AV News 184 - May 2011
Peter Coles, His passion for photography & AV - in his own words
Peter has been taking photographs for over 60 years. He started with a
posh-looking Italian-job camera which was really just a simple box camera but
it did look good! Then his grandma contributed towards a proper camera on the
understanding that he would never take her photograph; but he did anyway and
also surprised a lot of folk, including himself in 1956-7 when some of his images
adorned the walls of Leeds University because he had won several Awards.
Peter was supposed to spend most of his time reading Chemistry but he did
play a lot of football as well as taking pictures. In 1957/8 Peter’s Education
thesis for his Dip Ed involved a sort-of-one-projector-AV on 'The Jewish
Religion in Leeds', which gained him a distinction, probably because even
university lecturers would prefer to look at pictures than read too many words,
even though they had to set up a projector and tape recorder to do so! So the
proper camera, this time an Irish-job called a Corfield Periflex, was standing
him in good stead. Fancy the Irish being famous for cameras! It was, indeed,
the first camera to use multi-coated Lanthanum glass and was probably the
forerunner of the mass-market single-lens reflex camera, as it had a periscope
which dipped in to the field-of-view to ensure accurate focussing. One of
Peter’s Grandma-pictures, appeared five decades later in an AV called 'What I
Call Love'. This is also the title of Peter’s first published book of Poems.
Peter married Enid in 1958 and taught Chemistry in two Grammar Schools
in Bradford. He set up a Photographic Group in his second job as Head of
Chemistry at Thornton Grammar School. One of his 'pupils', John Robinson, is
now a member of Leeds AV Group! Another, John Baruch, a Professor in
Bradford University is, amongst other things, in charge of a degree course in
Digital Imaging.
Peter then went on to teach teachers at Loughborough. He was also invited
to take part in a lecture tour of Northern Universities and so, once again his
trusty Periflex came in useful as his topic for the lectures was 'Teaching
Chemistry with Models'! Sadly, these were not the cat-walk sort of models but
molecular models! Loughborough, seemed like an easy job to him: four
lectures a week and walking round a couple of practical sessions talking to
students about what they were doing, but then came a revolution when,
suddenly, Loughborough College had to find a way of teaching a few hundred
students 'Materials Science' with only one Physical Science lab. So Peter
volunteered to teach them via closed-circuit television. This entailed designing
the lectures, demonstrations and audio-visual aids and controlling three
television cameras at the same time as giving the lectures. This proved to be
fascinating but exhausting work, particularly as to make ends meet for his
growing family (Enid had produced three in under three years!), Peter spent
most weekends taking photographs of horses jumping over fences at
numerous venues throughout the land for a local entrepreneur to sell to them,
to the horse-riders not the horses! Peter tried cine for a short while to record his
children growing up, but he soon found that the quality of image was
disappointing and so it was back to 35mm.
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