opinion

Define the word ‘portrait’?

The word portrait is used by photographers all over the world, but it’s meaning is a little blurred. Many use the term to describe photographs of people’s head and shoulders and others use it to refer to any old picture of a person so I want to tie down what I mean by potraiture and then talk a little bit about the subject.

©Neil Turner/TSL, June 2006

In my book a portrait is a photograph deliberately used to say something about the person in the picture. A simple ‘mug shot’ can be a portrait, but only if it says something about the subject and isn’t just an identity card style image. Even a characteristic expression is enough to turn the bland ID card photograph into a portrait. You then have a wide range of images that can legitimately be called a portrait until you get to the other extreme where a photograph of someone becomes more about an activity or a mood than about that person. Although there doesn’t have to be any interaction between the photographer and the subject for the picture to be a portrait, it really helps. I have read all sorts of nonsense about the kind of lens you have to use to make a portrait, or the kind of light that you must use. None of these things matters, a good portrait can be made using any lens and using a huge variety of lighting situations.

There are many traps in making good portraits, and I fall regularly into at least one of them, but the bottom line is that the photographer needs to free themself of as many constraints as possible in order to achieve creative results. With this in mind here are a list of do’s and don’ts that might help you to shoot good portraits – starting with my most regular failing:

  • Resist the temptation to always use the same style and fit each subject into it giving you the same picture over and over with different faces in.
  • Each face is different, so allow the light to help to show that. Not everyone benefits from soft lighting and good portraits are made better with thoughtful lighting.
  • Don’t crowd the sitter. If you get right in someone’s face, you will put them on edge and spoil the photograph – of course if you purposefully want to make someone uncomfortable, then go ahead. A relaxed sitter makes the shot easier to get.
  • Think about relating the sitter to their surroundings. One of the easiest ways of saying something about your subject is to shoot them in their own environment.
  • Think about using props. Well selected items can really add to the message of the portrait- it could be an author with a copy of their book or a child with their favourite toy, be imaginative.
  • Resist the tempation to always use the same focal length lens. Nothing annoys me more than to read conversations about “the ideal lens for portraiture”, it does not exist.
  • Try a wide variety of compositions, portraits can be stunning if the subject occupies only a tiny percentage of the image, and can be equally strong if just their eyes fill the frame.
  • There is no rule that says that ‘you must flatter your subject’ but harsh lighting and cruel angles should be kept for those situations where they are suitable.

To be effective a portrait must say more about the sitter than it does about the photographer and it must say more about the sitter than it does about what they are doing. Most great portraits have interesting but not overpowering light. If the first thing that you notice is the lighting then the photograph is not a complete success, if the first thing that you notice is the ‘nice blotchy backcloth’ then the portrait has truly failed.

An open letter to the college accounts department

This is a first for me – writing an open letter to a bunch of people that I don’t really know and who, personally, have done me no harm. The accounts people in question all work for educational establishments in the UK and the rules that they are inventing/enforcing/misusing are costing me a small amount of money but far more importantly they are preventing students from hearing from a lot of wonderful professionals who have stopped doing one or two days here and there as visiting lecturers.

To whom it may concern

Thank you for the paperwork that you recently sent to me that I would have to complete before coming to your establishment to work with student photographers for one day. I have looked at the forms and decided that it would take me at least an hour to fill them in. I have also realised that a full-time permanent employee of the college would have exactly the same forms to fill in. This seems a little ridiculous, given that my time with your students will be restricted to five hours this week and no more than fifteen in any one year.

I was also disappointed to read that you wish to have all of my National Insurance and tax references and that you would be deducting tax and National Insurance at source from me even though I am a self-employed professional who is registered for VAT. I know that you will quote ‘advice from the HMRC’ as the reason and I would love to read this advice. Unfortunately a long telephone call to the tax authorities and a diligent search of their website have failed to turn up this ‘advice’.

Presumably, having taken tax from me at source, you would be obliged to issue me with a P60 tax certificate at the end of the financial year. This was a piece of information that HMRC’s advice line was able to give me. I am sure that all of this form-filling and certificate issuing covers your back quite nicely. I am equally sure that if you have to repeat the same process for every visiting lecturer it has the added benefit of creating or at least securing the job or jobs of members of staff within your department.

