Nia: What's the story behind your collection? Where did this interest start?

Seimon: About ten years ago, I went to France to take photographs for a book and saw a lot of costumes that people wore to celebrate 50 years since the end of the Second World War.

Nia: Is the history important or the clothes or a combination of both?

Seimon: A combination of both, definitely. I've a lot of stuff that you don't even know who used to wear them but because they come from a certain era, you know that there's a certain history behind them and you can't take that away from them. So, over the years, the collection has developed but the collection's history has developed too.

Nia: American army clothing

Nia: Doctor's helmet and you can see a dent in the helmet where he's had a knock but I wouldn't like to think what hit him either but it does tell a story.

Nia: Seimon has to own props such as this knife for his work.

Nia: Original goggles

Nia: A camera which still works

Nia: This suit is amazing. It's only when you see something like this close up, that it hits you that a real person had actually worn this and had probably experienced the horrors of war. There's a number on the suit which relates to who the person was, so if I wanted I could find out who they were, what their history or background was and quite possibly how their life ended.

Nia: As the years go by, the war clothes have increased in value. To avoid damage to the clothes, Seimon uses copies of the original clothes which give the actors much more freedom to re-create a more realistic scene.

Seimon: This jacket was new but by using a blowlamp and sandpaper, I gave the impression that the jacket was older than it actually was. It wouldn't be worth anything to me if it looked like one that had come straight out of a factory, I have to give the new clothes some character and if it means damaging them to some extent, that's what I have to do. I've been offered a lot of money for this jacket because people think it's an original one, but it's only about two years old.

Nia: Seimon has worked with big names such as Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks on a number of films and tv series. His expertise in helping them is to ensure the factual accuracy of the clothes and a feeling of reality.

Seimon: When I worked on 'Band of Brothers', you saw the extras coming in wearing the German clothes and suddenly enough there was some air of authority about them, and maybe their attitude changed slightly.

Seimon: Rhodri (actor) has helped me with documentaries and photoshoots. He's become familiar with the feel of the clothes, he looks the part. To me, he can give me the look I need and I hope that I create the most realistic shot possible.

Nia: What kind of a feeling is it to wear original war clothes? Quite a lot of history to them isn't there?

Rhodri: Yes, and it's something I enjoy doing. I try to get into the part and imagine the situation so that can be quite a difficult feeling.

Seimon: I have an interest in the people that used to wear the stuff, I have an interest in their backgrounds as young guys that used to go off to war. I've no interest in guns or anything like that but that's not important. What I'm trying to re-create is a feel of war time using the appropriate costumes to re-create shots that fit in with my work as a photographer for a magazine in America.

Seimon: A number of years ago in a wedding, I met this American gentleman called Jim Hallow who was based in Britain during the Second World War. A couple of months after I'd met him, my friend bought an uniform for me and in the pocket of the uniform there was a picture of a guy called Lester Duggan. It turned out that this guy had shared the same plane journey as the guy I'd met, so I could put both back in touch as they hadn't seen each other since the Second World War.