Featured Photographer #41: Parinya Veeraputtaragul
My name is Parinya VeeraputtaraguI, I am an ordinary 34 year old guy living in Buriram, Thailand. Thank you for the honorific opportunity to be able to share my story today.
What do you do when you don’t have a camera in your hand? I am working as managing director at Kubota tractor authorized dealer showrooms in Satuek, Buriram and part time working on my design projects. At night I usually listen to music and there are 2-3 times a month that I spend at home developing photos, scanning & cropping them, so I can share them on my social networks. Drawing and sketching is another thing I do.
What did you want to become in your childhood and are you that person today? As a child I wanted to become plenty of things until the 8th grade, when I realized that what I really want to be is an architect. 5 years later, I am studying architectural design in Silpakorn University. Afterwards I have to come back to my hometown to help out my family’s business. So, now I am Architect/MD at Kubota tractor authorized dealer showrooms in Satuek, Buriram, Thailand.
When is the first time a fired the shutter? I cannot find an answer to that. What I can find are a couple of photos of my brother and sister that are out of focus or have really bad composition and came from a “low eye” view … that must have been a creation of mine.
Where did you meet photography or where did photography meet you? It all started around 2000 when I was in 11th grade. I had the opportunity to be one of those exchange students in Brisbane, Australia for a year. While there, I took an apply-art class where the art teacher was kind of nice and she really helped me out on everything I needed. In that Art class there was some equipment that I’ve never seen in my life before and I hadn’t got a clue what are they used for. Afterwards I learned what are they used for and I was lucky I still had some periods left in my week timetable so I signed in that class. There are so many things I learned from those 2 hours per week, so much more than the total sum of other 5 classes gave me.
That is the beginning of how I became another “film-a-holic” nowadays.
What’s your experience with digital photography and why don’t you use it more in your work? I used to always use a digital camera for all my trips but I ended up with not learning much about photography at all, because of the unlimited shots you can get out of a memory card. And I didn’t think much about how to frame it too, because of the zoom lens, plus you can see all your photos right away. As a self-teaching photographer that is an important thing to me. With a film camera it is the opposite — plus film photography is more fun and kind of has a magical touch that only film does. When you shoot film, what you need to set is aperture, shutter speed and composition, it’s that simple. I don’t mind using a digital camera, if there is one that can keep me learning more about photography like an analog camera and I think I found one.
What photographers habit distracts you most on you personally and what distracts you most in other photographers? I think there’s too much post-processing, the way you retouch one photo into another, or one of those things.
Have you ever got yourself in trouble? I have got yelled at once while I tried to correct the exposure setting by pointing at the similar light value area, as I was pointing at one of the shop’s interiors when the shopkeeper happened to see me doing that and it all led to a misunderstanding. There are definitely some distances that the photographer should take in consideration, such as privacy, personal space and final composition. For the first 3 months, when I started using an analog camera, I didn’t have a light meter other than the one with my Leica M6.
Usually I cut those distances by smiling & talking to the person first, or I point the camera away from my subject when I’m correcting the setting, my focus or using hyperfocal focus mark on the lens. What I normally do is setting up the frame and then I wait for the object to pass into the position I have anticipated.
What attracts you to the work you shoot? As for me, in photography there are two kind of photos. First one are photos that contain “LIFE”, such as documentary, family and street photography. Content in these photos are expressions or feelings of people, animals and things that are really there, they’re not set up. They have a story. It gives you a feeling of that atmosphere that is in the photos. It’s pulling you into it. It’s a coincidence.
The other ones are the photos that contain “HOPE”, like those commercial posters or those you usually see on facebook (not all of them though, just some). These photos contain content that usually looks nice. Maybe a little bit too much of what you want it to be. It makes you want to have them or makes you want to be one of them. It’s pushing those feelings into you.
I am in both groups, maybe 70% of “Life” & 30% of “Hope”.
What do you want to achieve? What I try to achieve are those “Life” kind of photos and a happiness from the process of taking them plus more skills out of shooting thousands of them. My weaknesses is that I’m not so good on post-processing them and that I don’t really have the time to do that part for my photos. I alway try to understand and remember the mistakes that I did with my recent shots. I never stick to the perfect exposure values that I read from my camera’s light meter — I like to under- or over-expose them a bit. I hope you guys could tell me more about it. I took them because I feel like I needed to take them and because of the feeling at the moment alone. Just wanted to capture life and all those feelings in my mind with it.
What’s in your camera bag? All my gear, I never bring them all of them out, too much to carry around. I usually use the new gear more often than other in the first month and Lumu comes along with me every time I go out of my house for more than 2 hours with or without intention to take photos.
In my opinion, you don’t really need the most expensive gear to capture the beautiful. The good gear with a reasonable price tag will do. There is many “iPhonography” too and it looks really nice. But for me it just happens to be the RF that small enough to throw it in my bag that I carry around. That’s also why the 35mm summilux v2 comes in handy. Sometimes I bring out the Rolleiflex 2.8E, Hasselblad 500c/m or Yashica mat 124G for the weekend and for those situations I like the Lumu light meter. Actually, I bring the Lumu with me all the time.
This is a story about myself. Hope you guys are having fun with your photography life so you could continue doing that until the end of the world. Then I will be waiting to check out your story.
Let’s me know what are your thoughts of my blog post or of my work. I would love to have any kind of a chat about photography or camera gears.
— Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrparinya/
— Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrparinya/
— Email: mrparinyav[at]gmail[dot]com
