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.

Vic Reeves portrait – the “contact sheet”

No sooner had I posted the folio photo of comedian Vic Reeves than I received an email asking to see more of the set. I have all of my work from that period backed up and catalogued and so it was really easy to lay my cursor on them. How to display them was less obvious. WordPress has plenty of gallery and slide show options but I wanted something a bit more “old school”  something like a contact sheet.

©Neil Turner/TSL | May 2006

The final edit of 18 images that were submitted. This job was slightly unusual for me because there are no upright images – everything was landscape because the magazine double page had already been laid out with the copy written, headline in place and the designer was just waiting for my pictures to be slotted in and sent to the plate makers. I have always had a soft spot for frame 004 but the page went with a slight crop of 015. I actually shot about 80 frames on the job but I’m afraid that even I don’t keep everything.

If this page gets some “likes” and positive comments I will see if I can find the time to do a few more things in a similar vein.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses. Lumedyne Signature series flash and a 23″x24″ Chimera soft box.

Fun picture: stray apostrophes, London.

When the news broke that UK booksellers Waterstone’s were going to drop the apostrophe from their logo to “make things simpler” the story was greeted with a mix of horror, outrage and cynicism. I was part of the cynical camp: what better way to get your company on the news than to pull a stunt like that? Leak a story that you might be about to do something and then sit back and watch it go viral and, more importantly, go viral amongst the very people who would be your core market. It was either brilliant, fortunate or (the least likely in my view) a genuine story.

©Neil Turner/TSL | London | October 2003

I was reminded of the last time that I was involved in a “stray apostrophe” outrage story. Back in 2003, yet another report on the use of punctuation in grammar singled out signs and posters for special criticism and so I was asked to go and find some examples. For a city reputed to have “thousands” of examples I struggled and it wasn’t until I was in the second hour of driving around looking that I finally found this gem on a secondhand video, DVD and CD shop near King’s Cross. The shop was on a one way system with almost no chance of stopping and very little parking nearby but I was desperate and so I went around again, found a parking meter and shot some pictures of the sign. The cafe next door was also the perfect place to have a quick coffee and send my pictures. Job done.

Compose the picture and then wait

I have a folder full of images on my hard drive that I use for teaching. They aren’t always my best work but they help to illustrate a point better than others from my portfolio. This is a perfect example of that idea.

Sometimes you can see the potential for a picture but the picture isn’t happening. This is a common issue for news photographers who have to shoot pictures to go with stories about something quite specific but aren’t allowed to set a lot of shots up. This picture was to go with a very small story about an art exhibition that had been put on by some young female artists on a very tight budget. The venue was a shopping centre (mall if you are from the USA) and I could see that some human interaction with the work was the best way to cover it. I grabbed a tripod from the car and stuck my camera on it. Composing the frame was pretty easy and all I had to do was wait for the right people to walk past and look at the work. People came along and I tried various shutter speeds to get some blur in order to keep the ‘focus’ of the story on the art. Soon I was happy with my plan (1/10th of a second at f4.5 on 200 ISO) and I waited, shooting frames as people came past in ones, twos and threes.

©Neil Turner/TSL | London | October 1999

I could see these two women with very similar pink in their outfits coming. I could see that they were in perfect step and so the plan went from the occasional frame to a full burst (about 3 frames a second in those days) and got this shot. Of course I did a few more but the deep joy of those early digital SLRs was that you had great confidence in what you saw on the rear LCD.

The idea remains one that I use over and over again. I see pictures and I compose them around what’s there and then I just have to be patient and wait for someone or something to come along and complete the photograph. You can see the same idea here in an old post about walking with speed lights which has pictures taken a lot more recently!

For those who love detail, this was shot with a Kodak DCS520 camera (1.9 megapixels of class) and a Canon 17-35 f2.8L lens at the 35mm end of the range perched on a Manfrotto 055 tripod (which I still use).

Keeping it simple

The text books will all tell you that there are a number of rules for composing a photograph (or a painting for that matter) and it isn’t a bad idea to follow these rules 90% of the time. Working on a newspaper has taught me that simple compositions often work the best and that there are several ways of keeping it simple. One of my favourites is to work with a small depth of field. The human eye will always be drawn to the subject that is in sharp focus with a simple out of focus background. Usually this will mean that the background doesn’t contribute to the image, but every so often an out of focus background forms a really important part of the image.

©Neil Turner/TSL | Southampton | August 2001

This picture of three year old boy at a nursery school learning about some creatures that had been brought into the school is a perfect illustration of how throwing the background out of focus gives an enormous boost to the composition and helps to tell the story of the image. The chameleon is in focus, but because the lens (180mm on a 70-200 f2.8 zoom) was wide open at f2.8 the boy becomes an interesting blur. The added 1.6x focal length multiplication brought no change in the depth of field but narrowed the angle down to a 35mm equivalent of 288mm. On this particularly sunny day that meant a shutter speed of 1/4000th of a second on 200 ISO.

Techniques are there to be used, altered, modified and adapted. This one should become really useful to you once you have mastered it. When you are struggling to make an interesting composition it’s always worth considering narrowing your depth of field.