My problem is this: I used to do visits to a lot of colleges and I have refused to get involved in this PAYE farce because for every different college that has to send me a P60 I have to fill in another page on my tax return because each is treated as a separate employment. In one year I have been known to visit eight different colleges – eight extra pages on my tax return, and I have to get that each of them checked by my accountant. Time is money – especially at Chartered Accountant rates. This is on top of the extra hours I have to spend filling in your own forms (which arrive as badly laid out Microsoft Word documents with a good deal of redundant information asked for by the way) and, more often than not, having to chase for payments because you award yourselves 60 days credit as well.

How hard would it be to accept that I want to simply send the college an invoice for my time and my expenses instead of going through this dense bureaucracy? How hard would it be to realise that I am a legitimately self-employed professional who has no intention of ripping the system off and avoiding my obligations to the treasury? I am sure that HMRC never intended whatever rule you are citing to actually get in the way of the students getting contact with professionals. I know that it isn’t just me. I know a lot of other self-employed people who are at the top of their game who want nothing to do with very occasional visits to educational establishments for the very same reason.

So, no thank you. I will leave it to you to explain to the head of the course who wanted me to come and share my 25+ years experience with their students for a fee that was already a lot lower than I would charge for taking pictures why I won’t be coming this year. I’ll let them know that you will be the one explaining and I will apologise for the fact that your establishment has been added to the lengthening list of places that I won’t be supporting until you change your college’s rules.

Portraits, ID pictures and PR

I spend about forty percent of my working life shooting portraits for newspapers and magazines. It is my main passion as well as my career….

You will probably not be surprised to hear that I have some strong opinions about the art / science / craft (delete where applicable in your work) of photography. As an editorial photographer I am really lucky because there are three parties involved when I am shooting someone. There’s me, there’s the subject and there’s the paper – and that is really important to me and to the freedom I have to shoot the picture.

Social photographers usually have only two parties involved in the process – themself and the subject who often doubles as the customer. They are suddenly having to please the person who is sitting there in front of the camera. I really hate having to shoot portraits of family and friends because that’s even worse – imagine having the hassle of shooting a picture of someone who you love and care about and portraying them in a way that they may not have chosen. The freedom of being able to be objective and detached is a wonderful thing!

I have been involved in many arguments, both in person and on the web, about exactly when a photograph of a person becomes a portrait. It is really difficult to give a list of criteria about what constitutes a portrait, but somehow you can just look at a picture and say “yes” or “no” pretty much straight away.

I think that there are three categories of pictures of people. There are photographs that are merely record of what someone looks like that are perfect for ID badges or criminal records that say little or nothing about the subject. There are photographs where what is happening in the picture is more important than who is in it, such as a picture of someone playing sport or a musical instrument. Thirdly there are portraits, where there is enough in the image besides the subject to give a few clues about the subject, but not so much that the viewer is left thinking about what, rather than who. As a location only portraitist I have the added luxury of having the subject’s surroundings to help the image work. Studio photographers have to work really hard with fake props and painted backcloths to do what I can do very easily. Mass produced accessories, even student gowns, add little or nothing to the information that the photographer can give about their subject and can detract from the individuality of an image. You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned any particular focal length of lens or lighting rig, and that’s deliberate. You can shoot a great portrait with any lens, and in any place – it’s all about your relationship with the subject.

Portraiture is something that you either find easy or you don’t. There are things that you can learn to make the whole process less painful and there are ways of shooting that eliminate risk (and creativity) if you really find that saying something about your subject isn’t what you were cut out to do with your camera. My advice is to talk to your subject, look around the room or the garden for something that they relate to and shoot a lot of frames. You can add a lot of athmosphere with lighting, but if you get the pose, props and position right you have the battle half won. Get your “bedside manner” right and you can call yourself a portrait photographer.

The relationship between the photographer, their subject and their client is vitally important. Editorial photography usually has three parties and it’s a great way to create good images. A while ago I shot a PR portrait of two businessmen. It had to be done in fifteen minutes and the deadline for the pictures to be with the designer was very tight. PR is a strange hybrid of social and editorial photography. There are usually more than two parties involved and they want editorial style shots but they have to be flattering to the subject. It doesn’t matter if the client is a PR company or if you are being paid directly by the company that you are there to promote – the images have to be positive and show no flaws. Is that a two party or a three party relationship? I would call it two and a half.

