photography

Seaside towns beginning with ‘B’…

I was born in Bournemouth, went to school in Bournemouth and I live there most of the time. I am, as they say, a Bawmuff Boy. There are a couple of other major seaside towns that also begin with ‘B’. Brighton is 94 miles along the coast and I have shot at least twice as many commissions there than in my home town in the last 25 years. Blackpool, on the other hand, is a long way from either Bournemouth or London and somewhere that I have only ever been sent to for party political conferences. Because of the distance I’ve never seen the place as it should be seen – without an overload of grey men in grey suits.

©Neil Turner/TSL. Brighton, July 1995 - a view that no longer exists.

I really like Brighton – it is a photogenic place and it seems to be a really media-savvy sort of town too. On one occasion in the summer of 1995 I was even sent there to shoot stock images of the place to accompany general articles about the town (now a city I believe) and about the county of East Sussex. It was the first in a series of similar days when the diary was empty and I went to Cambridge, Oxford, Birmingham, Bristol and Norwich during that summer. It’s not very often you get quite such relaxed brief but it was actually quite a challenge – generic images in three hours and away again. Cambridge and Oxford were a lot easier but Brighton was the one I’d choose to do again. If I were given a free hand it would have to be Blackpool though. Every time I see it on TV I think to myself “so many pictures to be taken…”

©Neil Turner/TSL. Brighton, July 1995

©Neil Turner/TSL. Brighton, July 1995. Timeless...

Ahmet Zappa – the “contact sheet”

Ahmet Zappa is the son of legendary rocker Frank Zappa and is an author who has written books for children. A resident of Los Angeles, he was photographed at the offices of his publishers, Penguin Books on The Strand in London. I was there at the same time as one other photographer and we played this weird “your go, my go” dance shooting portraits in turn in different parts of the beautiful building. He was more than happy to clown around – his PR team were less sure until we showed them what the pictures looked like on the LCD screens, at which point they became very happy indeed!

©Neil Turner/TSL. London, August 2006.

The magazine went for frame 032 but I have always preferred 027. It has been in and out of my folio over the last three years and I think that it will get another outing soon.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses. Some available light but mostly with a Lumedyne Signature series flash and a 24″ x 32″ Chimera soft box. There is also quite a bit of ambient light in the pictures.

The man who wrote “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”

Everyone who has ever read books to very young children should have seen “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”. It’s an absolute classic and, back in 1999 I had five minutes to shoot a portrait of Eric Carle, the American writer and illustrator who created it at a London Hotel. I should have had longer but I was badly late because I’d been given the wrong address but he was charming, patient and his PR people were relaxed as well. At the time, he was 70 years old and the book was coming out as a 30th anniversary edition.

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 1999, London.

As soon as I got there, I set up my Lumedyne battery powered light with a simple shoot-through umbrella and started to work.  The author was sat in a high backed chair and I decided to work around where he was already sitting – he looked relaxed and I was still in “full apology mode”.

Although this was nearly 13 years ago I can still remember a random throughout that came into my head “if I were casting someone to be Santa Claus, it would be this guy”. From then onwards all I could see was a really nice bloke with a twinkle in his eye that children would adore. The fact that he must have illuminated millions of childhoods was certainly in my mind and we shot some very nice pictures very quickly.

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 1999, London.

This set of eight pictures is all that remains from the shoot. Back in 1999 storage was still expensive and the company policy was to use Zip discs (remember them?). My laptop had a zip drive and I put the wider edit onto the “official” zip disc and kept the tight edit on another disc for my own records. The official disc with the Kodak RAW files was lost somewhere in the mists of time and we didn’t discover that it was gone until we started to upload the entire back catalogue into a managed and backed-up library a couple of years later. You learn from your mistakes.

I like the simple and innocent tight composition of frame 004 and I love the expression of frame 007. I have read his books to young members of the family ever since and I try really hard to do so with the same twinkle in my eye that the author had.

This was still the early days of digital and I was using a Kodak DCS520 (Canon D2000) with Canon 17-35, 28-70 and 70-200 f2.8 lenses. At 200 ISO, with good light and if you didn’t need to use the pictures too large the quality of the files was actually very good indeed.

Archive photo: Private investigator. December1990

©Neil Turner/Insight. December 1990. London

Back at the end of 1990 I was sent to accompany a reporter to do an interview with a private investigator. He was an ex-Metropolitan Policeman who had a very good reputation and track record in finding runaway children. He was possibly the severest looking person I had ever met and his penchant for big fat cigars did wonders for his image. The truth is that he was actually a very caring man and both the reporter and I liked him a lot.

When I did a quick “Google” for the man I found that he had given another interview to the newspaper ten years later and that he was still as forthright as he had been. I would imagine that he has since retired but I still look very fondly at this picture and remember it’s place in one of my old portfolios.

This was shot using ambient light at his office in Southwark. I was probably using a Nikon FM2 with a 180mm f2.8 Nikkor which I had at the time and the film is Kodak Tri-X. This was scanned from a fibre-based print which was printed full frame with the rebate showing.

