opinion

Bad weather and batteries

OK, so I forgot to post and say “happy new year”. I’m trying to make my blog posts count and my new year’s blog resolution is to be “relevant, regular and interesting”. The first thing that I want to do is to heap praise on the batteries used in the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra system. The weather in the UK over Christmas was pretty cold and in Perthshire, where we spent Christmas, it was very cold indeed. I had my Ranger Quadra kit in the car boot for well over a week of sub-zero temperatures and the batteries still worked perfectly.

The same cannot be said for the Quantum turbo that was also there. I know that this might seem a small point to most of you but the ability of batteries to keep their charge in cold weather is a big selling point for professional gear. Obviously this wasn’t a scientifically controlled experiment but I am really pleased to know that the gear seems to have this very welcome durability.

Teamwork

Great news photography doesn’t just stem from a good photographer. There is are a whole number of people that come together in the planning, execution and reproduction of top class images and the real downside of being a freelancer is that I miss being part of a really great team.

©Neil Turner/TSL | Weymouth, Dorset | December 2007

Being a photographer is usually part of a process. Images are commissioned, stories are bought and sold, edits are done and newspapers are printed. It’s a big and complicated jigsaw and being the person who operates the camera has to be the best part. There is no such thing as a run of the mill commission, but the process often goes like this;

  • The story is commissioned
  • The arrangements are made
  • The photographer is briefed
  • The photographs are taken
  • The edit is done
  • The pages are laid out
  • The newspaper/magazine is printed

There can be upwards of thirty people involved in the whole process and it’s important that the communication is good and that it goes in all directions. Some photographers aren’t as lucky as I am – this piece from the Sports Shooter site is a tongue in cheek rant against bad communications and poor commissioning. Unfortunately lot’s of photographers fail to live up to their obligations, indeed many don’t even recognise that they even have those obligations. It is up to us to talk to the picture editor, the journalist and ask the right questions. Getting the correct information from everyone else in the chain gives the photographer the best possible opportunity to shoot the right photographs and to tell the story in the best way possible. A failure to communicate ties the creative hands of the photographer and drastically reduces their chance of making a great set of pictures.

Sometimes the commissioning editor will forget an important detail, and at other times spelling mistakes and wrong addresses will get in the way of the pictures. Checking details, double checking spellings and discussing the story with the editorial staff will always prove to be time well spent:

  • It helps with the story under discussion
  • It improves your own relationship with the editorial team
  • It goes a little way to improving photographer editorial relations on a world scale!

Of course the picture desk need to do their bit in this vital piece of symbiosis because photographers really appreciate being given accurate information, input into the story and feedback after publication. Two way conversations work, and the industry needs more of them.

Being self-critical

One of the best things about studying photography at college was having so many of your peers around to help critique your work on a daily basis. It often hurt at the time and more than once I decided to ignore the advice of my friends and forge ahead with my own style. After college there was always the darkroom or the lab where you would talk to other photographers and get some feedback on what you were doing. Then there were a few years when we were hand processing film wherever we happened to be and scanning it, quickly followed by the early digital era. That brief period between the darkroom and the almost universal uptake of the internet and adoption of digital was a tough time for those of us who liked to talk about our work with other photographers.

Now we have choices. We can submit our work to picture sharing networks or publish them on our own sites and hope that others take the time to have a look. Excitingly, we have a growing number of photography discussion groups such as Photo Forum in London where like-minded folks can get together and see the work of others, talk about it, help each other and get inspiration.

There is, however, another option. Self-critcism. The concept is simple – you look at your own work very very closely and try to see how you could have done it better, more imaginatively or maybe just differently. As a freelancer, based a hundred miles from London, this is something that I am going to spend more and more time doing. It was easy to look at a friend’s work and pass a comment or two but it is a lot tougher de-constructing your own images. So much so that I have been giving some thought to having a structure for looking at my own pictures. My first thought was to have some headings under which to work: image quality, composition, light, first impression, suitability for the job were all there in my first list. It’s a decent way to analyse images but I can’t help thinking that there is a better and more enjoyable way to critique my own work.

I tried opening a small number of random images from the past months work and really studying them hard, trying to imagine that they weren’t mine. I found myself coming up against headings and categories again and so I marked six images with a numerical score out of ten under five separate headings and ended up with scores ranging from 20/50 to 44/50. An interesting exercise, but boring and outrageously bureaucratic! What would I have said if these pictures had been by someone else? The first thought that came into my head was that I wouldn’t have wanted to hear about how hard the job was or why certain compromises had been made – the very things that I know about my own work.

