opinion

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.

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