Moments in Life, David F Cooke

DISTINCTIONS MOMENTS IN LIFE

DAVID F COOKE FRPS

None of the images in my FRPS Panel is posed. My work is ‘street photography’ in the sense that I go out with a camera and take candid photographs of people doing what they do rather than posing for the camera.

I find this kind of photography very engaging. It is challenging and exciting to go out with the camera and not know if you are going to capture anything worthwhile. As nothing is set up or prearranged, you are completely dependent on chance.

However, my aim is to take candid shots which tell a story and I want to create images with an ‘artistic’ feel to them which could be considered as ‘Visual Art’ images.

For me, the image I get in the camera is almost a working drawing or a sketch, which then needs to be developed into the final work.

THE FRPS

My Fellowship panel is based on a body of work which I built up between March 2009 and April 2014. Most of the images were taken on holiday as this was the time when I had most opportunity to spend time in situations where I was likely to capture useful images.

Sometimes, I saw a scene which I thought would make a good background for a successful image and I waited for something to happen. For example, in ‘Lifestyles’ where I saw the shop and the bike leaning against the window and I stopped in a shop doorway opposite waiting for the right juxtaposition of people coming down the street, and ‘The Man in the Passageway’ where I waited in the passageway.

At other times, it was a matter of seeing a fleeting moment and capturing it before it was too late as, for example, in ‘Down’ and ‘The Man on the Bus’. To do this, I set up my camera as a ‘point and shoot’. Normally, I shoot using a focus point in the centre of the screen. I try to leave enough space around the subject to allow for cropping to get the final composition. I use aperture priority, normally with an aperture of f/2.8 to f/4 to help to isolate the subject from the background. The ISO is set to Auto with a minimum shutter speed of 1/250 and a maximum ISO of 3200. I use matrix metering but I set the

Function Button to centre weighed so that the metering can be changed quickly, if necessary.

As is normal in developing the panel, I went through several versions from that submitted to the Initial Advisory Day I attended in December 2012 to the final successful panel. My Fellowship in Visual Art was awarded in May 2015.

CHALLENGES

The main challenge in presenting my images as a Fellowship panel was to make it cohesive. The people in the pictures were different and the situations were unrelated.

It is also a very loose project, not like others I could have chosen. For example, my ARPS project on the Church of St Thomas the Martyr in Bristol, which was more clearly defined as it involved exploring the play of light and shade both inside and outside a specific building.

One of the ways I achieved the necessary consistency for the Fellowship panel was in the processing and presentation.

DEVELOPMENT

I worked on images on an individual basis – doing what I thought that image required to make it as I wanted it to be. This is not the best thing to do for a cohesive panel but there is a common theme in the filters that I ended up using.

One I used a lot is Nik ‘Glamour Glow’, which I used to give a slightly ethereal feel to many of the images. Another was Nik ‘Viveza’ to change the lighting to the way I wanted it.

Also, I used textures if I felt that they enhanced the image. For example, in ‘The Couple’, I included a texture created from a photograph I took of a damaged wall in the Church which was the subject of my ARPS submission. The Texture was positioned so that the crack down the wall ran diagonally between the couple to indicate a lack of communication between them.

There was also uniformity in presentation: the colours are muted, and there are often textures applied. All the images are square in format.

Many images have been retoned from their original

STATEMENT OF INTENT

My main photographic interest is in making images of people going about their everyday activities, rather than posing for the camera. I find this kind of photography very engaging. It is challenging and exciting to go out with the camera and not know if you are going to capture anything worthwhile. As nothing is set up or pre-arranged, you are completely dependent on chance. I try, though, to produce images with an artistic flair rather than just being records of existence. To achieve this, I use digital manipulation to help produce the feeling that I want in them. My panel aims to show moments in the lives of different people presented in an artistic way.

version to help the cohesiveness, for example, ‘The Lady in White’. ‘The Escape’, was reworked and retoned as the feedback I had was that the treatment was inconsistent with the other images in the panel.

I didn’t always sit down and say ‘this is what I need to do’. Sometimes it was obvious but more often than not the images developed as I went along. An example of this is ‘The Encounter’. This was taken in a store in Florence. There was a beautiful staircase made of steel and glass and I really liked the reflections and being able to see the people going up and down the stairs. I took several shots and chose this one because of the way the woman was framed in the gap and the because of the legs of the man coming down the stairs, which I thought made a good composition. As I was working on it, the title ‘The Encounter’ came to mind as it implies a relationship between the man and the woman, which may or may not exist.

CONCLUSION

This was not an easy project because it is rather loose and something tighter, like my ARPS project on a Church, would have been easier.

I chose it, though, because I was particularly interested in capturing these transient moments and I felt passionate about meeting the challenge of making a consistent panel out of disparate subjects.

Fortunately for me, the panel was accepted but even if I had not succeeded, despite the undoubted real sense of disappointment I would have felt, I learned so much and my photography developed so much that it would have been well worth it.

Down

Find out more

You can see details of David’s distinctions and many of his international acceptances, together with the original images and notes of how the final images were created, on his website: www.davidfcookephotography.co.uk

The Escape (before reworking and retoning)

Opposite page, clockwise from top-left: Down, Gelateria del Teatro, Grumpy, Silence Please The Lady in White (before retoning)

Clockwise from top-right: The Lady in White, The Escape, The Man on the Bus, Lifestyles, The Couple