I Photographed Thailand With A £5 Camera

I'm a professional photographer and people are always asking me about equipment rather than about 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 and with a bit of thought anyone can get great images with whatever equipment they have.

I bought a compact digital camera for £5 from Emmaus (a charity helping the homeless). The only stipulation I had was that the camera had to have a degree of control over the exposure. After taking the first few shots I realized that the camera, which was quite old, was struggling with anything other than sunlight. It was giving me a very long exposure 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.

I'm pleased with the results, they are definitely very different from the images I would have gotten with my expensive Nikon DSLR, but in many ways, I think they are better.

More info: timsimpsonphotography.co.uk