And then there were two!.

December 31, 2018 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in art, digital art, exhibition, Fine Art, Gallery, Leigh Kemp, Malta, Paintography, panorama, panoramic, photography, Travel | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

Well, I’ve paid for 50 works on the exhibition site and displayed 37 in my main exhibition. It seems a waste not to display the remaining works so I’ve now got a smaller sister exhibition with them in imaginatively named “Additional works by Leigh Kemp” 🙂

https://artspaces.kunstmatrix.com/en/exhibition/219833/additional-works-by-leigh-kemp

Exhibition Catalogue

Like getting your money’s worth?, you bet! 🙂

Kind regards

Marketing genius urgently required! :)

December 31, 2018 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in art, digital art, Fine Art, Leigh Kemp, photography, Travel | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

After my abject failure to attract investment in my Santa Claus business on the grounds that it’s seasonal, the overheads are through the roof and the profit non-existent. I’m now looking for a marketing genius to help me market my artwork. The easy part first, said marketing guru must be able to sell ice cubes to Inuits and, now for the difficult part, be up for a real challenge, promoting my artwork 🙂 . Oh, and be delighted to work for a very minimal share of any profits as I don’t have any money 🙂

Apply here,

Always look on the bright side of life,

A fairytale ending

December 30, 2018 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in art, digital art, Fine Art, Leigh Kemp, Paintography, photography, Travel | 2 Comments

Hi everyone,

My last work of 2018 and probably for a while as I’m hanging up my cameras and calling it a day.

Kind regards and Happy New Year,

Web links – static post

December 30, 2018 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in art, digital art, Fine Art, Leigh Kemp, Paintography, photography, Travel | Leave a comment

gallery 640.gif

Website

Flickr 500px

Online Exhibition Books

“Visualisations Gallery” Twitter

Commercial Image Licensing.

All-in-one links page.

I designed this page to provide quick access to my artwork merchandise, books and exhibitions. The page contains information on all of my range of merchandise, books and my main online exhibition complete with preview videos.

I’ll go my own way

December 29, 2018 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in digital art | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

I just got reminded why I’m not a member of any groups and societies. Against my better judgement I joined two this year and left two this year, you’d have thought I should have known better, it won’t happen again!. I really do not enjoy groups, clubs, societies etc., they can go their way in peace and I’ll go mine. 🙂

Kind regards

Leigh

My personal favourite work of 2018

December 29, 2018 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in art, digital art, Fine Art, Leigh Kemp, Paintography, photography, Travel | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

As the new year nudges ever closer I started thinking about which of my many works from 2018 was my personal favourite. I’ve had another prolific year and completed a heck of a lot of new works but one stood out from the others.

Sometimes a work comes together almost exactly as one envisaged it when taking the shot and this is one such work. I’ve had more successful and popular works but I have a soft spot for this work. It comes out of my “tree” period and was my first and only work to get to no.1 in the Olympus European Users Gallery.

I’ve been lucky enough to travel many miles overseas this year and visit some beautiful locations but, as things would have it, this work of a tree was taken less than a couple of miles from my home. 🙂

Reaching Out

You can also find it gathering dust on page 23 of my new book and in (another) quiet corner of my latest online exhibition. 🙂

Kind Regard,

And now for the video :)

December 29, 2018 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in art, Brussels, Corfu, Czech Republic, digital art, exhibition, Fine Art, Gallery, Greece, Leigh Kemp, Paintography, panoramic, photography, Prague, Praha, Rome, Travel | 3 Comments

Hi all,

I did a video promo tour featuring some of the works in my new online exhibition. https://artspaces.kunstmatrix.com/en/exhibition/218740/paintography-by-leigh-kemp

Kind regards

“Exposed to the Elements”

December 28, 2018 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in art, digital art, Fine Art, Leigh Kemp, Paintography, photography, Surreal, Travel | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

A painterly surreal work.

Best wishes,

My new virtual Gallery – “Paintography”

December 28, 2018 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in art, Brussels, Corfu, Czech Republic, digital art, Fine Art, Gallery, Greece, Leigh Kemp, Liverpool, Malta, Paintography, photography, Prague, Praha, Rome, Travel | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

My new gallery, featuring 37 of my recent works,

Exhibition catalogue pdf

Visit the gallery

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Best wishes,

New virtual gallery coming soon.

December 28, 2018 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in art, digital art, Fine Art, Gallery, Leigh Kemp, Paintography, photography, Travel | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

gallery coming soon.jpg

I’m hoping that this will bolt together nicely with my website and online artwork merchandise site.

Best wishes,

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 a few years ago 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 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.