Biography

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Built in the fifties, original and unrestored with some parts still in working order :) and living in London UK I am a self-taught "paintographer". I take photographs because I really enjoy photography. I endeavour to create digital art because I LOVE art. I also love to travel whenever I get the opportunity and landscapes are my favorite subject.  I got my first camera at the age of 9, a battered old twin-lens reflex camera which my grandfather "loaned" to me and my first serious camera, a 35mm film camera (an OM-1), in my late teens.

For me there are only a few things that are of prime importance in a camera and lenses. They have to be small, light, well built, reliable and take well exposed and sharp images and my OM-D cameras and Zuiko lenses more than tick all those boxes. The thing that I most enjoy about photography is finding subjects/locations and imagining how they might look when I’ve had a chance to work with my images. So there’s a sort of feedback loop already going on in my head when I’m looking around and taking pictures.

What the camera sees is one thing what my mind’s eye sees is another thing entirely. What I’m always searching for in a scene are aspects such as perspective, textures, compositional elements and lighting etc. and well beyond that how I can work with these when I’ve downloaded my images which brings me on to processing (hate the term), for me, by far the most important and exciting part.

A while back I stumbled across the perfect description for my type of work “Paintography” some years after I stumbled into it completely unaware that there was such a thing. I guess this is where the photographer in me stops and my artistic side takes full-rein if indeed one can separate one from the other. Put simply, this is the point where I have complete artistic freedom to explore and mix different techniques and open the lid on a Pandora’s box of artistic possibilities, such a large box that even after some years I’m very much still discovering and experimenting with new things.

"Painterly" - relating to or characteristic of painting or painters.

"Paintography"  - A combination of Digital Photography and Digital Painting This is more than editing a photograph, it includes actual digital painting segments in the same work of art, generally on canvas. Artists using digital photography as a basis for a digital painting are doing paintography." (urban dictionary)

website: www.leighkemp.co.uk

Books - http://www.blurb.co.uk/user/LeighKemp

blog: https://leighkempphotoblog.co.uk/

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/leighkemp/

500px: https://500px.com/leigh_kemp

Kind regards

EM-5 Mk 1 (Silver),EM-5 Mk 2 (Titanium), EM-1 Mk1 (Black), PEN E-PL5 (Silver), Tough TG-5 (Red), PEN-F (Silver), M.Zuiko -  12mm f2.0 (Silver), 17mm f1.8 (Silver), 25mm f1.8 (Black), 45mm 1.8 (Silver),  9-18mm, 12-40 mm PRO f2.8, 12-50 mm, 14-150 mm f4.0/5.6 II, 40-150 mm f4.0/56. II, 9 mm body cap lens (Black), 15 mm body cap lens (Red), M.Zuiko 30 mm f/3.5 Macro.