I’m now on LinkedIn

January 23, 2016 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in digital art | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

I decided to join LinkedIn so if you’d like to send me a contact thingy I’ll be very happy to add you, let’s get connected :).

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/leighkempphotoart

Best wishes

Leigh

We’re all made out of ticky tacky and we all look just the same!

January 21, 2016 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in digital art | 5 Comments

Hi,

I’ve got a bit of a bee in my bonnet this morning!. When I logged in to my page on about.me, one of my favourite sites, I was presented with an option to update my page (before they do it automatically for me!), update to what?. So, I investigated a bit further on their blog and found that they are introducing a new page layout template. I looked at their examples and, to my dismay, I think that it’s very minimalist, soulless, boring and “vanilla”.

It’s a great pity as I was first attracted to their site and have enjoyed using it because it offered a straightforward front end interface whilst having the ability to sufficiently customise one’s page and make it individual and reflect some of one’s personality. I think that the new design looks like an electronic business card which I don’t want or need . I don’t want a page containing a photo, bio and links to a few social media sites. I liked the digital “real estate” that the current (soon to be replaced) page layout and options afforded me. It was also great fun viewing the pages of other people and enjoying some of their creative, expressive and individualistic page designs, key word individualistic. To continue my real-estate analogy, metaphorically-speaking I feel like the new layout would be a bit like moving from a house with a garden to the 30th floor of an apartment block. They mention in their blog that, and I quote, “The next generation desires to turn their hobbies into businesses, 76% of college students today think they’ll turn their hobby into a source of income”. Well they should be given the artistic tools to express their individuality and stand out not shoehorned into “samey” little boxes. This might just work for clerical professions it sure as hell doesn’t work for those with an artistic temperament.

I’ve always been a non-conformist at heart, the one thing that I hate more than anything else is being compartmentalised, trapped in a little box and forced to be someone else’s vision of what they think that I should be or how I should present myself, after all the site is called about.me and, if you remove my ability to express my character by removing my freedom to design then it can no longer be about me in anything else than a few clinical factual terms, in short, “boring”.

As a paying customer of their service I fell that I should have at least been advised of their planned changes and given the option to opt out of the changes but I doubt if that’s even possible. I really hope that they’ll have a change of heart but I’m not expecting it nor am I expecting others to agree, so, reluctantly, if things stay as they are I’ll not be renewing my paid membership.

Kind regards

Leigh

Another interesting website for creatives

January 20, 2016 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in art, digital art, Fine Art, photography | Leave a comment

Hi,

A quick post, I’ve joined artsicle a site that I was put on to by those nice people at A Place For Creation. Hope that it’s of interest.

Best wishes

Leigh

An unusual shot: “A gathering of the clans!”

January 20, 2016 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in digital art, photography and tagged Magpies, Photographer, Photography | 8 Comments

Hi,

I was leaving the house when I heard an incredibly loud cackling noise. Looking up in to a tree I spotted the most Magpies that I’ve every seen in one place at one time. I rushed back in, grabbed a camera and the longest lens that I own (which isn’t that long) and took a few shots.

Unfortunately about a dozen magpies flew off whilst I was shooting, startled by a noise or there would have been even more birds in the frame!. Maybe they were having a party!? 🙂

A little news

January 19, 2016 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in art, digital art, Fine Art, photography | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

I’ve not been able to get out and take more shots so I have little to work on at the moment a situation which is driving me nuts and one which I hope to rectify ASAP but I do have a few items of news.

I’ve spent a little time editing my pixels.com website to include translation links for 35 different languages!. Edit: Correction make that 43 languages, I added a few more this morning 🙂 .So if anyone’s ever filled with an uncontrollable desire to look at my website in, say, for example, Macedonian, then you can now do so to your heart’s content! 🙂

I’ve also got a new limited-time promotion running for five days

I’d also very much appreciate it if you’d like to leave a comment on my feature on A Place For Creation if you get a sec. which might help me gain some street-cred on that site :).

And I’ve also been trying out some new tweets, well you’ve got to try haven’t you! 🙂

Just Art!

