Local Photographer travels around Thailand with a £5 camera
A camera from Emmaus
A photographer from Uppermill, Tim Simpson, has recently taken a second hand reclaimed camera around Thailand with stunning results. He wanted to show that good photography doesn’t necessarily depend on the equipment a photographer is using and that it is the person behind the camera and how it is used that matters.
Tim told Saddleworth Life: “I’m a professional photographer and people are always asking me about what equipment they should by or what do I use. I think more important than this is technique and exposure. So on a recent trip to Thailand, I set myself a project to prove photography really isn’t all about expensive equipment, most people now have a phone camera and with a bit of thought you could get much better photos.”
He bought a compact digital camera for £5 from Emmaus Mossley (a charity helping the homeless).
Tim said: “I was looking for a camera that had to have a degree of control over the exposure. After taking the first few shots I realised that the camera, which was quite old, was struggling with anything other than quite bright sunlight. It was giving me a very long exposure (which results in blurry/shaky images) and when you used a higher ISO to combat this, to make the camera more light sensitive, it was very grainy.
“One way around this is to use flash but I really didn’t like the results this gave. So I decided to use these limitations to my benefit by using blur, grain, and long exposure as part of the image. This long exposure blur is often called Kinetic Photography. ”
He is pleased with the results and said: “They are definitely very different from the images I would have gotten with my expensive Nikon DSLR camera.
“In many ways, I think they are better. and I will translate some of this to my day to day photography.”
Author: Jude Gidney - Editor
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