“Nothing unusual about this job?” I hear you ask. The answer is OH YES! The number of parties involved was as many as six and the decision making process was made harder by the two people in the pictures having the final decision about which image was chosen. Let me explain…

The end client was a European division of a multinational company who needed a picture shot in London. They had asked their London office to arrange a photographer to supply the pictures to the designer who was in another country (that’s three parties so far). The two men in the picture both had a say in the shoot (parties four and five) and then, of course, there was me (party number six). I had to set up the shot without the two businessmen but with the London PR people present. The two men arrived and I shot for ten minutes with two differing backgrounds and then offloaded my RAW files into my laptop. There then followed a quick Photo Mechanic slide show for the two subjects and the London PR where they selected two possible images in which they felt they looked good. We finally settled on the very last frame that I had shot – taken, ironically, about a minute after the two subjects started to make noises about leaving to catch a flight!

It was then a simple case of converting the RAW file on site and sending it as a high resolution email attachment to the designer, copying everyone else who hadn’t seen the choice in at the same time. That, ladies and gentlemen, was a complicated relationship. Editing the images later to send a choice of twenty to the client I decided that there was a better file but by then it was too late.

The difficulty for me with this job was that one of the two subjects vetoed several of the images because he didn’t think he looked right in them and the other subject vetoed one or two as well. The old adage about asking a committee to design a horse and ending up with a camel comes to mind. If too many people have a right to say no, you inevitably end up with the least offensive and least interesting picture!

Photography and the art of compromise…

This is an old opinion piece that has been well used in teaching, writing and seminar work.

Photography and the art of compromise is a title for an essay that’s been rattling around in my head for a while. The other day I tweeted a version of what I wanted to say in “140 characters or less” and it was responded to or re-tweeted more times in a few hours than anything else that I’ve ever written on that particular social networking site. It was at that point that I decided that I needed to put my thoughts about the subject down as a blog piece.

All photography requires compromise – the better your skills as a photographer, the more control you have over the compromises you make.

That was the wording on Twitter (OK, there was a hashtag on the word photography). It seemed to strike a chord with a lot of my peers – maybe because it is possibly the single hardest lesson to learn when you become a photographer.

For the less experienced photographers amongst you who might be unsure about the kinds of compromises I am talking about, here are a few of the choices that you need to make on a day-to-day basis that lead to compromise:

  • Shooting wide open apertures to get a shallow depth of field versus stopping down a little to make sure you get the subject in focus.
  • Going for a higher ISO than your camera is comfortable with versus the chance of getting camera shake at the lower ISO where there won’t be any noise in the shadow areas…
  • Having to shoot at f22 in bright sunshine so that you can shoot flash and still keep the shutter speed down to the camera’s maximum sync speed.
  • Placing your flash unit close to the subject to get the effect of a proportionally larger light modifier versus placing it further away to reduce the effect of flash fall-off.

And so on and so on. Every time you alter a setting on your camera, every time you place a light and every time you focus the lens you are making decisions most of which lead to a compromise. Sometimes the decision has a small effect on the image and sometimes it has a crucial one. The technical and creative skills that we pick up throughout our time as photographers equip us with an ever greater understanding of the options. As we practice our craft, we learn to take more and more decisions in real time – often without really thinking about them and it’s these decisions that dictate our style of photography.

As a photographer my preference might be to worry less about depth of field and more about critical focus when I’m shooting some jobs whilst I’d almost certainly place a light where it will give me the right light on the main subject and allow me to worry about backgrounds second.

Put simply, that’s what makes my pictures mine and the decisions that you would take in a similar situation would mark your images out as yours. Where decisions become compromises is the place where creativity lives and where most photographers do their best work

Professionalism 101 (or P101 for short)

©Neil Turner/TSL

The hardest part of the transition from good photographer to professional photographer is in understanding the difference between the two. I once wrote that the best definition of “professional” is someone who gets the shot 99.9% of the time and has a damned good excuse for the rest. Still true, but professionalism has another side to it – one that can be learned pretty easily.

