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the tide roll in, “I counted down 3-2-1, she
planted one on him, and I got it in one shot.”
The key word in that account: trust. “Shoot-
ing from the inside out, getting inside the ac-
tion, people are going to trust you, feel com-
fortable with you, and feel like you’re a friend.
At a wedding it’s easy for people to pick up
on that energy. I’m doing my job but I’m also
high-fiving moms and hugging dad and boogy-
ing on the dance floor. Friendships are made
and people remember you. At a destination
wedding you spend a couple of days with a
group of people, you build connections, and
that builds a circle of friends.”
Inevitably, that circle includes a couple
who will themselves someday become en-
gaged. Cooke met one such couple at a wed-
ding he worked in Calgary. “They were on
the dance floor and so loving, any photogra-
pher would love them,” he says. They used
one of his images for their Facebook profile
and made him one of their first calls upon
their engagement. Theirs was the wedding
he recently shot in Greece.
“Simple as that. I’m just me, I do what I
love. It took me years to be comfortable with
the idea that I could be different, do some-
thing extraordinary, and be me, embrace my
weirdness and my quirks, and the right peo-
ple will be attracted to that.”The guy with the camera
Photography is Cooke’s second career. Grow-
ing up in Halifax, he played with his dad’s
Kodak Instamatic and devoured National
Geographic. By high school, the camera was
his key to a social life ... and to kissing the
yearbook editor in the darkroom. In college,
“I was the guy with the camera,” he says. “I’d
walk around and talk to people and shoot
pictures.” But he never considered it a career.
He earned his degree in psychology and hu-
man resources and leveraged his flair for
computers into a career in information tech-
nology, working in the real estate division of
Bank of America in Charlotte, North Caro-
lina. WIth the home mortgage crisis in full
swing and a family that was growing, Cooke
left his job and he and his wife, Susie, moved
back to Nova Scotia in 2010.
He had continued photography as a hob-
by, purchased a Nikon D80, and discovered
the potential of digital photography. Why not
use it as a potential earner while looking for
his next career move. Cooke chose weddingyou watch; a book, you pause with each turn
of the page. “It invokes conversation about
that memory,” Cooke says.
Because Cooke spends so much time with
the wedding party leading up to the wedding
day, he forms personal bonds. This engen-
ders trust that manifests in some of his most
striking images. Case in point: the kissingcouple framed by an exploding wave. “We
were driving around the shoreline, I saw
the rocks and then saw the wave. I stopped,
watched, and timed the waves, checked the
rocks and saw that they were dry, and I
said, ‘Hey we can do this, and it will be an
amazing shot,’ and they said, ‘Cool, we trust
you.’” Cooke positioned the couple, watched