equipment

Possibly the oddest picture I ever took…

©Neil Turner/TSL | London | January 2006

The story was simple: we were doing an anonymous interview with a man who needed to remain unidentifiable for legal reasons and we had to shoot a picture of him at a time and a place that wouldn’t give his identity away. It seemed to be important that it was actually him in the picture and that became obvious when I had to shoot a proper portrait at the same time just in case the court case was decided and we needed a proper picture of him to go with a future follow-up article. Still with me?

The reporter arranged that I meet the subject at a London tube station and to get around the problems of finding someone whose name you don’t know and who you don’t have a picture of I always describe myself and what I’m likely to be carrying and wearing because a) I’m probably going to be there first and b) I’m probably going to be easier to spot (being big and carrying a lot of kit).

The venue turned out to be quite close to where he works and we decided that if any of his colleagues happened to spot us the cover story was that we were doing a fashion vox-pop on what the well-dressed office worker was wearing that season. The cloak and dagger details just kept multiplying.

I decided to go with a silhouette (you can read my thoughts on them here) and just for good measure I added an extra twist with a bit of motion blur too. The result was quite striking if bafflingly anonymous!

The technique is pretty simple. It was a dull winter’s morning in the city and we found a under cover area. I used a Lumedyne flash kit to light the brick pillar and silhouetted the subject against it. Without the flash, he would still have been a shadowy outline but so would the pillar and the picture would have been pointless.

The light that was coming from either side of the pillar was OK but it wasn’t plentiful and so I decided to give it a bit of movement blur by zooming the lens whilst the shutter was open. I ended up with an exposure of 1/8th of a second at f13 on 200 ISO using a Canon EOS1D MkII with a Canon 16-35 f2.8L lens triggering the flash with a pair of Pocket Wizards. Zooming during an exposure as relatively short as 1/8th of a second means that you have to have quite a few attempts to get it right and it also pays to tell the subject what you are doing if you don’t want them to think that you are a lunatic!

In the end I was very happy with this genuinely odd picture. I had arrived at the assignment with almost no idea what I was going to do and pretty much made it up as I went along. That’s why I love my job…

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.

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…

Objects of desire

One of the great joys of being a photographer is the wonderful array of gear, technology and toys we get to use on a daily basis. It is also one of the curses of being in business. If I went out and bought every new camera, every new lens, every new application and every new computer that I fancied I would have no home, no car and no life.

That doesn’t stop me looking. The CES show in the USA has thrown up lots of new “I want one of those” moments and a quick calculation says that I would make a £20,000 hole in my finances if I went and bought it all. The serious point here is that for many photography is a hobby and buying new gear is a matter of “I want it, I’m going to have it”. For professional photographers there is a simpler test which asks “will that piece of kit pay for itself, pay my bills and work how it’s supposed to work?”

I’ve said many times that a lot of my clearest thinking comes from teaching and I’m currently updating my notes for teaching some business studies to my NCTJ Photojournalism group at Up To Speed Media in Bournemouth. In many ways the formula is simple: A. you need to take the cost of purchasing the item, insuring and servicing it and divide that by B. the number of days you work in an average year. Dividing A by B gives you C. To get the final figure D. You decide how many years the item might remain useful (longer for lenses, less time for camera bodies, computers and software).  Finally, you divide C by D and that figure is the cost of that piece of kit per working day.

An example: Telephoto zoom lens

  • A. price paid is £1,400 and it adds £20 a year to your insurance and a further £30 a year to service. That’s a total of £1,450
  • B . working 3 days a week on average over a 52 week year. That’s a total of 156 days
  • C. that’s 1,450 ÷ 156 = £9.29
  • D. lenses last on average 3 years

The final figure for owning that particular lens is £3.09 per working day IF you shoot for 468 days over three years. The cost goes down if you work more and it goes up if you work less. Of course one lens isn’t much use without the rest of the kit and so you can go through your whole stash of gear and do the same calculation for each. I tend to go for 2 years for camera bodies and computers, 3 years for heavy use lenses, 5 years for light use lenses and only 1 year for software including upgrades.