Clients are used to dealing with professionals: Slick presentation, questions being answered before they are asked and great customer service. These are all things that we expect as consumers and in business we expect even more. As a professional, you are in a market place and you have to compete.

We work in an image-conscious business and we live in an increasingly image-conscious world. Even as self-employed freelancers we need to have corporate identities of our own. The vast majority of our clients have proper business cards and 99.9% of them have email addresses that tell you who they are and who they work for.

I am constantly amazed by the number of decent photographers who hand out slightly apologetic home-made inkjet printed cards and I’m shocked by the number of Yahoo and Hotmail accounts that people rely on. Webmail is useful but it does nothing to positively affirm you as a professional. Buying and running your own web domain is not difficult or expensive and it really helps to give potential customers the impression that you are in business and that you have been for some time. If your email address matches your portfolio website there is a certain synergy. If your on-line presence is a gallery on Flickr and your email is london-snapper@webmail.com then you really are missing a trick.

Keeping everything the same, presenting a corporate image and playing the game doesn’t detract from your photography. Quite the opposite; it removes a potential barrier to clients taking you seriously. Having a well-designed and easily navigated portfolio on the internet is almost as important as owning a camera. Being a member of at least one of the professional bodies that offer searchable freelance directories is also a very good idea.

Moving on in the story a little, you have met the client, they like your folio and they give you some work. Professionalism moves up a gear and this is your first job for them so you cannot make presentational mistakes now. Be clear when accepting the commission what the fees and expenses are, what rights you are selling them and what they are expecting from you. Get technical specifications, deadlines, delivery addresses (FTP, email or postal) sorted out and then go and do what you are there to do – shoot the pictures.

Let’s say, for arguments sake that the job requires a CD with twenty high-resolution, post-produced RGB JPEG files in the post. P101 says that the client will be used to proper presentation and so your CD should not be a PC World own brand disc with a few illegible words written in marker pen in a cracked plastic case. Printing proper CD labels is very cheap. Getting discs printed on an upmarket Inkjet printer isn’t expensive and having a few hundred professionally screen-printed will not break the bank. Slim CD cases are OK but softer plastic flexible cases are better and they will cope with the postal system far better. Of course the disc should be labelled with the date but the main impression should be that this came from Joe Bloggs – professional. The packaging should be professional, the label on the outside should be neat and tidy and you should have a properly printed compliment slip in there too.

None of this makes you a better photographer, none of this will actually impress the client. But none of this costs much money either. What it will do is not raise any negative thoughts. The hand written scrawl on the cheap disc stands a good chance of making a negative impression – yet hundreds of photographers still do it.

So what about what is actually on the disc. There are the pictures of course. It’s important to make sure that they meet any specification given to you by the client and it’s also vital to make sure that the client can open the disc on whatever system they use – but what else? Make space on the disc for a PDF file containing licensing information and a second PDF with the caption details (it’s amazing how many picture buyers still don’t understand or see the metadata that you embed in the images). For some clients a set of clearly marked low resolution, screen sized sRGB JPEGs can be useful too.

Going deeper still, think about the metadata that you attach to the files. Professionals have to add IPTC caption details. Who, what, why, when and where. No matter which imaging application you use you have to put into words what is in the picture – which balding middle aged man is which, where they were taken with a date and possibly a time. You also have to add your details. Stamp your identity right there in the metadata. Use the © symbol liberally so that everyone knows who owns the pictures. The tricky thing here is to know which box you put this information into. Many newspapers want you to put everything into the main caption/description box. Others only want the names and places in the main box. Most magazines and commercial clients don’t have a preference. If in doubt put it all in the main caption/description box and add it all in the other relevant boxes too.

Metadata has another face – EXIF. These are the shooting details that your camera will add to digital files. Some are useful – time, day and date. Others are annoying – which lens, shutter speed, white balance. Does the client need to know this stuff? Probably not – so delete it.

