Author: dg28

I've been a full-time editorial & corporate photographer since 1986 and I'm still as passionate about the work now as I was then. These days I also write about photography, teach photography and act as a consultant on all things photographic - so, basically, photography is my professional life.

Why do YOU take pictures?

Most of this blog is about the professional side of photography but, like a lot of people who make their living taking pictures, there is a passionate enthusiast inside me too. From time-to-time I get a lot of emails from keen amateurs asking me how they can improve their photography. The first answer is always “take more pictures” but beyond that it really helps to know what you are taking photographs and who the audience for those pictures is.

©Neil Turner. November 2011, Branksome Beach, Dorset. This picture was taken as part of a set to illustrate why the BH13 post code area is such a desirable place to live.

Defining who your audience is and realising what their requirements are is a huge step towards becoming a better photographer – especially if you care about what others make of your work. Of course there are many among us who would profess that they only take pictures for their own enjoyment and who don’t really care what other people think. I’m sure that those people exist but they are an incredibly tiny minority. The rest of us want to share our work, get feedback on it and (hopefully) have praise heaped upon it.

A few years ago I wrote an essay entitled “Commission Yourself” as an early attempt to give some direction and purpose to photographers who had a desire to be out there taking pictures but who struggled with what, when and why they were doing it.

It doesn’t matter if you are a professional photographer, a keen amateur or a weekend and holiday compact user – shoot the best pictures that you can. It is all a matter of approach so here is how I suggest you try to take pictures. There are a number of things that a professional photographer knows long before he or she starts to take pictures. The pro knows who the client is, what the end use of the pictures will be and what they will be taking pictures of. This enables them to “focus” on the job ahead, an approach that can easily be translated into the type of photography you do.

The “client” could be your partner or your children and you know that the pictures are destined for the family album. The pictures might be of a child’s birthday party. Already you are starting to think in a far clearer manner and you can concentrate on making a list of the important images. You could, for example, need a range of images that would fit accross a double page in the album. You need a shot of the birthday boy – maybe a nice tight one. You need some pictures of the guests – perhaps a wider picture with three or four revellers in it. Some smaller images of a cake and other guests and something with a bit of humour. A total of five or six images, shot from different heights and some tight, some wide. To get five or six good images you will need to shoot at least thirty pictures and on a digital you have wasted nothing by trying different things. You can print images to different sizes and edit on screen adding captions as you go.

By deciding what your goals are in advance you will actually spend less time just snapping and hoping. Next time you will know how well you did and what worked in the framework you set yourself and adjust your self-commission accordingly. It is one of the great ironies in photography that tighter briefs often make better pictures. I have never been able to just “go and take photographs”, but if I am looking for a something specific I nearly always get what I want.

As you become a better photographer you can learn to recognise what you like about certain images and trying to shoot in a given style becomes a great way of finding your own. So go out and commission yourself tomorrow and if nobody is having a party try to document your garden or street. Pick out details and shoot the wide picture – you’ll soon have your own photo story in the can.

Of course it is equally true that there are people out there who don’t really care about what they shoot; they just want to own and be seen with some very cool and expensive gadgets. I have met so many people with cameras over the years who can quote the features of their kit as if they had learned the brochure by heart but who don’t actually like taking pictures. Each to their own.

Another tactic for becoming a better photographer is to analyse and even mimic the pictures that we see from other photographers. Shooting street scenes in the style of Henri Cartier-Bresson or portraits in the style of Terence Donovan can be a real creative spur and sooner or later you will develop your own spin on those styles and start to move towards having your own way of shooting. There are fashions in photography related to specific lenses that you can follow and there is a constant cycle of effects doing the rounds that you can analyse and adopt if you need more inspiration. It’s all out there waiting. Light, subject matter and composition – master being able to assess those three elements in other photographers’ work and you will be well on your way to being a much better photographer.