Taking a look at the pictures without giving myself a proverbial “pat on the back” for overcoming technical and physical difficulties brought me closer to the answer. Answering questions like “does it have instant appeal?”, “is it a good picture?” and “does it fulfil the brief?” without the excuses that I had been giving myself started to work. The next step was to try to put myself in the shoes of the client and factor in what they might have thought about them. It was getting complicated but I found myself looking at my own work in a far more detached way than I ever had done before.

Applying this process to an edit that I had done a week or so previously allowed me to go back and make that edit so much tighter. I have a very bad habit of editing far too loosely and giving myself a few rules to work with definitely helped me.

At the end of the process I made three decisions:

  • To be far tougher on myself when editing
  • To seek out help from other photographers to review what I’m doing
  • To have another look at my portfolio and see if I can re-shape it

It’s amazing where a few idle thoughts lead you

A rant against dull and predictable photography

Originally posted in November 2002, this was a classic rant against dull and predictable photography…

I’m afraid that I get quite excited by a good argument. The cut and thrust of intellectual discourse is both stimulating and fulfilling, but I have decided that there really is no point in arguing with a disciple!

Discussion forums are great places to spend five minutes, pick up a few tips and dispense some of one’s own “wisdom”. I visit a few photography forums from time to time, and I hope that advice that I have given has helped a few people get more from their photography. The thing that upsets me, however, is the prevalence of self appointed experts who follow the teachings of photographic gurus.

A couple of months ago I wrote about various bits of advice that I have been given in my time wielding a camera. I came to the unremarkable conclusion that the best bit of advice had been to ignore advice from somebody who claims that there is only one way to achieve something in photography. The world of High Street photography seems to be fertile territory for gurus and their disciples. One or two high profile photographers have established ways of doing family portraiture that have barely moved on since the 1980s. Whole industries have grown up manufacturing the cliche’d accessories that keep the cult of posing guide and lighting ratios going. No matter which High Street around the world you go to, there they are… the blotchy canvas backdrops and fake bookcases, posing cushions and fake rugs that are featured in the “How You Must Do Portraiture” videos.

As a production line and money making business model these methods of portraiture are singularly successful. Every home in the world seems to have some images produced by the “factory photographers”, but just like factory farming you get bland and often tasteless products churned out by people who either don’t care, have lost sight of why they did the job in the first place or just see it as a way to make money. Whilst this all saddens me a great deal, it is a good business model and you have to make a living and pay your bills somehow.

What really upsets me about this kind of work is that there is a massive number of people out there who are exposed to this kind of work and follow the gurus. They go out and buy the video because that’s what they believe portraiture is all about, they buy the blotchy canvases because they feature heavily in the videos and they finally get sucked into thinking that this is what photography is all about. I want to kick and shout and make people realise that you don’t have to have battery hens to get eggs. If you want battery eggs, go to the supermarket and buy them – but if you want something better, something tastier then you have got to start keeping your own chickens. Photography at all levels of ability allows you to produce what you want to. Creative and interesting portraiture is just around the corner as long as you don’t get suckered into believing that there is anything remotely original about canvas backdrops and set lighting ratios.

I was working in a school the other day and a parent had come to collect their child’s “portrait” taken at school. She picked it up and went to leave when the receptionist called after her to say that she had picked up the wrong child. The parent replied “…does it matter, all the kids look the b****y same in these snaps anyway!” I wanted to applaud her, she was so right. The “individually created” portrait is no better unless the photographer is going to create a new canvas back cloth for each client and then dispose of them straight afterwards.

I hope that the people pedaling the lie that this kind of work is somehow “classic portraiture” all over the internet will throw off their robes and admit that there just might be another way of achieving wonderful and desirable images.

My call goes out – Amateur photographers, wannabes and bored professionals everywhere… rise up, burn those backdrops, dump those videos and escape the cult now. There is a world of interesting, unique and occasionally truly original work to be done out there. Before you know where you are, that chant (ommmm-mainlight,fill light,hair light,backlight-ommmm) will just be a distant and mildly embarrassing memory.

©Neil “don’t copy me, just learn from my mistakes” Turner.

Five people that I will never forget

Originally posted in July 2009, this was a very personal reflection on some very important people in my career.

I suspect that most professional photographers keep a pool of pictures that they use for promotional, exhibition and portfolio purposes. I have always had a folder full of my favourites and now that I am freelance one of my regular tasks is to update it. The death of Mr Henry Allingham who was, at the age of 113, the oldest surviving veteran of the First World War made me go through and think about some of the people that I have had the honour of meeting and photographing.

My folio folder had no fewer than five images of people who have died since being photographed by me. As a percentage, that’s not out of the ordinary and three of them were very elderly indeed. Each of the five people had a big effect on me for various reasons and I’d like to share some memories of them with you.