This is not rocket science 101. This is, however, a very competitive market. P101 says that you have to do everything that you can to give the client confidence that you are a pro and that you will deliver the goods. I was giving a talk on this very topic at a college when a very-self-assured young man told me that he wasn’t interested in any of this “plastic b******t” and that his clients would have to take him for what he was – an excellent photographer. This kind of approach might have worked twenty years ago but it doesn’t have a snowball-in-hell’s chance in the 21st Century.

Having a “USP” (unique selling point) is a great idea as a photographer, but being the one who eschews good presentation and good practice is a pointlessly high-risk strategy. If you want to take pictures for a living, you have to get people to pay you. Most of the people who control the market place wear suits and respond well to corporate image. It’s a game and you would be well advised to play it.

Words of wisdom

Back in 2004 I was pretty prolific. I was writing technique and opinion pieces on my website at least once a month, if not more. Times have changed, I’ve become less prolific and I have a lot less spare time on my hands too. Going back through some of the gems (and some of the cringe-making stuff) I am re-posting (and re-re-posting others) because they still represent what I think. As I say, from 2004…

It has happened again. I have had a letter from a student of photography asking me a really simple question, and I have spent so much time over-complicating the reply that it has ended up here on my web site.

“…so” said the innocuous e-mailed question “what is the best piece of advice anyone has ever given you about either being a professional or about photography in general”.

Innocent question? No! I have spent ages formulating my reply, and I’m still not sure that I’ve cracked it…but, for what it’s worth, here is my reply. The answer is in the last sentence.

 There is a stage in your career where you learn so fast that your head spins at 6,400 rpm at the end of every day. Slowly your learning rate goes down, but the quality of the newly found knowledge probably goes up. Similarly, when you are a real “newbie” there seems to be a queue forming right around the block to deposit sage truths right into your knowledge bank. (I am mixing my metaphors here, but I think it make sense anyway). Once you have been around a while it takes more courage on the part of the “old hand” to dish out the advice until one day you find yourself imparting more gems of truth than you will ever receive again. Sadly I’ve been at that latter stage for so long now that I really should get myself a Gandalf beard, but I do remember a time when I did qualify for the advice soup kitchen.

In chronological order here a few of the more choice bits of advice that I received before my career got going and I hope that you are either informed or amused by them.

  • There’s no money in photography – school careers counselor 1980
  • Never shoot wider than f8 – manager of the camera shop where I was working 1983
  • There’ll always be a market for pictures of nude women – sleazy shop customer 1983
  • My career will be over long before newspapers shoot colour – local newspaper photographer 1983 (still working)
  • Nobody will offer you a place at college with a folio like this – admissions tutor 1984

Early advice and comment fell way wide of the mark. There was plenty more to be had, but it was all as bad. Once I had been accepted onto a college photography course, the quality of the advice picked up and the staff lecturers were full of wisdom, the best example of which I still remember…”Don’t listen to anything I say, but hang on every word of the visiting professionals we bring in to talk to you”. My peers and I did listen to the wise words that came our way, and we quickly worked out which were worth obeying, which needed to be stored for later and which could be safely forgotten. Some of our visiting tutors gave great practical tips…

  • Keep every receipt. Claim everything against tax and make sure you get paid.
  • The business is full of sharks. You have been warned.
  • Get a great portfolio, keep it up to date and never let it gather dust.
  • It’s good to know how to make beautiful prints, but only so you can tell your printer where he’s going wrong.
  • A distinctive style is good, just as long as it doesn’t go out of fashion.
  • Spend as much time looking at other people’s work as you do fretting about your own.
  • Only buy enough equipment to do the bread and butter jobs. Renting makes sense.

I’ve lost count of the photographers who told me which developer to process my Tri-x in, or which pro lab did the best job on transparency film. Valuable though these things can be, they aren’t going to get you noticed. The people whose advice did the most were those who took the time to look through my folio and be constructive, those who would show you their work and talk candidly about it and those who would have a drink with you and tell anecdotes. Stories give context to advice, real life situations add relevance. Photographers who can tell you which picture editor likes what and who can advise you who to talk to are saints, but some of the best advice came from my peers. People at roughly the same stage in their careers as me were always worth listening to and my respect for the whole concept of “peer learning” is huge.