Hope everyone is keeping happy and well, thanks and best wishes

PS. I’ve also booked to attend a free evening event near my home town which I saw advertised which gives free advice on pricing, social media etc. to artists which I thought could be interesting and only involving two bus fares and I might even get a free cup of tea and a biscuit :). I’ll let you know how it went.

leigh sig 2

New work: Market Square Monday

January 15, 2016 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in art, digital art, Fine Art, photography and tagged art, Fine Art, Kingston upon Thames, Klimt, Market, painterly, Photographer, Photography, textured | 2 Comments

Market Square Kingston upon Thames

It’s all done with smoke and mirrors

January 13, 2016 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in art, digital art, Fine Art, photography and tagged art, digital art, digital artist, Fine Art, Photographer, Photography | 6 Comments

From suburbia to the open road.

Every once in a while I like to post a sort of “making of” series of shots from one of my painterly photo-blend works. This time I’ve chosen “The Wind In My Hair”. On a visit to a local town I spotted this chap in a sports car pulling out of a parking bay and thought it would make an interesting shot so I hurriedly raised my camera and took a few shots.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Fabulous car!, dreary background!, so the first thing that I wanted to do was loose suburbia (oh if life was ever that straightforward!) 🙂

Making of the wind in my hair mask 320

Then I started thinking of what backdrop I could use, I wanted a countryside background and remembered a very unremarkable shot that I’d taken a few weeks earlier at a different location so I added some motion blur to it:

Making of The Wind in my hair background with blur

Then I put it all together:

Making of The Wind in my hair 3

Added some radial blur on the car wheels and painterly effects and texture and some final black magic “tweaking” 🙂 and this is the end work, “The Wind In My Hair”

I hope that the owner would have liked it.

Best wishes,

leigh sig 2

And I wanted to buy a chicken! (re-hatched)

January 12, 2016 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in digital art, photography and tagged Photographer, Photography | Leave a comment

Hi folks,

Every now and then when the moon is in the first quarter and the tea leaf readings are favourable I like to sneak in a “straight” colour work. In these days of somewhat dubious advertising claims I was amused by the refreshing honesty of the shop name that I spotted last year on my travels. 🙂 I’ve hyperlinked it to a bigger view on Flickr as the window contents demand closer inspection :).

Edit: I hope that it brought a few smiles to faces, it made me smile when I spotted it. I found a reference to the shop on the web which describes it as “Eccentric, fabulous and slightly frantic”, sounds “right up my street” as the saying goes except that it’s not up my street it’s about 50 miles away 🙂

I love eccentricity, I think that the world needs more eccentrics. I remember that when I was young I was pretty darned introverted. Then something happened and I remember the occasion and circumstances quite vividly, it was like someone threw a switch in my brain and all of a sudden I didn’t much care what the world thought of me, I realised that, somewhere inside my brain there was another “me”, one neither I nor anyone else had seen before and it came as a huge surprise!, a more confident and self-assured me, and from roughly that point on, I became a lot more extrovert, bordering occasionally on the eccentric, a trait that has steadily grown over the years. I’m reminded of the song “The hollow man” by Marillion, I think that, if I hadn’t changed I would have become one and I very nearly did:

“Watch this cold world dishing up these endless hollow men
Find us anywhere you look
Come and meet our friends
Stand us in our silly clothes
Put our batteries in
Line us up like fairground ducks
Watch us grin and grin

See the lies behind our eyes
See the will to win”

Best wishes

Leigh

A Place For Creation

January 12, 2016 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in art, digital art, Fine Art, photography | Leave a comment

Hi,

Something that I hope is of interest to my fellow creatives. I recently joined a very interesting site that perhaps you already know of, “A Place For Creation” http://aplaceforcreation.com/ . You can view my profile at http://aplaceforcreation.com/profile/Leigh-Kemp/

I’ve been corresponding via their Creative Coach Facebook group with the site founder Gemma Louise Kimpton and she’s been extremely friendly and helpful. Looks like they’re building a nice friendly artistic community there.

Hope it’s of interest, check it out and mention my name if you get in touch with them.

Best wishes

Leigh

This little piggy’s off to market!

January 12, 2016 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in art, digital art, Fine Art, photography | Leave a comment

Hi,

Well not quite yet maybe but, given my spectacular lack of success to date in selling my work online, I’m seriously considering printing up a few of my local works when and if funds permit, getting a license to sell at a local market (yes you need a license for everything in this country except breathing but I’m sure that that will come in the fullness of time!) 🙂 and trying my hand at the direct face-to-face direct sales method. I need to give some thought to my sales pitch, I think perhaps, “Please buy my work before we starve!” is a bit too “in your face”, honest, but too blunt so I’ll work on that aspect :).

