opinion

Mindset – small word, big concept for news photographers

©Neil Turner/TSL, March 2004

Written in 2002, this opinion piece still holds very true nearly ten years later…

What’s the difference between a photographer who takes pictures for fun, another who struggles as a professional and one who is on top of their game? The answer, well there are many but the top of my list is….mindset

It’s a pretty innocuous word, but it makes a massive difference. As I sit here writing this I’m trying to formulate some thoughts ahead of a talk to a group of postgraduate news photographers. Snappy titles are always a good start – according to the “Lecturing for Dummies” handbook so “Mindset” it is.

Next step – arresting opening sentence. That will have to wait until I have better formulated my ideas, but my handbook tells me that if you get people’s attention at the beginning you have won fifty percent of the battle and if you don’t you will waste a lot of time getting it back. Well, that’s a bit like writing and (spot the cheasy link) an awful lot like being a news photographer.

The narrative that runs through a well shot photo story or a well written essay is remarkably similar. I have been trying to find a way of telling eager “news photographers in the making” that the message is more important than the way it is delivered and I have decided that it’s worth keeping the writing analogy going.   Nobody denies that poetry is literature and everyone has respect for well written short stories. Good authors are comfortable with their medium, they structure their work and use words economically. Good photographers mirror this. The common thread is mindset; shaping what you have into what you want it to be. I’m not saying that you pre-judge an issue, but rather that you should edit before you shoot, as you shoot and after you shoot to tailor your pictures to a particular format.

If you are working towards an exhibition you work one way – adopting the right mindset, and if you are shooting a single image story you work a completely different way.  And then there are the differences between making and taking photographs, between being a welcome guest wherever you are or an unwanted intruder. News photography is a very broad church, with room for many ways of working and a lot of photographers find it very difficult to switch between the various sub-genres. It can be done.  The temptation for photographers new to journalism to assume that only great long complicated narratives qualify as news photography is understandable. It is also one hundred and eighty degrees out. The thought that it takes real skill to tell a story in a single picture is a difficult concept to master but the greatest story-tellers know that less can often be a whole lot more.

It’s all in the mind.  If you have a month to shoot a spread you can afford a few days (let’s say three to make the comparison easy) to acclimatise. If you have an hour to shoot a single image story and you take the same percentage of the job time to settle in, you’ve only got six minutes. You know what the score is, so you adopt the right approach before you start.  News photography, when it’s stripped down, is a really simple idea. You take pictures and you make pictures that tell stories. You can use photographs to spell out what you want to say, you can use them to intrigue the viewer or you can use them to infer things.

Good journalism often uses words, but it uses photographs just as often. If the photographer is thinking straight and can concentrate on the end product, good photography becomes great news photography.

Final step – the clever conclusion. I would advise anyone coming into the profession to read some good poetry and a few good novels, to work out how they were structured and to try adapting the simplicity of poetry to their photography. Why? The answer is all too simple, photography is all about creativity and it’s all about mastering the technical aspects but most of all it’s about a state of mind – a mental process – mindset.

…and we’re off
20120101-200818.jpg

©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.

Christmas at f1.4

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…

Angry teacher portrait

©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.

Happy Christmas

©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

Mad sky, madder lighting…

Even though it was well over 12 years ago I can still remember standing on a pavement outside a rather dull new building on the University of Southampton campus which wasn’t actually open or even finished and thinking “how am I going to pull this one off?” Normally with architecture news jobs you can rely on having somebody walking past or an interesting view from inside out but on this one… nothing.

©Neil Turner/TSL, October 1999

I messed about for half an hour trying to get an angle on the structure that didn’t show cranes, builders doing the finishing touches or plastic barriers. Miserable failure. There was one redeeming feature though – the sky was a beautiful deep and even blue. I’m no great fan of polarising filters but this was calling out for that kind of treatment so I grabbed my flash gear from the car and decided to underexpose the sky and get as much light into the foreground as I could. That meant giving full power up into the street lamp that helped the composition which also meant that I could underexpose the sky nicely.

©Neil Turner/TSL, October 1999

After that my mind started racing and I decided to go for something so over the top that even I would have bet the Picture Editor would have laughed as she put it into the dustbin.

The red in the street lamp was achieved by using a red narrow cut colour effects lighting gel over the flash, which was on full power and raised as high as I could get it so that the red would balance against the saturated and underexposed sky.

This was the first time that I had tried anything like this and the great thing is that I was wrong. They used the mad picture…

Some 11 year old thoughts on lens selection…

Choosing the right lens for the job – written in 2000 for http://www.DPReview.com and it still pretty much stands up today – which cannot be said for everything that I thought that I knew when I’d only been in the profession for 14 years!

There are two ways that you can choose which of your lenses to stick on the camera:

  • You can say “there’s my subject and here I am, let’s see which focal length on my zoom works best”.  Sometimes at sports matches and political events you have your position and that is that, or…
  • You could say “I want the effect that my experience tells me a 28mm lens will give me so I’ll select that focal length and move to the right position to make that happen”.

Either of these could be a valid option and, in many cases, the first is decided for you by circumstance. Most news photographers use zoom lenses because it makes sense to have fewer lenses when you are never quite sure what kind of work you will be doing on any given day.

Personally, I use a combination of both approaches. If a position forces me to choose a certain lens then I’m with option 1. Given complete freedom to shoot what I want I’d go with 2. More often than not I’ll go with, say a 24-70mm lens intending to shoot at the 24mm end and get in a position to shoot that way. I will shoot several frames and then start to move around, zoom in and out and shoot a variety of similar images, each with subtle differences. I try to make a point of shooting with just about every focal length available to me on every job. Sometimes I am right about lenses first time but often I’m not. What had seemed like an obvious task for the 28mm ends up being a spectacular 200mm shot and vice-versa but the result is that you often end up with images that are just that bit better.

I nearly always shoot on location so I cannot preplan every detail. Going equipped with a range of lenses is vital. Your choice of lens will depend on so many questions running through your mind. How is this image going to be used? Big, small, upright, horizontal, front page? Double page, back page, website, magazine or newspaper? Is it going to have copy running over it? Will it have more than one usage?

If I cannot answer any or all of those questions, then I’ll shoot every variation I can. Shall I start with a long lens, if it’s a portrait then being further away may relax the subject and I’ll get in with the wide when they are more comfortable. Background, what’s behind them? Can I use a change of lens get rid of a poor background?

Answering self-set questions and making compromises is the key to news photography. Choosing the right lenses helps to reduce the number of technical compromises that you are forced to take, giving you more time to make the creative compromises that you want to make.

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.