Grumpy old photographers’ charter

I do a lot of seminar and teaching work these days and one of my most popular presentations is about professionalism. The talk is aimed at new entrants to the profession but it seems to go down well with photographers who have been around a while as well. I have even delivered the same talk to a group of lawyers because actually replacing the word ‘photographer’ with ‘lawyer’ brings a lot of the meaning around to the central idea that, in many ways, professionalism is the same no matter what you do for a living.

©Neil Turner. March 2009, Bournemouth Beach

The final part of the talk is a bit of a dig at myself and my peers. Those of us who have been in the job for a long time and who might just be getting a little complacent about things. I call this part of the talk “The five worst habits of those of us who should know better”:

1. Harking back to a golden age that may, or may not, have existed

It’s a simple idea really – we all look back with slightly misty eyes at the time a few years ago when things were good and before something new came along to spoil everything. Take your pick from the use of colour in newspapers, the whole move to digital, the adoption of multimedia by newspaper websites and several other developments in the industry. The truth is that when I was just starting out there were a few photographers who complained about the arrival of 35mm film and the loss of their beloved Rolleiflex cameras and even one or two who bemoaned the passing of half plate cameras and dark slides with sheet film. I reckon that every photographer has a ‘golden age’ that they look back at and that you can calculate when that was for each of us using a simple formula which compares how long the photographer has been working with when they got their first big front page and divide it all by the first major change in the industry that they went through. There never was a true golden age was there?

2. Forgetting why we came into the job in the first place

Easy to do this… most of us had a desire to tell stories, create arresting and beautiful pictures and to make the world a better place with our photography. Very few of us did it for the money, not many of us did it so that we could play with ever more expensive toys and only a tiny number came into it so that they could work unsocial hours and have to chase clients for money the whole time. If you take a step back and think about your original motivation and it isn’t there any more you really need to make your mind up about whether this is still the business that you want to be in. The older I get, the more I feel the need to shoot pictures that I want to shoot just to keep myself sane and sharp.

3. Failing to keep up with new business practices

“I’ve always done it that way, why should I change now?” is a common lament from photographers who are in trouble of getting it wrong. From the way you buy and use equipment to the way you store your archive and from the way you word your invoices to the way you put your portfolio together should be the subjects of constant review and possible change. Technology affects every single aspect of who we are and what we do and anyone who decides to stop keeping themselves up-to-date with what is happening is consigning themselves to a parallel dimension where they may get some work but where that might  be a temporary state on the road to going out of business.

4. Throwing money and effort into the latest thing

Exactly the opposite of the last problem really. Keeping abreast of developments and knowing where the market is a good idea whereas automatically jumping on every new idea, fad or fashion is not. So many new developments turn out to be ideas that don’t stand the test of time and too many of us have invested too much time and money chasing them. The worst way to do this is to assume that somebody younger and hipper than you automatically knows what to do – that, in my experience, is rarely the case. There’s always a middle-aged geek who you can ask…

5. Letting professionalism slip

Another thing that is far too easy to do. I know that I’ve done it – mainly through over-confidence. You have to remember the maxim that “professionalism is everything we do, everything we say and everything we produce” in our working lives. You can get too close to clients, you can cut corners in your workflow and you can rely too much on automated systems. This is far from a full list but it illustrates the potential pitfalls when it comes to losing our professional edge.

Being a professional photographer is a fulfilling and interesting way to make a living but we all need to remember that it is a profession and not a lucrative hobby. I’ve been wracking my brains to come up with a clever and punchy pay-off line for this blog post but I’ve struggled. I’ll just content myself with some advice: when things are feeling tough and not all all like the ‘old days’ just remember the five worst habits of those of us who should know better and if that doesn’t help… get some help!