The early days of digital

I took delivery of my first Kodak DCS520 digital camera in late November 1998. It was a revelation. I had used a previous model (DCS3) which was pretty poor and I wasn’t really that convinced about the whole process. After three days, I was a convert – the kind of convert who then sees it as their role to evangelise about their new-found wisdom/insight/faith. Based on the Canon EOS1n camera, the Kodak conversion replaced the whole of the back of the camera and quite a big chunk of the electronics too. It was expensive, relatively slow and it only had 1.9 megapixels. It had a tiny low resolution LCD screen on the back and it used enormous and expensive batteries that rarely lasted a whole day but I absolutely loved it from that first week!

©Neil Turner/TSL. 10th December 1998

This was one of the first proper portraits that I shot with my first DCS520 (known as the Canon D2000 in some countries) and it was of a double bassist and jazz teacher in his own home. My conversion was so dramatic and so complete that I even remember sulking a little when I had to shoot on film for the glossy sections of the newspaper. We worked with these early cameras for nearly four years until the Canon EOS1D came out. Nikon had introduced the D1 in that period and the see-saw battle for supremacy between the two big manufacturers with input from Kodak and Sony began in ernest.

I quite often get asked what the big trigger was for digital in the newspaper industry. There are a few factors;

  • The arrival of cameras capable of shooting quality images
  • The money saved by newspapers getting rid of darkroom staff
  • The arrival of new health and safety laws that meant waste chemicals became very expensive to dispose of
  • The speed of turnaround of digital pictures
  • The ease of archiving digital images

Talking with others who used the Kodak DCS series camera from that era we all agree about one thing – how good Kodak’s software was. What a shame that they threw away their lead in professional digital photography. If they had even kept their software development going, they could possibly have avoided needing to file for bankruptcy protection in the US courts last week. I look back at the early days of digital with a real fondness – they really were the most exciting of times. There’s something very cool and very rewarding about being in the second row of pioneers!

Folio photo #14: Children on a bug hunt, south London, May 1999

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 1999, south London

This picture from a story about children from a local primary school going on a “bug hunt” in Nunhead Cemetery was shot for a special supplement to the TES about the environment. The outdoor lesson was led by Richard ‘Bugman’ Jones, a professional entomologist who undertook a residency at the school. Like a lot of my favourite pictures it doesn’t tell the whole story but it is a ‘moment’ that hopefully makes you want to know more.

I had switched to shooting most of my work digitally the previous year but the Picture Editor working on this section was still keen that we shoot pictures for these glossy extra sections on transparency film. I think that this was the last commission that I ever shot using a Leica M6. The wider shots were definitely on the Leica but I also shot some longer lens pictures using a Canon EOS5 and a fixed 85mm f.18 lens

Geek moment: Leica M6 with 35mm f2 Summicron and Fuji RDP100 transparency film.

Some posts are “a bit Marmite”…

When I started to migrate my old blog over to WordPress I also began to watch the site statistics that are there to help you understand what kind of content on your blog is popular. Obviously announcing new posts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn helps but the figures for days when you don’t do any plugging probably tell you more about what people search for and find.

Having shifted so many old postings (anything listed before December 8th 2011) I have been watching to see whether the ‘old’ stuff gets many viewings. The answer, sadly, is no. More interestingly, blog posts that aren’t about specific photographs don’t get a lot of viewings either.

British readers of this blog will be familiar with the concept of something being “a bit like Marmite” (or Vegimite if your are from the Antipodes). It means something you either love or hate, nobody is indifferent to it.

Drawing comparisons between a savoury spread and blog posts is probably a bit tenuous but I still like the idea! I think that there is some interesting material back there so I’ve decided to go through the viewing figures and publish links to some of my favourite and your least favourite oldies.

That’s half a dozen to be getting along with. I goes that they share a certain ‘wordiness’ but they are the kind of things that I want to to talk about and so I hope you give one or two of them a go.

William Atkinson portrait – the “contact sheet”

When I took these pictures in May 2008 it was only a month before William Atkinson was Knighted in the Queen’s birthday honours list. He had been the Head Teacher at The Phoenix High School in west London since 1995. I shot these portraits on the school’s “farm” which had been an unused area of land which has been brought into use as a community resource and outdoor classroom.

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 2008, London

His CV is long and distinguished and he is an impressive man. Shooting his portrait took patience because he had quite a bit to say about quite a few topics and, like so many head teachers I have photographed, he was constantly watching what was going on around us. This wasn’t the first time I had photographed him – I first shot pictures at Phoenix when he first arrived back in 1995 and the lovely thing was that he still had a copy of that magazine cover on his wall.

I shot 92 frames on this job and submitted a tight edit of 11 having previously trimmed the selection down to 18. Looking back through a lot of the portraits that I did between 2000 and 2008 it is amazing how often 18 was the number of frames that I kept. There has to be an explanation but I am afraid that I cannot think of it!

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses. Lumedyne Signature series flash and a 23″x24″ Chimera soft box.