Jan Bainar

Jan Bainar

Jan Bainar is young photographer from Czech Republic. His main focus in on Central European wetlands. He is very interested in environmental issues. Works in financial advisory.

janbainarphotography.com

Tim Parkin

Amateur Photographer who plays with big cameras and film when in between digital photographs.

Flickr, Facebook, Twitter

Can you tell me a little about your education, childhood passions, early exposure to photography, etc.?

I took up photography some day during the autumn of 2006. I remember my older brother bought Panasonic DMC FZ50. He was inspired by our uncle Dalibor who is a keen technician and has been into photography since the 1990s. My brother probably was not so much into photography itself, but rather into the technical part of cameras and stuff, so he didn´t really shoot that much. Meanwhile, I, being in the first year of grammar school at that time, started to borrow my brother´s camera more and more often.

I was 12 years old, had a speech defect and felt like an outsider in a new class in my school. So I kept borrowing the camera and every day after the school I headed into the River Odra Basin natural protected area. It is a lowland floodplain area, not even a national park, but it is located very close to my hometown of Studénka, a suburb town of Ostrava city, which is the third largest and most industrial city in the Czech Republic. I was always inspired by nature since my early childhood. Our family lives in a house with a huge, beautiful garden with an apple orchard and a small forest. Furthermore, as I mentioned, there is Odra Basin 10 minutes walk from our doorstep, so I spent a lot of time there, ever since the day my parents had taken me there before I could walk.

What are you most proud of in your photography?