Like most working photographers I sometimes take pictures for the sheer joy of it. Sometimes I even get my iPhone out and do fun pictures. From time to time on this blog I hope to ad a few of the silly, odd and downright comical pictures that I sometimes see.
A lot of my favourites are actually not that good as pictures; I am often amused by wordplay in pictures – like this one…
©Neil Turner, October 2011
©Neil Turner/TSL November 2001
Children from a Leicestershire nursery school try to hand in their petition against closure to No.10 Downing Street.
This was a very ordinary story about yet another petition being handed in at No.10 which became extraordinary when the Police Officer on duty allowed the two children to try to knock on the door and then stood back and laughed as they kept trying.
It was a very cute moment on a day where the world’s media were not watching and the reflection of the officer in the shiny black door makes this a favourite picture of mine. They never reached the door knocker and so the officer eventually helped them out by knocking it for them.
©Neil Turner, March 2010
The sub heading of this blog is “me writing about photography because I want to” and that’s the truth. Post number 47 and it’s the start of month two.
2012 is underway and I’m planning to do quite a lot of blogging as the year goes by. I’m going to talk about education, press photography, photojournalism, light, technology, workflow, software, cameras and just about anything else that I come across in the day job.
If you read the blog and come up with any questions for me please let me have them. In the mean time, let’s hope that 2012 serves us all well.
The new year is almost here and all I wanted to say was BRING IT ON!!!
Christchurch Harbour & Mudeford Spit ©Neil Turner, 2011
Main Street, Hawkshead Village. ©Neil Turner
Whilst enjoying a few days away with the whole family in the Lake District over the holidays I shot a few pictures for my own pleasure and for the family album. For no other reason than “I wanted to” most of them were taken at the maximum aperture that the lens could manage – which, given that I mostly used a 50mm f1.4, was f1.4!!! It was great to be away from the big city for a while and take in the countryside and wander through some small towns and villages.
This was taken in Hawkshead Village – a large part of which was refreshingly closed…
©Neil Turner/TSL, April 2005
Back in April 2005 The TES had a great article written by a newly qualified teacher about how to avoid getting angry with pupils at an inner-city secondary school. It was clearly written from personal experience by a dedicated and keen young teacher working at a relatively tough school. He wanted to teach, he wanted to be good at it and he was working hard to achieve his goals.
When I arrived at the school it was the end of the day and both of us were a bit tired. We talked about how to illustrate the story and we decided that it would be great fun and have the desired amount of impact if he just stood there and yelled at me: full-on screaming. It was loud and, as it turned out, great therapy for him. All of the pent up emotion from the day came out is one long, loud and hilarious stream.
On my way home there was, coincidentally, a radio programme about anger management. None of the experts mentioned standing in an almost empty room screaming at a photographer while you had your picture taken. I couldn’t help thinking that they had missed out of an important therapy!
There’s nothing especially clever about the picture – a slightly desaturated image, lit simply an composed carefully but it had enormous impact on the page thanks to some brave and clever design.
©Neil Turner, December 2011
In keeping with the amount of recycling of words that I’ve done in order to get this blog up and running quickly, here is last years blog post with the dates changed…
To everyone who has followed the site, followed me on Twitter, has worked with me or been in contact through 2011 I’d like to say ‘Merry Christmas’.
If you are a working photographer who has found this last year to have been a hard one in which to make a living I’d like to wish you a better, happier and more prosperous 2012.
My year has been a real rollercoaster but it has ended on a real high with a lot of enjoyable and reasonably profitable work coming in the last two months. 2012 looks exciting with some teaching and quite a bit of photography already booked. I hope that I will find the time to do more work on this blog and on my website in the next few months – well actually, I don’t – if I’m not blogging it should mean that I am shooting and there is nothing that makes me happier in my professional life than shooting pictures.
So, once again, I wish you a very happy few days until the end of 2011 and a very succesful start to 2012.
See you next year
©Neil Turner/TSL, August 2006
In 2006 Ian Smith was the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Oracle the software company based in the City of London. This business portrait was actually taken for the Times higher Education Supplement who were running a piece about Oracle’s connections with the education industry. The portrait itself was shot in under two minutes but I had set up with a ‘stand-in’ who posed for some test pictures for fifteen minutes before Mr Smith was available.
The really interesting thing about this portrait is that it was shot with deliberately mixed lighting: tungsten gelled flash on the subject and daylight behind with the camera on a custom white balance which was only concerned with the flash. I use this set of pictures a lot when I am teaching my location lighting seminars.
Neil Turner Photographer 