folio photo

Folio photo #10: Eton College Choir, March 2004
©Neil Turner/TSL, March 2004

©Neil Turner/TSL, March 2004

Choristers leaving the College Chapel after early morning prayers at Eton College, Berkshire. The famous public school is offering junior music scholarships in an attempt to attract bright and musically gifted boys to the school. The blur was used in this case to anonymise the pupils. The camera was sat on the ground, propped up with a the lens hood because I didn’t have a tripod and wanted the motion blur. The lens was a Canon 16-35 f2.8L and the camera was an EOS1D.

Folio photo #09: Bournemouth grave digger, October 2008

©Neil Turner. October 2008

Dave Miller has been working for the cemetries service in Bournemouth since leaving school. These days he even lives in a house inside one of the local graveyards. Photographed at dusk in Bournemouth’s North Cemetry for The Guardian. They were running a whole series of pictures of people who do slightly unusual jobs and they times this particular feature to run at halloween.

This frame features four separate flash units – one of which is down inside the grave (which was otherwise empty). Dusk is my favourite time of year for shooting pictures and this particular sunset was very colourful. If you’d like to know even more about this picture, go to this technique page

Folio photo #08: Peter Snow, London, May 2004

©Neil Turner/TSL, May 2004

Peter Snow, BBC sephologist, journalist and newsreader photographed after an interview at a central London hotel for a “My Best Teacher” feature for the TES Magazine.

He had a book and a TV series with his historian son at the time and the interview was one of a long series that he had already done that day. The room was cramped and poorly lit and so I used a medium sized soft box very close to him to keep as much light off of the background as possible. One picture editor that I worked with used to call this very tight crop the “egg cup” because it was as if someone had flattened the top just like one.

Folio photo #07: Ugandan primary school, April 2005

©Neil Turner/TSL, April 2005

Asaba Primary School, Masindi, Uganda. This private primary school has 1000 pupils aged from 3 to 12. Parents in this remote and poor area go to great lengths to give their children the best education that they can afford. Class sizes at Asaba are as small as thirty or forty which compares very favourably to the free schools where eighty or even a hundred children in one class is common.

I was in Uganda to shoot a feature to coincide with a television series about rural African education and Masindi is a very interesting place with the huge contrasts between the locals and the aid agencies, many of whom have regional offices in the town, and their brand new four-wheel drive vehicles which are parked outside their offices.

Folio photo #06: 10 Downing Street, November 2001.

©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.

Folio photo #05: CEO portrait with tungsten light, August 2006

©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.

Folio photo #04: BMX rider, May 2011
©Neil Turner

©Neil Turner, May 2011

BMX rider Keegan Walker practicing his skills at the Ringwood skate park in the evening after work. This was shot as part of a technique ‘how to do it’ article for Photography Monthly magazine. I’ve had a really interesting relationship with the magazine for the past couple of years in which they have given me free reign to go and shoot pictures that I want to, write about how I did them and simultaneously earn some money AND get some pretty decent portfolio pictures too.

While shooting this particular assignment I found myself having to ask Keegan to be a little more conservative with the height he was getting off of the ramp. Too much space in between him and the ramp just looked silly – believe me, this guy is really good and was very capable of getting more ‘air’ than you see in my pictures. This shot was right at the end of the session when the sun had just gone down and the light was fading fast – my absolute favourite time of day to shoot pictures.

Folio photo #03: Primed for disaster

©Neil Turner, March 2009

Visiting business “guru” lecturer Richard Roberts from GE Capital explains the subprime mortgage crisis to sixth form business and economics students at a Camden secondary school. This was shot as part of a story about a school doing everything it could to give their sixth form students as many extra opportunities as possible. The set included portraits of the head teacher, vox-pops of other students and audience shots of the sixth formers.