Beach huts in the winter

A few months ago I wrote about shooting a magazine feature about “walking with speed lights” and promised to say a bit more in time. well, a promise is a promise…

There are days when I just want to go out and take pictures. Most of the time it really doesn’t matter what I’m shooting – as long as I can get my teeth into making the pictures as good as they can be. Winter in the United Kingdom can be pretty un-inspiring and if, like me, you love shooting people outdoors it can be a tough job getting people interested in being out in the cold – especially when there’s a strong chance of getting wet and probably having to be wrapped up in unflattering bad weather gear. A few months ago, in preparing a ‘technique” piece for a photography magazine I decided to go for a walk. The thing that made this an unusual walk is that I took some flash gear with me – nothing too heavy, a couple of Canon Speedlights and a couple of lightweight stands in a simple sling bag – and I decided to shoot anything that I thought would look better with the addition of some off-camera flash.

©Neil Turner, November 2010 – Bournemouth, Dorset.

I tried lots of different pictures but it was this composition that made me happy. One of my favourite spots growing up was a small headland between Bournemouth and Christchurch called Hengistbury Head where there is a nature reserve and a path to some of the coolest beach huts on the planet. On a wet winters day you meet plenty of people walking their dogs and some very hardy bird-watchers.

Great locations are nice but I could have chosen to do this walk almost anywhere in the country and it would have been possible to take interesting pictures. When I’m in London I often walk the canal toe-paths or wander through Epping Forest to see what I can see. Location isn’t as important as the attitude that “something is going to catch my eye”.

The wooden chalets that line the spit are all painted in different colours and no two are alike. What I had wanted to do here was to use flash to make one hut stand out even more from the rest and so I walked along until I saw a very nice one in a muted yellow.

The “normal” exposure here would have been 1/200th of a second at f5.6 on 200 ISO but the skies would have been washed out and I couldn’t achieve my self-set goal. The trick here was getting enough power from two Speedlights to give me a flash exposure of f11 so that I could let the background and sky go two f-stops under exposed.

I found this hut with something right next to it where I could hide a flash. Just along the beach was a freshly painted blue hut that had its own tuft of grass – which was perfect cover for a couple of speedlights. With two flash units simply sitting in plastic bags on the sand and on ¼ power each I played around with composition and with angling the two flashes at different angles before coming up with one of my favourite images of the day. The exposure was 1/200th at f14 on 200 ISO and that allowed me to pick out the single hut better because the flash units were so close to it. The rules of flash fall-off mean that if something is two metres from the light source, and perfectly exposed, anything else that is four metres away will be exactly two f-stops underexposed which plays directly into the hands of anyone being creative with light.

Student work on show.

I’m very pleased to say that two of the students that I have been working with over the last year or so are showing some of their work in London over from tomorrow (Friday 27th April) until Tuesday 8th May. The work will be on the walls at Calumet Photographic’s Drummond Street showroom. The students have both now left the NCTJ Photojournalism course at Up To Speed in Bournemouth and are making their way into the industry.

©Deborah Yawetz

Deborah Yawetz – My interests are wide ranging; there is so much world to see, and people to walk in the shoes of! I enjoy news and wildlife photography: though seemingly different, both have a sense of immediacy, both are challenging and require patience, then finally responding to the moment. I have travelled a lot, most recently to Rwanda and the Serengeti.

I have published work in DV8 magazine in Bournemouth, Shed light events in London and a photo in the Daily ” Echo, Bournemouth. Work experience includes with Redactive publishing and The Times.

©Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright – I’ve worked on programmes for NGOs in the UK and in various African countries, and I saw a lot that never seemed to be documented by the media, or to donors. Combining this insight with recent editorial experience on the UK’s longest running environmental magazine, and of course the Photojournalism training, means I am well-placed to bridge the gap between theory and practice; truth and cliché; and do so in an informed, thoughtful way.

I am equally interested in finding homegrown stories: urban beekeeping and UK homelessness are two local stories I am working on. ” The power of storytelling to inspire and trigger change at whatever level – is ultimately what motivates my work.

You are invited to an exhibition featuring work by two new photographers from Friday 27th April until Tuesday 8th May inclusive.

