opinion

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.

Welcome to the new Blog…

I have finally done it. The pre-blog was intended to last about six months and it made it past three years. I have finally found the time to migrate a lot of the newer posts to this shiny new WordPress version with all of the bells and whistles that you’d expect from a templated site.

When I get time, I will migrate even more of the old content over to here so that it can be better indexed, more easily searched for and release some space on my main dg28 site. To those of you who have followed the blog patiently checking back from time to time I’d like to say ‘thank you for your patience’ and to let you know that the RSS feed is up and running.

The BPPA & the Leveson Inquiry

When the celebrities queued up to give evidence at the Leveson Inquiry in the culture, practices and ethics of the press we had no idea that they would, one by one, single out photographers for criticism. They seemed almost entirely unable to tell the difference between professional press photographers and the people with cameras who chase celebrities to get the pictures that certain types of magazine love to buy.

The BPPA’s first response was to apply to the inquiry to become a “Core Participant” and then to publish the open letter we sent to Lord Justice Leveson. You can read it here:

That was followed by countless posts from photographers and commentators largely agreeing that

  1. Photographers are not one homogenous mass
  2. The Leveson inquiry was in desperate need of some balance on the matter
  3. Some of the celebrities giving evidence were having issues with their memories

If the future of press photography, the avoidance of OTT privacy laws or even the freedom of the press matter to you, can I suggest that you pop over to The BPPA Blog and then to The BPPA Facebook page and follow both. Things are happening fast so maybe you should have a look at the Twitter feed too!

How often do you service your gear?

How often do you get your cameras, lenses or lights cleaned and serviced professionally? Every six months? Annually? Every other year? When things go wrong? Sadly, for most professional photographers it is the last one – when the kit goes wrong and needs to be fixed. Almost all of them get their cars service every ten thousand miles or when the service warning light comes on. Over half will get their central heating boilers checked and cleaned every once in a while but their cameras, the equipment on which their livelihood depends seems to get overlooked.

“My lenses are soft, I’m switching to the other brand” is a cry we have heard regularly over the last coupe of years but is it that one major manufacturer has suddenly started to make bad lenses or is it that the daily wear and tear on even the toughest kit starts to have an effect on image quality?

If the fall off is gradual enough we don’t notice. A lens might go from “wow” through “acceptable” to “oh dear” in twenty stages over thirty months and still we only seek the help of a technician when it gets to “oops”.

Modern camera chips are capable of resolving every bit if detail that our lenses can deliver. A camera such as a Canon EOS5D MkII will show up every glitch and flaw in a lens’ performance in ways that film or smaller chipped cameras never could. It will also show up tiny errors in focusing that would have gone unnoticed in times gone by.

One of my cameras celebrates it’s third birthday next week and it will go away for it’s third service a week or two later. It isn’t particularly cheap but it is a bargain when you think how much I rely on that camera to perform on a daily basis. I have a nine-year old lens that has been to either Fixation orCanon CPS six times to get this or that checked and another seven-year old lens that has made five service trips.

I have always loved the line from “Only Fools and Horses” where Trigger the road sweeper says proudly that he has had the same broom for years but that it has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles. I don’t think that camera maintenance is quite that easy but the concept should apply.

Professional kit is closer to high performance cars and needs to be treated with a bit of TLC every once in a while.

It’s not really that funny…

I’ve just had yet another conversation with a keen photographer who wants to become a photojournalist. For the sake of anonymity, let’s call him Charlie. I have quite a few of these chats and they regularly leave me feeling in need of a joke or two to help overcome the worries I have for some of these (mostly) young people looking for the right career. Last year I uploaded a load of photographer based jokes to a web forum where a lot of news, sports and press photographers hang out. You know the kind of thing:

Q. How many photojournalists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. None – they aren’t allowed to change anything…

The silly thing is that I spent several minutes agonizing over whether to answer the question as ‘we’ or ‘they’. Am I a photojournalist or aren’t I? In the end, I chickened out and went with they telling myself that just because I used ‘they’ it didn’t mean that I couldn’t count myself in. Typical cop-out!

There were plenty more jokes in a similar vein:

Q. How many art directors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. Does it have to be a lightbulb?

Q. How many newspaper photographers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. No time for that, just stick the ISO up to 6400 and shoot it with available light.

I think that the list (and my colleagues’ patience) eventually stretched to ten lightbulb jokes and I’m pretty sure that I could have managed a few more.