How depressing was that? Let’s end on a lighter note: objects of desire… well… the Canon G1X looks very, very cool, as does the limited edition all black Fujifilm X100. Of course the Canon EOS1DX has to go on the list and I’d love to give the Nikon D4 (and a kit of lenses) a spin. The list is actually a lot longer but nobody reads this far down… do they?

Archive photo: Inner London Education Authority, April 1990

When the Conservative Government finally abolished the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) which had shared County Hall with the Greater London Council (GLC) Mrs Thatcher could finally look out of the House of Commons and not be reminded of the opposition that her party had faced from across the river. I was sent to shoot a picture of one of the last people still working at ILEA who had done an interview for the Times Educational Supplement about his work wrapping up the affairs of London’s last unitary body (until the Labour government reestablished a London Mayor’s office in May 2000).

I went equipped with a notional headline of “will the last person to leave County Hall please turn out the lights” and I was very pleased when it turned out that the desk where he was working was in a windowless room in the basement of the beautiful if tatty building. I was even more pleased when I had processed my film and had a look at my pictures.

©Neil Turner. September 1990

For the camera geeks: Nikon F3P with 85mm f1.4 Nikkor and Kodak Tri-X film

Two portraits, one poet and a fifteen year gap…

Working as a photographer you often shoot pictures of people before they become famous and then get to shoot them again once they have “made it”. I don’t know if you can really categorise a poet as ‘famous’ but the British Poet Laureate is about as famous as you can get for poetry. In 2008 and towards the end of his term as Laureate, I photographed Andrew Motion at his London home but this wasn’t my first “one-to-one” with him. Back in 1992 when he was already established as a poet, and just ahead of the publication of his biography of Phillip Larkin, I had taken pictures of him at a different London home.

©Neil Turner/Insight | London | 14th September 1992

A lot of people are a lot more accommodating and easier to photograph before they become famous. They are often friendlier, more likely to offer you a cup of tea and are generally easier to work with. That wasn’t the case with Mr Motion. Back in 1992 I had caught him on a bad day – or at least a day when he had far more pressing matters to attend to than getting his picture taken whereas fifteen and a half years later he was well used to being photographed and had developed an easy manner when dealing with people like me. It could be that I was also fifteen and a half years older and more able to handle myself but whatever the reasons, shooting him in 2008 was a lot easier.

©Neil Turner/TSL | London | 28th March 2008

Of course the technology had moved on: in 1992 I was shooting with Nikon F4S cameras and some lumpy f2.8 Nikkor zoom lenses (35-70 f2.8 and 80-200 f2.8) on black and white film. By 2008 I was onto Canon EOS1D MkII and 20D cameras with some lovely L series Canon lenses and shooting digitally. The quality difference is also very noticeable and I wouldn’t want to shoot film on a job like this again.

Archive photo: Student demo, London, November 1988

On the day that I got my very first mobile phone I was sent to photograph a student anti-loans demonstration in London. Nobody was expecting anything other than a march by angry students on a very grey day in London. Part of the way through the march there was a large break away group that decided to head for Parliament – which was not on the agreed route. By the time they had broken away and reached the west side of Westminster Bridge the Metropolitan Police already had a cordon across with vans, horses and a large number of officers. Scuffles, charges and fights ensued but the police line held and the students never made it to Parliament – less than 200 metres away.

Photo: © Neil Turner | 24 November 1988

Contrast this photo with the student riots of 2011: the police are wearing no special clothing, no high visibility jackets, no shields and there was no overt photographing or filming of the students either. No buildings were ransacked, damaged or invaded and the whole thing felt relatively civilised. It did feel weird to be able to talk to reporters, other photographers and even the picture desk on the phone in the middle of a mini-riot: my phone was a Motorola 8000s which was known as the “City Brick” because it was so big and bulky.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t have a happy ending (apart from two front pages and a ‘congratulations’ from the editor). A few years before, I had broken a toe playing cricket and during the demo I had the same toe re-broken when a police horse moved backwards and trapped me between it and a van, crushing my toe. As a freelance, I couldn’t afford any time off so I limped from job to job over the following three or four weeks to Christmas. I also had a lens damaged and wasn’t properly insured so my old 35mm f2.8 Nikkor was replaced with a newer 35mm f2.

The camera and lens combo here was a Nikon FM with a 35mm f2.8 Nikkor using Kodak Tri-X film.