Jeff Coles ARPS DPAGB
ARPS Panel The Dark Side.
This panel represents the imagery of vivid dreams and nightmares.
The individual images portray the fleeting impressions of the dark side of our imaginations, the images are both strangely alluring and repellent.
It uses my original photographs, to create composite images, as part of the cohesion of the panel I have used a narrow set of component images,
I have used the minimum of computer generated components, where I have most have been rendered with my own photographic textures.
My intention is to take digital imaging, beyond photographs digitally enhanced for effect,
to produce images that explore the very thin line between photography and art.

This Panel of images has gained me a bit of a reputation as a dark character within the club, I would like to promise the members that after eighteen months of creating images of dreams and nightmares I might be cured, but nothing is for sure.

As I have said this is eighteen months of work, I started by attending a RPS workshop taking my DPAGB panel and a few other images fishing for a direction to work in.
The advisors selected a few and suggested I might have the start of a theme to develop.
From there it was straightforward, I had to produce fifteen images that fitted the theme and worked together to make a panel.
As you can see I do use photography as the base components of my images but the composition and feel of each image is created in photoshop. In most cases I will work from one element of a picture and design the final image around it, usually going out to take pictures to complete the image.

Then I spend a disgusting amount of time in photoshop putting the final image together.

I tried a small number of my images out at club competitions and with a few magazines to gauge the reaction to them, with a number of successes I felt that I was not taking the images to far away from photography.

I attended a RPS assessment day to understand how the panels are judged and get a feel for how scrutinised the images would be, the images are looked at very close up, so print quality and in my case digital techniques have to be spot on, they expect excellent quality.

Finally I attended another workshop with my finished panel and a few extra possible images to get a fresh opinion, this proved a valuable experience and I made one final change to my panel.

All that was left was to fresh mount the images and wait for the day.

The rest is all now history with my panel being assessed in the afternoon receiving enthusiastic remarks from all of the assessors and getting a unanimous vote.

This leaves me looking forward to working toward a FRPS with what I hope will be a lighter theme.

I would like to thank all the members of OPS, who supported me on the day and offered valuable advise and opinions on my panel.

 

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