Vocabulary of photography

Language is an ever-evolving thing and a quick search for a famous quote on the nature of language brought up two very interesting thoughts. The first is accredited to Karl Albrecht – a German latter day renaissance thinker (I wish it were the co-founder of Aldi who had the same name)

“Change your language and you change your thoughts.”

This is an important idea when, as press photographers, we are trying to get the world, the rest of the media and the Leveson Inquiry to think about photographers differently. Words like paparazzi have been liberally used during the inquiry and by commentators about the inquiry. Fellow journalists and even some of our peers regularly use the words snap, snapper and snapped to talk about our work. As long as this kind of unhelpful vocabulary carries on being used we are almost bound to carry on having a problem. We are photographers, we take photographs and what we do is photography. Get a thesaurus out and there are plenty of other words that can be used (with increasing degrees of pompousness). It seems likely that it is up to us to start the ball rolling. It is one thing to use slang terms within the tight confines of our profession but an entirely different thing to propagate them elsewhere.

As professionals we owe it to ourselves and our colleagues to change our own vocabulary and to correct everyone else who falls into the lazy trap of using short snappy terms that are just not accurate. Take last Saturday’s Times for example. On the front page of one of their sections they had a line about “What really happened when Beaton snapped the Queen”. Did Sir Cecil Beaton really “snap” anything? The Victoria and Albert Museum, a cultural institution that would claim to respect photography has on their shop website a line about the same photographer saying that after her 1953 Coronation

“(he) snapped the Queen in all her coronation finery.”

As long as what we do is trivialised in this way we are going to have an uphill struggle. A couple of other searches on the web brought up equally depressing quotes – this one comes from a careers website www.allaboutcareers.com and their description of the job “Press Photographer”:

“Press photographers are employed by newspapers, magazines and other print and web publications. These snap-happy professionals are tasked with recording images of current events to support news stories or taking interesting photos to emphasise the point of featured articles.”

We could go on but that would only serve to labour the point. It is hard to think of another profession whose work is so universally undervalued, whose work is widely misunderstood and about whom the vocabulary used is to pejorative.

One final note: whilst looking for quotes about language I found this one attributed to Federico Fellini – the man credited so widely with the origins of the term “paparazzi”;

“A different language is a different vision of life.”

Our language is a very visual one but occasionally even we need to resort to words to make our point. If we aren’t careful, the rapid evolution of the English language will leave us behind and the regular and repeated use of poor and inaccurate phrases will become “correct”.

Folio photo #12: Vic Reeves, Kent, May 2006

©Neil Turner/TSL, May 2006

Comedian and writer Vic Reeves (aka Jim Moir) photographed in the back garden of his home in Kent on the day that he and his wife were moving out. We had to shoot in the garden because the house was full of removal men, boxes and the controlled chaos and stress that goes with moving house. He was the complete and consummate professional and I greatly enjoyed photographing him for a feature that was about his time at school. His biography of his early life was just being published as the feature came out.

Nikon Vs Canon (no, really, honest…)

A Wise man said to me recently that the best way of getting a shed load of traffic to your blog was to make the title something like “Canon versus Nikon” of something along those lines. Well, as it happens, I actually do want to write about Canon versus Nikon – or at least to make the point that with the imminent arrival of both the Nikon D4 and the Canon EOS1DX (at least on specification and raison d’être) the two camera giants will have a broadly competitive and similar offering for the first time since the Nikon F3 and the Canon F1n did battle back in the early to mid 1980s. Both of those cameras were built like tanks, had optional and fast motor drives and were principally designed for heavy duty professional use.

The new offerings have remarkably similar specifications – knock for knock, these are the most similar cameras on the pro market for thirty years. There are a few differences of course: Nikon have stuck their necks out and gone for a dual memory card slot with one of them being for a new and largely untried format. Both cameras have the odd quirk here and there but it will all be about personal preference when purchasing decisions need to be made.

Of course one manufacturer might have exactly the lens range you want or the other might just feel better in your hands but, the bottom line is that for the first time in the digital era and maybe even for the first time since the original EOS1 film camera hit the shelves we don’t have a clear leader. Can’t wait to try them out…

Space makes you think

In general I am a fan of tighter compositions, but there are some subject matters that are just crying out for space. A large area of foreground or background can lend an enormous amount of emphasis to an image. Placing a small subject in a large space helps you to tell a story. If you place a person in one of the bottom corners you might suggest loneliness or vulnerability, whereas placing them at the top may well imply the opposite.

©Neil Turner | Bournemouth | January 2005

This photograph of a child playing on the beach in the winter suggests that he is really enjoying his freedom. The photograph was taken from quite a height (maybe 25 feet) to isolate the sand from the confusing background and the fact that he is nearer the right of the frame suggests that he has a lot more room to head into. The oldest rule about composition – the rule of thirds – is being observed.

If the space around the child in the photograph was full of details then the impact of the composition would be lost. You would inevitably give the image more than one subject and spoil the simplicity which is the real secret of the picture. Of course if the child’s mother was in another area of the otherwise empty frame then that would give another message altogether, the space would still be making you think – but differently.

Cluttered photographs are much harder to pull off, simple images are often more effective and this image proves that simple doesn’t necessarily mean tight.