic appeared before me at another friends wedding when the groom handed me his digital camera to use. It was an Olympus C2000Z and, like auto-focus a few years before, I found it a breeze to use and was well impressed with the results. So good in fact I bought it a couple of months later when my friend moved onto a higher-spec model and offered it to me.

The staff in my local chemists shop thought I'd moved away or died - in the last days of my 35mm photography I was going through at least a film a week so was in frequently dropping off or collecting films/prints. Once I'd invested in a few memory cards I saw a significant cost saving though not having any films to process. I have never bothered to make prints of all my digital shots, preferring to show them on a computer screen (and now, having a DVD player at home, on my TV set). The Olympus 2000Z lasted me a couple of years but the 3x zoom was often not enough to get near enough to the subject matter, a big problem on railways with "no public beyond this point" notices everywhere! So, in 2001, I upgraded to an Olympus C700UZ - UZ standing for Ultra-Zoom. It has a 10x (38mm to 380mm) optical zoom with a digital zoom boosting it to no less than the equivalent of a 1000mm lens! Both my digital cameras have been 2 mega-pixel and have been of sufficient quality to get photos published in the railway press and easily usable for 10" x 12" enlargements. My old C2000Z went to my Father who still has it, though has himself moved onto one of the Olympus UZ range of cameras as his primary camera.

Time moved on to late 2004 and I replaced my rarely-used Video8 video camera with a digital camcorder (a Canon MVX25i) which, according to the reviews I'd read, was reported to be one of the best sub-£1000 "amateur" cameras available at the time. It has the ability to take 2 mega-pixel stills photos and has a 14x optical zoom (then up to 280x digital zoom!). Despite some people doubting the ability of a camcorder to take good stills photos I have had several published in magazines so it can't be that bad!

Through 2006 I have been using a Pentax Optio 60 (6 mega-pixel) compact camera for much of my photography though the Canon MVX25i still got some use as the zoom lens on the Pentax is only 3x optical. The latest chapter in my "photographic career" began at the end of 2006 with the purchase of a Nikon D80 digital SLR plus 18-135mm lens...at 10 mega-pixel, a 1Gb memory card or two will be on my birthday list for sure!