  • Calumet Photographic, 93-103 Drummond Street, London, NW1 2HJ
  • ‘Meet the photographers’ evening on Thursday 3rd May, until 9pm, with drinks and nibbles.
  • The exhibition will be a chance to see a varied mix of work by two recently accredited NCTJ Photojournalists, and during the open evening, to chat more about their work and future projects.
  • More information: ejwainwright@gmail.com / 07841 529773

UK National Symposium on Photography 2012

The fourth National Symposium on Photography takes place this Friday, Saturday and Sunday in London. Timed to coincide with the World Photography Organisation Festival in London, the symposium will feature a very interesting range of debates and events.

I am going to be there, taking part in a panel debate about the future of news photography. The narrative for the debate on the UKNSP website says this:

The ethics of press and public photography, with particular reference to the implications of the Leveson Inquiry. At what stage does photography become harassment? Should there be controls? More broadly, where is the press heading in its use of photography? Should the press, citizen journalists, and members of the public all be treated the same or differently, whether in general or at newsworthy events? This panel discussion features a range of points of view – that of a photographer who gave evidence at the Leveson Enquiry, a leading picture editor and a champion of citizen photography.

It’s going to be a very interesting and maybe even passionate debate. This will be the third time in four years that I’ve taken part in the symposium and I firmly believe that it is developing into and very important event in the UK photography calendar. My fellow panellists are Alan Sparrow, Chairman of the Picture Editors Guild and Executive Picture Editor of Metro UK and Pauline Hadaway, Director of Belfast Exposed Photography and the debate will be chaired by Photographer Andrew Wiard.

The debate starts at 5pm on Friday 27th April at Somerset House in London. Tickets are available from Redeye or from the WPO.

Selling my EOS7D + BG-E7 grip

Selling great condition Canon EOS7D body + BG-E7 grip for £900.00 inc VAT

I am selling my Canon EOS7D body complete with BG-E7 grip. It has been a third/fourth body since new and has had light use because of that. The lure of the EOS5D MkIII is strong and I will be upgrading my MkII bodies later this summer. If you are interested in knowing more about this camera get in touch.

The selling price is £900.00 and that includes VAT. I have the original strap, instruction manual, charger and a single battery included with the camera or you can opt for the Op-Tech strap that I have been using it with. No boxes, no discs and no other cables I’m afraid.

The camera is in Bournemouth but I am regularly up and down the M3 on jobs and so may be able to make other arrangements.

The best lens for portraits?

On a photographers’ forum last week there was a lot of discussion about the best lens for portraits. Can of worms opened. Mac vs PC or Nikon vs Canon style debate well and truly started.

I have written before about portrait lenses and I won’t bore you with repeating my previous post (if you missed it, catch up here) except to say that when people ask this question they normally mean headshots or mug shots where the subjects head and shoulders will fill most of the frame.

©Neil Turner, February 2012. Bournemouth.

This portrait of a local artist was shot using an 85mm f1.8 Canon lens wide open but what lens should you use for this kind of picture. The debate will rage and answers anywhere between 85mm and 135mm (all measured on full-frame cameras) will be given, supported, doubted and even ridiculed. Most arguments that don’t get broad agreement also don’t have a simple answer. Sure there’s something lovely about the feel of a portrait shot on an 85 but what about the degree to which you have to invade the subject’s ‘personal space’ to get the composition? What about those 85mm lenses where the close focus isn’t good enough to get that bit tighter still? With a 135mm lens the personal space issues largely go away and the close focus issues almost always go away too – but is the effect as nice? Can you ever include something of the environment in those pictures? Would you even want to?

The actual answer (as always) is that it depends on you, your technique and your own taste in pictures. A few weeks ago I was looking back at some corporate headshots that I had shot and I had to tell another photographer on the other side of the world how I had shot them so that he could replicate them so that when his pictures and my pictures were printed on the same page nobody (hopefully) could tell that two photographers were involved. One of the things I needed to give him was the focal length of the lens used so I got the pictures, went through the EXIF data and noted it all down. I had used a 70-200 f2.8L lens and so the actual focal length was between 120mm and 130mm.

