You don’t need to be a professional photographer to take great looking pictures; in fact you don’t even need to be a professional photographer to have your own exhibition. ‘Through the lens’ is an exhibition for amateur photographers Helen Plant and Phil Green, both of whom are members of Southampton’s ‘Camera Club’.

Having no formal qualifications in photography and being completely self-taught, both Helen Plant and Phil Green have been awarded a Distinction by the Photographic Alliance of Great Britain.

Helen Plant says about her love of Photography:

I am fascinated by the shapes, colours and textures of nature in close-up as well as on occasions a more abstract approach to the wider landscape.

My preference is for subtle colours and lighting and relatively simple compositions.

Both Phil and Helen use digital cameras, though Phil Green says his love of photography stems from the traditional SLR camera.

Most of my photographs are of nature subjects taken within twenty miles of home. I cover my local patch with an emphasis on the welfare of my subject. This is a major factor and one of which I am fiercely proud.

The ‘Through the lens’ exhibition begins on June 28.

Photography, by its very nature, is a visual medium. It’s the capturing of an image on film using light reacting with chemicals. It’s all about the visuals, the look, the composition, the colours and the tones.

It might surprise you to know then that an exhibition of photography with a difference took place in the Ukraine recently. This exhibition was different because the photographs were actually for the blind.

The photographs use a unique piece of software that takes a photographic image and traces over the lines in the detail. It then manages to create an embossed version of the picture so that it can be touched, and experienced.

This makes the photos ideal for the blind to experience because they are able to follow the embossed lines with their fingers and ‘see’ the image as though it were written in Braille.

You can see examples of the art on the BBC website.