I can see myself on a cold, wintery Saturday morning dressed in my finest winter togs, beanie hat, fingerless gloves and flask of hot tea , the later essential as I don’t function without it! :). What people miss out on online is my god-given charismatic charm, humour and wit and my “honest John” face LOL 😀 :D, time methinks to give it a go!.

Best wishes,

leigh sig 2

As I sit here looking at my modern digital cameras I’m reminded of my first camera and, in particular, the first photograph that I ever took. Nowadays we take cameras and camera technology pretty much for granted but when I was a child I can’t remember many photographs. The only time our camera saw the light of day, and it had to be the light of day, as there wasn’t a flash, was on a few family occasions, the usual thing, school sports days, birthdays, etc.. My interest in photography didn’t start until my grandfather “loaned” me his camera to take with me on a week-long school trip, sleeping under canvas, in Snowdonia, North Wales. It was a somewhat battered old twin-lens reflex camera in which one looked downwards in to the viewfinder when taking a photograph.

I remember being very excited at being entrusted with the family camera, film wasn’t cheap and I had very little to no idea how to use it. The experience must have made some kind of impression on me as, after all these years, I still remember taking my first photograph. The coach stopped en-route at Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of Sir Winston Churchill and it became the subject of my first photograph. Although, sadly, like my other photographs from the trip, it has long since disappeared, however, I really don’t need the photograph to remind me as the experience is indelibly etched on my mind. I wonder if this is perhaps where my interest in landscape photography stems from but that’s probably too much of an assumption. As far as I remember I was the only kid on the trip to have a camera, that’s how different things were, nowadays, just about everyone has a camera of some sort built in to their mobile phones. It also taught me to be disciplined to the point of being frugal when taking photographs as the trip was for one week and I only had a 12 exposure black and white film in the camera.

Some years later I really got the photography bug and bought my first camera, an Olympus OM-1 35 mm film camera and I went on to own their OM-2 and OM-4ti cameras and a range of lenses. Film was still pretty expensive considering I earned about £20 a week in my first job so I got in to developing and printing my own black and white and, later, colour films to help keep the costs down and make things more affordable. Not only did this experience teach me an awful lot about image-making start to finish, many of the techniques and skills that I learned in my makeshift darkroom, a small room adorned with genuine World War 2 blackout curtains fitted to keep out the light, another hand-me-down from my grandfather, these skills would re-surface and be invaluable some years later when I started working on processing my digital images.

I put myself through University as a mature student and I badly needed the money so I had to very reluctantly part with all my photographic equipment, but needs must. After I graduated I bought my first digital camera, a small fixed lens Kodak compact camera, reduced in a sale. It had, by today’s standards, a laughably small maximum image resolution of 640×480 pixels or, to put it another way, a stunning 0.4 Megapixels!. For all of this and further equipped with screw on wide angle and telephoto lens attachments, it proved to be a fabulous little camera which I took all over the place with me. Put simply, digital photography was a revelation, to me, no requirement for film, no real running costs and a lot of image capacity on a small memory card which I found absolutely liberating.

A few years before that I had discovered some free graphics editing software on the cover disk of a computer magazine and that started off my real passion for working with graphics and, ultimately, photo processing. So I then had all the tools I required to develop, pun intended and further, my interest in digital photography. Processing is where the magic starts for me, I am totally absorbed in and fascinated by the range of options that digital processing affords me. It encourages me, if, that is, I ever need encouragement, to constantly experiment with new styles, new techniques and is such an important part of my enjoyment and interest in photography.

I went on to own several DSLRs but, as I got older I began to find that they were simply too heavy and bulky. I switched over back in 2013 to Micro Four Thirds cameras and lenses. My choice of MFT system was heavily influenced by my experiences with my Olympus film cameras, maybe it was, in truth, part based on nostalgia that I decided on their OM-D system. As a landscape/travel photographer I have to carry my gear around all day and the weight and bulk saving is highly significant. I’ve been very impressed with the image quality of my Micro Four Thirds equipment, it has traveled with me extensively, never let me down and I have never had cause to question my decision to go over to that format.