Anyway, let’s get back to the point of this blog post. I was talking to Charlie (our potential student) a few weeks ago and I was telling him how tough the market is right now and how competitive it is to even get a foot on the ladder. I pointed out that news photography and photojournalism were careers in which you were most unlikely to ever make a lot of money and I even told him the other photographer joke that I know: “What is the best way to make a small fortune in photojournalism? Start with a large fortune!”

Charlie was still keen and was still interested in studying the subject but there was something about him and his manner that made me think that he still didn’t really understand what the job was really about and how tough it would be – even if the economy made a rapid recovery and even if advertising revenues came back to newspapers and magazines in sufficient quantities to help remove some of the financial pressures that we battle with every day. We shook hands, I gave him my card and offered to talk again if needs be.

He rang me this morning saying that he had been to a university for an interview where they were offering him a place on a three-year degree course at huge expense and that my opinion of the current market was not shared by the teachers he had met there. They had sold him the dream and he was considering buying into it. Don’t get me wrong, being a photographer and working for the media is often exciting, regularly rewarding and always unpredictable but I am worried by educators selling courses that are largely not fit for purpose. These days a three year degree is a huge investment to make and I have written before about the pros and cons of formal study versus the kind of shorter course (that I now teach on) versus learning as you go.

My main advice to Charlie was to consider what the worst thing that could happen if he did the course and in three years time he had £30,000 worth of debts and no clear idea how he was going to start to earn enough to repay the money. That was a question his parents had asked and he said he had ignored. Now that someone from within the business was asking it he seemed to take it more seriously. It was a telephone conversation but I could sense that his passion for photography had become more real since we had first met. It seemed to me that he had been bitten by the bug.

We talked a little more and I suddenly remembered two more photographer lines that always make me smile:

(Tongue in cheek)

You know when you are a photographer when…

Somebody asks you what your favourite colour is and you consider answering “18% grey”.
Somebody asks what your lucky number is and you find yourself wanting to say “1.4”.

There you go – I’m smiling again. Good luck Charlie… (even if that’s not your real name)

The 11″ Apple MacBook Air

A couple of weeks ago I took the plunge and bought a new laptop. I have been looking at small lightweight notebooks for quite a while and I have been trying to work out out whether the iPad or any of the other tablets would be OK for the work that I do. You see, I am getting a little bit older and I want to carry less weight – partly because I seem to be getting on and off of planes a lot more and partly because I would like to use trains instead of automatically driving everywhere.

Until very recently nobody made the right piece of kit. Apple have been promising to come close with the first and second generation MacBook Air models as well as the 13″ MacBook Pro but, somehow, none of their kit has quite got it right. I have looked at Windows notebook and sub-notebook models from a range of manufacturers and both HP and Sony have come close.

Then along came the third generation Apple MacBook Air and I am delighted by the 11″ model that I now own. I bought an i5 powered model with 4Gb of RAM and a 128Gb SSD drive and I am blown away by the performance – even compared to my 2010 15” MacBook Pro with an i5 processor and 8Gb of RAM.

When I got the new Air I posted on a Facebook group that I would report back about it. Two weeks later and having done a few jobs with it I thought that it was time to post my opening thoughts about it. It came with OSX Lion loaded which threatened to present a few compatibility issues with older versions of applications. Indeed, my main workhorse application Photo Mechanic was being reported as having one or two issues with slide shows. Two days after getting the Air Camera Bits released a Beta version of the software designed for OSX Lion and I have been using it ever since. In fact the second Beta is now loaded and it all seems to be going swimmingly. Issue number one sorted.

Issue number two concerned the software that controlled the two 3G USDPA mobile broadband dongles that I rely on when I am on the road. The 3 network posted an update for their drivers within a day or two and so I was left waiting for Vodafone to follow suit. It wasn’t a deal-breaker though because I have a Mifi unit for the Vodafone network and the new Air seems to work flawlessly with that. A few days ago a fellow Apple enthusiast and Vodafone customer Edmond Terakopian noticed that Vodafone had quietly put an update on their website and that meant that issue number two was sorted as well.

Issue number three was to do with loading Apple’s own Final Cut Express. It just would not load onto the MacBook Air and work. The first attempt to load it ended with having software in the Apps folder that wouldn’t open without getting a compatibility error message and the second attempt left me without even that. I searched some forums looking for the answer and the Apple community finally pointed me in the direction of an upgrade to Apple’s plug-in manager which let issue number three finally sorted.

