Welcome - Updated Aug 2019

This website has evolved over many years and has now been "tamed" to display my ever expanding image collection. I am also providing space for items that need to be archived such as the diaries from my croft in the Scottish Highlands.

Images from my many years in Antarctica are here as well the Scottish Highlands. My main interest (now) is flower photography so there are several albums to peruse. I also have a growing collection of fauna.

Many years ago I started to digitise my Antarctic image slide collection and I think I ended up scanning around 8000 from over 10,000. It took months but at least I have a digital record should anything happen to the slides. There are about 600 on this site and I will add more in the future.

Many of my images now feature on a couple of stock libraries iStock (Getty Images) and 500px. I am ever hopeful that some may sell...Putting all my images on this single website will make it easier for people to find my work and save switching between multiple sites. It is also cheaper as I have amalgamated 3 sites so far.

Anyway please have a look round and if you want further information please contact me.

Over 1500 images on this site !!

Pat Cooper

Retired engineer, served in the REME for 12 years and with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) for 27 years. My time with BAS ranged from 2 years living in an ice shelf at Halley, about 10 Antarctic summers with the airborne survey and countless science cruises on the RRS James Clark Ross.

I retired briefly in 1999 to my croft in the Scottish Highlands but rejoined BAS a couple of years later - ran out of money. Retired again in 2007 and opened an Arts & Crafts shop in Kinlochbervie near the croft. Sold up everything in 2014 and moved to Shrewsbury and now Bridgnorth.
Enough travelling I think !.

When I moved down I managed to retain a lot of the equipment used to produce sublimation and other items. Having retired (properly) I don't want to start another business but would like to make use of the systems. I will add a section just to highlight the sort of things I can make and will be quite happy producing items for your local Art Group, Choir etc.

Please contact me:

patcooper@microft.co.uk

**Still migrating images, some links may not work**

Products

I used the shop in Kinlochbervie to sell a whole range of gifts, many of them featuring my own photography. I had been visiting the Highlands for over 12 years prior to moving up and slowly built up a good collection of local images.

As well as ordinary prints I started to produce sublimation items such as coasters, table mats, bookmarks, mugs etc which sold really well. However after running the shop for 3 years single handed I rarely managed to get out with the camera so the same pictures had to be recycled. Not a real problem but trying to find unused images for the calendars was a challenge.

In addition to my "normal" photography I started to use a technique called "Stacked Focus". Essentially it is a method of capturing close-ups of flowers etc but ending up with the whole flower in focus from front to back. This is impossible with a single image.

The capture was quite tedious as I had to take a picture, move the camera forward by 0.5mm and take another. This could take over an hour. All the images were "stacked" and only the bits in focus kept. Eventually the whole image is produced.

There a many examples in the Flowers section.

All images copyright Pat Cooper