©Neil Turner/TSL

Dame Iris Murdoch was a brilliant novelist whose life story was made into a film “Iris” starring Dame Judy Dench. I photographed Iris Murdoch and her husband John Bayley in the garden of the home that they shared in Oxford where he was a professor of English. She was, by the time that this picture was taken in 1998, suffering from the latter stages of Alzheimers’ – which is a terrible disease that robs the intellect and then the personality of the sufferer and places a great strain on those who love and care for them.

Dr Bayley described her as being like “a very nice 3-year-old”. This picture was on the back cover of the book that he wrote about their life together.

The house had not been properly cleaned for a long time and there was a television in every room playing the same programme.

When I went to see the movie made of her life two women in the row behind me made comments about the house that they lived in and that she could not believe it could have been as bad as the film made out. The temptation to turn around and tell them that the film did not tell even half of the story was strong, but I resisted. She died in Oxford on February 8, 1999.

©Neil Turner/TSL

Sir Peter Ustinov was an actor, writer, director and raconteur. This picture was taken in his London hotel shortly before he died in 2004 aged 82. I’m not going to attempt to precis his life, but I’d like to tell my story about my time with him. I was searching for something to chat to him about and I used one of my “fallback” topics of what I had heard on the radio on my way to meet him.

Every morning BBC radio 4 has a news show called “The Today Programme” which that morning had a feature about the USA and communism. I mentioned Senator McCarthy and Sir Peter then delivered a wonderful and vitriolic soliloquy on the topic of McCarthyism – job done. I’m pretty sure that you would have had to pay a lot of money for a forty minute private performance from Sir Peter. I feel so privileged to have had it for free.

©Neil Turner/TSL

When I met and photographed Mr Henry Allingham he was already 112 years old. Despite his amazing age he was very coherent, had a very British sense of humour and was interested in everyone and everything around him.

I found meeting him very humbling and, when he died, I found myself counting the ways in which our world has changed during his lifetime. Cars, planes, computers, atomic bombs, heart-transplants have all become commonplace.

Queen Victoria was still on the throne of Great Britain when he was born and women did not get the vote until he was in his late twenties.

©Neil Turner/TSL

Leon Greenman OBE was the gentlest of men. Meeting him and being given a personal tour of the Holocaust Museum in London where there is a display featuring a large number of his personal possessions from before and during his time in the concentration camps had a profound and lasting effect on me.

His striped uniform with it’s Star of David, photographs of his wife and children who died in the camps, pictures of his life before the Nazis came and took the Jews away were there and he was there to talk about them in a factual but moving way.

I will never forget the day I met him and I hope that the amazing work he did to educate subsequent generations about the evils he witnessed goes on.

©Neil Turner/TSL

The death of people who have lived long and valuable lives is sad. The death of a child is far sadder. I met Fleur at a children’s hospice near Luton a few weeks before her untimely death. She was a sweet child who wanted to know all about everything.

Keech Cottage Children’s Hospice in Bedfordshire provides respite and terminal care for children with life limiting conditions. It is not a sad place. The children there are pretty much like any other children.

The families that I met had come to terms with the fact that they would lose the child that they loved and were making the most of their time together. I was welcomed, I was royally entertained and I would go back tomorrow if they’d have me.

From journalism to design and all spaces in between

No matter what you talk about in life there seems to be a scale: left to right, top to bottom, right to wrong. I can now add a new one….journalism to design. These are the two ends of the scale that I exist in as a photographer. At one extreme my work is pure journalism and at the other it’s little more than eye candy.

©Neil Turner. London, June 2009

The pressures that I feel when I’m out working come from both directions, and both sets of pressures come from the newspaper. My instincts are clearly those of a news photographer, but more and more I find that my work is required, judged and edited by designers. This makes me nervous because they wouldn’t ever consider meddling with the written journalism and I sometimes find my pictures being selected on the basis of how well they add to the graphical feel of the page.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for this attitude to pictures in lifestyle magazines, but the success of those magazines has meant that attitude spilling over into newspapers. Daily and weekly papers have always been dominated by the written word and photographs have always had to struggle for their place as an integral part of the journalism. I am fairly convinced that no significant newspaper has ever had a photographer as it’s editor, so it isn’t surprising that words dominate.

The constant changes in “who does what” inside newspapers has lead to the appointment of more and more designers who seem to have become very influential, not only in a design sense but in a more general editorial way too. Photographers are being sidelined by yet another group of workers.

Going back to my left to right argument, there are pages within a newspaper that are predominantly news and there are pages that are rightly about lifestyle. I have no problem with this except where the emphasis becomes blurred and decisions about photographs are made because they make the page look good on pages where the journalistic content should be king. Editorial photography is a far wider field than news photography and I want to be able to shoot in a wide range of styles to suit the whole spectrum, but more and more of my colleagues here in London are feeling the pressure to shoot in a softer, more feature based style all of the time. Don’t get me wrong, I think that great photography is great photography no matter why the pictures were taken and no matter where they are intended to go…but…the hijacking of news pages by people with anything other than journalism in their thoughts has to be resisted.