What happened next is still a mystery. It seems as if getting Final Cut Express working stopped Aperture from functioning. Every time I try to launch Aperture I get an error message telling me to check with the developer to see if the version of Aperture is compatible with the latest OSX. Well, as far as I know I have the latest version having downloaded it from the App Store. Issue number four is most definitely NOT sorted!

That’s enough of problems – what about the good stuff? Well, the Air is small and light and pretty quick considering the specification. It runs my basic applications (Photo Mechanic, Photoshop CS5 for Adobe Camera RAW and Transmit) very well and the gloss screen is far less of an issue than I feared it might be. The lack of a Firewire 800 port means that my workflow has had to change a little – I am not ingesting everything as a matter of course on this laptop. Instead I am using the UDMA enabled Lexar USB card reader to do a rapid initial edit and only import the pictures that have a chance of making it into the edit – cutting a stage out of my usual workflow.

Someone, somewhere wrote that the best camera is the one that you have with you and with the MacBook Air that same description will be applied to laptops. So many times in the past I have left my laptops in the car or at home because they are heavy enough to notice. Even with the small power supply I would be happy to carry the Air almost all of the time.

The big bonus, apart from the size and weight of the MacBook Air is its solid state hard drive – which is a revelation. To say that it is fast to boot would be an understatement. To say that it is quick to perform it’s tasks would be to equally shortchange it’s efficiency. I hope that I will always get SSDs from now on, they make all sorts of sense and they are tougher, quieter and see to produce a lot less heat. Finally, a laptop you can use on your lap without getting second degree burns! This new MacBook Air is as quick as my seemingly far better specified MacBook Pro. It weighs very little, has excellent battery life and stays cool.

Given the choice between buying either a MacBook Pro OR a MacBook Air I would probably say that a Pro with a SSD would be the best option if it is your only computer. I am lucky, the Air isn’t my only computer and it isn’t crammed full of Apps that I use twice a month so it is running sweetly and I love it.

Insurance fine print for photographers

Yesterday morning I received a renewal reminder from the company that insures my camera gear. Twenty minutes later I read a posting on a photographers’ discussion forum warning that some of the companies who offer specialist cover for press photographers equipment were saying that they were not going to pay out for equipment stolen, lost or damaged during the recent civil disturbances in London. I put on my “Vice Chairman of The BPPA” hat and got straight on the phone to the company that the association recommends to it’s members.

I had a long conversation with one of the directors of this major camera and public liabilities insurance brokerage regarding their position on claims from photographers who had equipment damaged or stolen during the recent violence.

He explained that they placed business with three separate insurance underwriters and that they were attempting to get a statement agreed by all three so that they could let us know what the definitive position was. As this was being negotiated, the Prime Minister was speaking during the emergency debate in the House of Commons. David Cameron mention the word ‘riot’ and said that there would be payments made under the 1886 Riot (Damages) Act. This led two of the underwriters to pull back from agreeing the statement until they could get clarification about the limitations of where and how the 1886 Act would be applied.

The insurance broker’s own interpretation of the Act says that at no time was a ‘riot’ declared and therefore they couldn’t see how payments under it could be expected. This left them having to make the decision to press the underwriters for their interpretations of the situation but the Association of British Insurers have not issued their guidance yet and therefore none of the insurance companies are prepared to stick their necks out either. I mentioned that one of the other brokers had told a photographer that their claim would be paid. He was surprised by this given that none of the London underwriters had made a decision yet.

We went on to talk about the cost of policies where full riot cover would be included and his estimate was that the current policies costing between 2% and 3% of the value of the kit insured would rise to between 15% and 20% and possibly more. He said that they would be happy to find any deals out there but that the existence of the 1886 Riot Act would remain a complicating factor.

This got me thinking about the other insurance policies that I have to cover me and my business and, as I had just renewed my policy, I thought that I’d check my car insurance. On first reading I couldn’t find anything that mentioned driving to or parking at a scene of civil disturbance but then I saw a catch all phrase about “knowingly placing the vehicle and/or it’s contents at risk”. A quick phone call later and I could see that driving to a riot for work would be a bad idea because my car insurers would not pay out if there was any damage or if the car were stolen. If a riot happened in my street or in a place where I had been on other business that would be OK – it’s the “knowingly” bit that would be an issue.

Next on my list was my own personal cover and, once again, I asked for clarification to be told that deliberately seeking out disorder would invalidate my cover. It was with a heavy heart and a sense of inevitability that my “all risks, business and domestic” travel insurance turned out to be a “not quite all risks” policy.

The moral of the story is simple: Do not assume that you are covered to do your job if that job takes you into harm’s way because it is very likely that neither you or your possessions are.