I was a little surprised that it was that long and so I grabbed a folder of images that I keep on my hard drive of corporate portraits to show prospective clients some examples of what I have done in the past and looked through the EXIF on those. These were pictures that, by definition, I really like and it quickly transpired that the tighter compositions were all shot between 120mm and 150mm on the 70-200. Again, quite a surprise – I had always seen myself as an 85mm lens user!

Well, one thing led to another and I decided to do a quick ‘audit’ of all of my favourite environmental portraits to see what lenses I have favoured. This was less of a shock because in the folder of 120 of my favourites the widest lens used was 16mm (on a 1.3x crop body, so we’ll call that 21mm for the purposes of this exercise) and the longest was a 300mm (on a 1.6x crop body which becomes 480mm in this context). There was a lot of bunching in the 35-45mm area and some more around the 120-150 area but the spread of focal lengths was otherwise pretty even – which pleased me greatly because it confirmed what I always say to others;

“There is no such thing as THE perfect portrait lens”.

This exercise is a bit time-consuming but it could have a lot of uses in professional photography. For example, anyone used to zooms wanting to buy a couple of prime lenses should think about going through the exercise to help them decide which ones would suit their style. Anyone wanting to know what lenses to replace as a matter of priority in these cash-strapped times could also benefit from a focal length analysis. The reverse is also true – a photographer who wants to change the way they do stuff could see what they normally shoot with and deliberately avoid those focal lengths. The possibilities are endless once you start to think and we can all do with a bit of style analysis from time to time. How we choose and use lenses has always been a preoccupation of mine and this exercise has helped me to rationalise that.

Indeed why stop there? EXIF data is amazingly useful and so you could also do an aperture comparison. My quick one revealed that I shoot a surprisingly large amount of pictures using three apertures f2.8, f8 and f22. In my sample, those three apertures accounted for over 50% of my pictures. I’m not sure what to make of it but I will work it out one day.

©Neil Turner/TSL. January 2008, London. 173mm focal length on a 1.3x crop body = 225mm

What started out as a simple answer to a simple question somehow turned into statistical analysis. Many people would say that is the exact opposite (they might even use the word antithesis) of what we, as creative people, should be doing. I have a lot of sympathy for that argument but, in a world where there are tens of thousands of great photographers vying for work, every little advantage we can eek out for ourselves and every piece of information that we have to work with could just be worth it’s weight in fluorite glass.

Capture One Pro and other workflows…

One of the subjects that I teach is workflow. I know that I’ve mentioned that before but I thought that I’d remind you of that when I explain why and how I have been learning all about Capture One Pro – the professional RAW conversion, tethered shooting and image enhancement tool from Phase One. I am on version 6.3.5 (the latest available) and this is the first time that I have seen it since version 4 a few years ago.

Principally designed to make the most of Phase One’s own imaging systems, it also works rather well with the whole gamut of professional file formats. I have been using it for quite a few days now and I thought that I’d post some thoughts on here.

Before I get down to my opinions on Capture One Pro I need to say that every piece of software that I’ve used has needed quite a long time to get used to and anyone who does “full reviews” based on a few hours of use is kidding both themselves and their readers. I also need to make it clear that I paid for this software and that I have absolutely no ties to Phase One.

I have now used Aperture, Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Canon DPP, Graphics Converter and a few others and Capture One Pro is probably the easiest of the lot to get to like. My knowledge of Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop has been gained over many years and many thousands of edits and it has only taken me a few days to feel almost as comfortable with Capture One. I’m still learning more and the more that I learn the more I like it. That isn’t always true of new software packages – even if you really want to like them…

The workspace that I'm currently using on a 15" MacBook Pro

I like lots of things about the way it works, about the interface and about how good the customer support and instruction manual are. Every time I think that I’ve found a flaw in the feature set of this software I search the knowledge bank or put a note on Twitter and there it is – the answer that tells me that everything I wanted was there all along. That is great but there seems to be one feature from Adobe Camera RAW that I use all of the time that isn’t there with Capture One Pro – good and accurate profiles of all of my Canon lenses ready to apply corrections.

