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Neil Maughan’s Morning
Cuppa has just won the 2011 Leslie Buss Trophy for Print
of the Year. Judge Rod Whelans, who gave a master class
commentary on the Valente Cup competition entries, said, of
all the very good prints entered into the competition, it was
his personal favourite. Morning Cuppa has also been accepted
in numerous International Salons of Photography
"Morning Cuppa" was taken in
2009. I put it into various Internationals and the Annual
Exhibition in the Cathedral. The Valente Cup was its first
"outing" in an internal Durham PS Competition.
I was inspired by something a
DPS colleague said to me some time ago about taking pictures
of family and decided to capture images of my father over a
period of time. To be frank, he's a photographer’s dream! It's
a long time since he was too bothered about his appearance and
often wanders around his house sporting scruffy jumpers and
looking as if he's just got out of bed. Add in the "tired"
fixtures and furnishings in his house and it's the perfect
backdrop for some good environmental pictures.
Typical of old pit men, he's
often making cups of tea and on this occasion I followed him
into his kitchen and stood in the entrance, ready with the
camera, in the hope he did something interesting. The best
thing was that, as usual when I've got the camera out, he
totally ignored me and just got on with making his pot of tea.
The tea pot is on the table behind him and he just suddenly
turned and started to sip the hot liquid in his cup. His face
is lit by natural light from a window on his left. There was
something about his expression and the way he looked up that
made me press the shutter button. I managed to get six frames
before he wandered past me.
The image I used was the
second one out of the six but images three, four and five are
also good but with slightly different expressions and angles.
I picked image 2 because as well as Dad's expression, I also
like the two flying fish ornaments on the wall and they are in
a great position in this image in the top left of the frame.
The original file is quite
underexposed and needs a fair bit of work to bring the best
out of it. I originally post processed it in CS4, then re-did
it in CS5 as the Raw Converter is, in my opinion, much more
advanced, which helps pull out more "quality" from the
original digital file. I've shown it in pure black and white
and also with a de-saturated effect, which is how it was
presented in the Valente Cup.
Taken on a Nikon D700, Nikkor
24-120 zoom lens (at the 24mm setting), 1/100 @f6.3, ISO 400,
no flash.
The project with my Dad
continues and the number of images I've got of him stacks up.
Some I'll use in Internationals, others will remain in my own
private collection.”
Neil Maughan
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