So my 50-plus year photographic adventure has led me from twin-lens reflex and single-lens reflex film cameras to digital cameras, from stumbling around in a dimly-lit darkroom to working with my images on my computer. I’ve heard it said on occasions, including a comment I read some while back by a very famous photographer, that cameras being so much an every-day item now and available in mobile phones etc. devalues photography. I feel quite the opposite, I firmly believe that it empowers everyone with affordable technology to take photographs and enjoy photography and that, in my opinion, is fantastic. Although I’ve very much enjoyed my personal photographic journey I do confess to feeling a slight tinge of regret that the technology wasn’t available when I started out but one can’t put the clock back and I intend to keep on embracing all these great technological advancements, experimenting and enjoying my work.

Cameras:

Olympus: OM-D E-M5 Mk II (titanium) & HLD-8G grip, OM-D E-M1 Mk I (black) & HDL-7 grip, OM-D EM-5 Mk I (silver) & HDL-6 grip, PEN EPL-5, PEN EP-5 (silver) +VF-4, PEN E-PL8 (Silver) +VF4, Tough TG-5 (red), PEN-F (silver), Canon Powershot G10, Nikon Coolpix A100

Lenses:

Olympus: M.Zuiko: 12 mm f/2, 17 mm f/1.8, 25 mm f/1.8, 45 mm f/1.8, 30 mm f/3.5 macro, 9 mm f/8 body cap fisheye, 15 mm f/8 body cap, 9-18 mm, 12-50 mm, 12-40 mm f/2.8 PRO, 14-150 mm II, 40-150 mm II, 12-45mm f/4 PRO, MCON-P02.

Sigma: ART 60 mm f/2.8.

Samyang: Manual focus 7.5 mm f/3.5 fisheye.

TT Artisan: Manual focus 17mm f/1.4, 23mm f/1.4, 35mm f/1.4.

Panasonic Lumix: 14 mm f/2.5, 20 mm f/1.7, 12-32 mm x2 (black and silver), 12-60 mm, 14-42 mm II, 35-100 mm, 45-150mm.

PEN E-P5, 9-18mm,12-32mm, 40-150mm II. A lightweight kit with virtually continuous coverage from 18mm wide angle to 300mm telephoto.

OM-D E-M1 I, 14-150mm II, 12-40mm PRO. . Heavier than my other kits but with complete weather-sealing. Coverage from 24mm wide angle to 300mm telephoto with some overlap for backup.

OM-D E-M5 II, 17mm, 35mm, 12-60mm. A balance of two fun manual focus lenses with a weather-sealed body and zoom lens.

PEN E-PL5, 9mm, 15mm, 25mm, 60mm, 12-50mm. Another lightweight fun kit with a zoom option.

TG-5, OM-D E-M5 mk1, 7.5mm, 12mm, 17mm, 45mm, 30mm macro. M-CON.

PEN-F, 14mm, 20mm, 12-32mm, 35-100mm. Probably my favourite lightweight day-to-day kit. Two fast primes and two zoom with almost continuous coverage from 24mm wide angle through to 200mm telephoto.

Software:

Corel: Paintshop Pro Elite 2020 & Video Studio 2019.

Skylum Software: Aurora HDR 2019, Luminar 4, Luminar AI and Luminar Neo.

DXO Labs: PhotoLab 5 Elite, Viewpoint 3, NIK Collection 6, Film Pack 5 and PureRAW.

Anthropics Technologies: Landscape Pro Studio 3 and Portrait Pro.

EyeQ: Perfectly Clear

Topaz Labs: Studio 2, Sharpen AI, A.I Gigapixel, AI Clear, AI Adjust, DeNoise AI and Various legacy plugins.

Adobe: Lightroom.

GreenScreenWizard Studio Pro.

Serif: Affinity Photo

Microsoft: Image Composite Editor (Free).

Darktable (Free).

Olympus: Olympus Capture, Olympus Workspace and Olympus Webcam (Free to Olympus owners).

Sony: Movie Studio Platinum.

Lighting Gear:

Godox TT350o flash, Godox X1T radio flash trigger, Godox Lux Junior flash, LED ring flash, GVM RGB LED light, Olympus MAL-1 Macro Arm Light. Two Godox LED36 lights, Godox Litemons LED6R light. Three Bowen studio flash heads, barndoors, honeycombes, umbrellas and flash meter.