My first impressions of the user interface centred around my inability to find the tools that I actually wanted. I knew that most were there because the literature told me they were and a very brief exchange on Twitter with the workflow genius that is Nick Wilcox-Brown let me know how to find them and add them to my custom user interface or “workspace” as the application calls it. Better still, you can create a range of custom workspaces and save them alongside the suggested ones for dual monitors, simple workflow, black & white or even a replica of the previous version (5) of the software. Being able to customise the workspace is not unique to this application but I believe that they have implemented it really well.

All of the adjustments and all of the options have easily controlled and finely adjustable controls (mostly sliders) and I found myself easing very quickly into the Phase One way of doing things.

Time for a short list of likes:

  • Customisable user interface
  • Easy to learn how to use
  • Extraordinary range of functions
  • Tethered shooting
  • Fantastic image quality
  • Value for money
  • Web contact sheets
  • Output of files to specific sizes

… and dislikes

  • Cannot find profiles for my Canon lenses
  • The sessions menus
  • Applying adjustment “recipes” seems hit and miss
  • The way that it handles IPTC metadata (I know that the sister app Media Pro does that better)
  • Speed of processing batches of files
  • Not recognising the simple tags that I can apply in camera or by using the ‘tag’ function in Photo Mechanic

That is a short list of dislikes and you have to actually use it to decide if you agree about the sessions menus – the way that Capture One likes to create a virtual time bubble for each job in much the same way that Aperture does by default. I may be doing something wrong when I’m trying to create, save and apply “recipes” which are a great idea (again shared with Aperture and others) that allow you to copy all of the adjustments that you have applied to one image to one or more others as well as keeping that set of adjustments for future use/adaptation. Sometimes the recipes worked and other times they didn’t.

My background is in news and editorial photography and IPTC metadata is a fundamental requirement for me and it forms a big part of my own workflow and the personal workflows of people that I work with when I’m doing coaching. Capture One Pro handles IPTC and is compliant with all of the IPTC fundamentals – it just doesn’t do it very well. The same can be said for quite a few image processing applications and I still love good old Photo Mechanic for the speed, accuracy and flexible way that it handles everything except RAW conversions and long term storage.

My final dislike is the speed when processing batches of files. On a two year old Apple MacBook Pro with an i5 2.4Ghz processor, 8GB or RAM it takes 50-60% longer to process a batch of 36 CR2 images from a Canon EOS5D MkII than Adobe Camera RAW inside Photoshop CS5 does. Individual files are shot through in almost the same time but batches are slower. I tried very hard to be scientific when comparing like with like but I am prepared to be proved wrong on this.

This isn’t really a full review – just some thoughts on an application that I am sure to have to teach very soon. Several people have already asked what advantages Capture One would give them over Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop and, to be honest, I couldn’t really name any. If you already use and are happy with either Adobe product for processing RAW files then it doesn’t really make sense to spend more money and get Capture One Pro. BUT (and it is a but worthy of being in upper case) if you are looking at designing a new workflow for news and editorial work from the ground up and you don’t already have licenses for anything else I would strongly recommend getting Capture One Pro and using it in tandem with Photo Mechanic. Between the two you have a solid, reliable and well priced set of options that will, without doubt, deliver the goods. That would leave you in need of an archiving option and for that Phase One’s Media Pro might be a good solution. There are those who’d argue that between the two Phase One applications you have everything you’d need and they would be right but there is no getting away from the fact that Photo Mechanic does what it does so well that it is worth the money and then some. The same goes for Capture One Pro too.