I strongly believe in giving designers and layout artists greater flexibility so I hope that everyone will realise that I want to meet “the enemy” halfway and not just sit sniping on the sidelines. I just get very depressed when I hear designers and layout people talking about photographs, good photographs as so much “window dressing”. The answer? Appoint more picture literate people to senior positions on newspapers, treat news photography with due respect and never allow photography to become just another element of design

One light, big space

It’s very useful to be able to kill two birds with one stone – especially when you have a limited amount of time. I have been very busy this month and blogging time has ben limited. I had intended to carry on my review of the ERQ and maybe post a new technique piece as well. I was sent on a job the other day that allows me to do both.

The quality that you can get at 3200 ISO with the latest generation digital cameras is amazing but sometimes you really would rather light something. I was asked to shoot some pictures of “An Evening with Alan Bennett” – an event staged to raise awareness and funds for the Christie NHS Hospital Foundation Trust. The Christie is a world renowned hospital in Manchester and they decided to hold an event in London to raise their profile. The venue was the Royal College of Physicians in London’s Regents Park. The library is a spectacular blend of 20th century modern architecture and the fixtures, fittings and books from earlier centuries. The light is kept deliberately low and that presented me with a few issues. At 3200 ISO I was only getting 1/60th at f2.8 and so I used my Elinchrom Ranger Quadra kit to give the room a lot more light.

Allan Bennett talks to Jenni Murray. ©Neil Turner

My idea was simple. I set up the light as far away from the interview as I could get it and bounced the light off of a wall. This gave me a light source of about eight feet (2.4 metres) by four feet (1.2 metres) at almost 90 degrees to the subject and at a distance of over thirty feet (9 + metres). Quite a decent soft light, but very directional and it looks utterly unlit.

This is an effect that I have written about before but the power of the ERQ kit, given that it is only rated at 400 w/s, made this very easy. I was able to be quite a distance away using a 70-200 f2.IS L lens on an EOS5D MkII and frame my shots with relative ease. I was shooting between rows of chairs and invited guests and had been asked by the organisers to severely limit my use of flash so I only got half a dozen goes at the shot. This was my favourite frame and it shows the interviewer – Radio 4’s Jenni Murray – asking Alan Bennett a question right at the start of the session.

This was shot at 1/60th of a second at f5.6 at 800 ISO. The available light was non-existent and the effect is very interesting. I had been worried about the range of the Elinchrom Skyport triggers but they worked very well at a range of at least thirty feet, probably nearer to forty feet and my only gripe with them is their lack of a locking mechanism to keep them in the hot shoe. The ERQ system passe another important test here and I’m still very very happy with the kit.

Owning up to some bad habits

“It’s all about light”. That’s a message that I hope everyone who visited the technique pages on my web site will take away. When you are the one who controls that light, you have a large number of options open to you. This month I have been trying a new toy and I thought that I’d use that as an excuse to write about how and why I choose the quality of the light.

©Neil Turner/TSL | London | December 2004

The first thing I have to do is own up to some fairly bad habits:

The first is that I go through personal fashions in the way I light and in the kit that I carry with me. One month I’ll use softboxes and then the next month I’ll use umbrellas. One week I will keep the flash as only one element of the scene and the next the flash will overwhelm the ambient light.

My second bad habit is that I will light women in a different way to men. 99% of the time I will use a much softer set up for female subjects than I would for males.

Thirdly, I’m aware that I tend to use a harder light on older skin (especially men). Older people seem to have a lot less moisture in their skin and so their faces have a lot less shine.

I’m much more likely to direct a spectacles wearer about the angle of their head, simply to avoid getting bad reflections in their glasses. I also try to find out if people wear contact lenses and get them to look more squarely at me to avoid getting any strange shapes in their eyes.

So far I’m painting myself as a bit of a lazy photographer. I like to think that it’s not laziness – more a realistic attitude towards getting the shot right. When you are shooting people, you often end up shooting a very different picture than the one that you first envisaged so my bad habits are there to simply give me an easy starting point. Getting on with the shoot is part of my style. I rarely spend very much time wandering around formulating ideas, largely because I am regularly expected to set up, shoot and break down in a matter of minutes. Having the “safe shot” in the bag is something of a religion to me and I find that giving in to my “bad habits” makes my practice a lot easier.

Many photographers use the same technique day in and day out. I cannot claim to do everything differently every day, and sometimes I feel like a chef who has a limited range of ingredients that I can select, mix and adapt to create new and interesting combinations. Every once in a while a new ingredient becomes available, a new toy to play with. Does that make me gadget boy? Or does it simply help to keep my work fresh?