These days it seems that we are constantly forging new paths and breaking new ground. The whole digital experience has taught me that there is somebody somewhere who has just worked through the problem that you are currently experiencing. Sure, you need to work out who is a reliable source and who is full of BS but the information is out there.

Now for the one piece of advice, well the best three. In reverse order they are.

  • Whilst it might seem a privilege to make your living in such a wonderful job, you still have to pay the bills.
  • Its not good enough to take good photographs most of the time, you have to take great ones all of the time to survive
  • Never take advice on photography from someone who tells you that there is only one way to do something!!!

Why dg28?

Originally posted on my pre-blog in 2009 but I still get so many people asking why that I thought I’d post it again…

Why would a photographer whose initials are NT call his website dg28? It’s a question that I get asked with amazing regularity and, for the eight years I have had the site, I have always enjoyed the mystique. I did a seminar last week for some London Strobists and the first question that I was asked was “why dg28?” Every time I tell the story it gets less exciting – unlike most anecdotes which seem to get longer, more interesting, more adventurous and even more heroic. I have finally decided to tell all. Right here, right now..

It all started back in 2000. I had a site hosted by AOL which had a domain name longer than anything you could properly remember and content which was attracting quite a bit of attention. I had written a couple of short pieces for Phil Askey at DPReview and sitting in a London bar he advised me to get some proper hosting and a snappy domain name. Good advice from someone who knows a thing or two about photography websites I thought.

A couple of days later I was doing one of my visiting lecturer appearances with some highly motivated post-graduate photojournalists telling them all about the digital process – something that I was already used to but few of them could get their heads around. It was a successful lecture and we ended up in another bar for a couple of drinks. We talked about photography, photographers and photojournalism for quite a while before the topic turned to the old chestnut of “what was the first record that you ever bought?”

I always like this one because I have a very good answer. One member of my family who has otherwise excellent taste started his collection with “Ernie and the fastest milk cart in the west” by Benny Hill – something which still embarrasses him. Being proud of my record I spoke first and told the students that I had bought Metal Guru by Marc Bolan and T-Rex at which point one of them (a young Canadian guy) said “that’s great. You bought Metal Guru and now you are our Digital Guru…” Cue light bulb moment… digitalguru would be a brilliant domain name.

The next day I got onto a registration website only to find that it was gone. As were several variations. Then I remembered Phil Askey saying that short is good so I tried variations on DG and finally settled on dg28.com because the dg bit is for digital guru and the 28 is for the day each month (the 28th) when I used to post updates.

You see what I mean, it’s not actually that interesting but it makes for a decent story – one which I hope to be telling less often in future.

Photographic policy

Just in case you haven’t noticed, I’m a photographer. I also teach a bit of photography and write about the subject too. The latest addition to my ‘portfolio career’ is what I can only describe as photographic consultancy. I have done a few corporate training sessions aimed at people who aren’t necessarily shooting pictures but who are handling them on behalf of their employer. It started off with some PR managers from a range of Universities a few years ago and has been a very small part of what I do ever since then.

This week, I did a bespoke session for an NGO talking about copyright, licensing, permissions, model release, photographing children and how to get PR pictures used in the media. All of that in less than one day meant that we didn’t get right down into the finer details. For some organisations the knowledge that they need to do more will be enough to get them going. A company wide photographic policy has to be a ‘must-have’ with the amount of images, websites, pamphlets, brochures, publications and social media in circulation (officially and otherwise).

We are in the Christmas party season and a good, well publicised policy telling staff what is and is not acceptable would be very useful. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and the rest are public platforms and un-wisely placed images or video are bad news. It isn’t only about stopping bad stuff happening though; good pictures need to be licensed, captioned and stored properly. The quantity of pictures held on company systems seems to have expanded exponentially and it makes sense to have policies that make use of the good stuff whilst making that the bad, the off-message and the out of date images are never seen.

As a professional photographer it is really hard to see photographs sourced from keen amateurs, micro stock sites and crowd-sourcing as anything other than lost income but that is the way the world has gone and we need to learn to work with it. People like me, with a lot of experience in the industry, can help to form policies for small, medium and even large businesses based on our knowledge of the law, ethics and technical matters. It isn’t going to cost a fortune and any company who ignores the concept of a photography policy could end up regretting it.