Rob Whiteley

Rob Whiteley, originally from Leeds in Yorkshire, England, has enjoyed photography for well over four decades, since he first received a Kodak Brownie 44a 35mm camera as a child, for his birthday. The choice of aperture on that device was limited to two fixed settings of f/11 and f/16 and an even smaller choice of only one shutter speed – 1/40th sec!
Rob studied the now lost art of developing photographic film and its very unforgiving creative applications (one roll of film – no mistakes tolerated) at the Harrogate Institute of Photography in the 70’s – and began to cultivate the ability to frame each photograph so that very little, or no cropping would be required in the darkroom. Thus each shot was constructed through the lens first (or viewfinder at that time) which meant that still life applications tended to be the order of the day due to the set up time for each picture.
Sometime later, Rob progressed to a Polaroid One-Step instant camera (everyone had one – right?) – which kept him out of the dark room, but definitely sacrificed his “post-click” creativity.
Nowadays, a digital SLR is the bread and butter of his photographic repertoire and, armed with a post-click photoshop software package, he has fun creating “pop cultur...