photography

Another old picture from the loft

©Neil Turner, October 1988

I keep on finding old pictures that I want to talk about so if you are bored by this stuff – I apologise. I have started getting my loft ready for some 21st century insulation and that means getting every last box and filing cabinet out… and of course that means having a peak in them as you go.

The two piers in my home town of Bournemouth have played a huge part in my life and in my photography. My family spent a huge amount of time during the summer months on the beach and I used to play the arcades with my pocket money when Boscombe Pier had a building on the end which housed all manner of slot machines and one-armed bandits.

This picture is, I guess, street photography but on a pier. It was taken on the day that I first used a truly wide angle lens on a Leica M6 – the 28mm f2.8. I would guess that it was October 1988 and I spent a lot of time wandering around just shooting for the fun of it. The roll of Tri-X film that this frame is on holds a wide variety of pictures but this has always been my favourite. The shot has no big meaning – just a pensioner enjoying the late afternoon sunshine but it never fails to make me smile.

Pier divers in Bournemouth

Several (actually all) of my recent blog postings have been about old pictures that I have found lying around or in searches for something else and why they are important to me. The latest one shows some young guys diving of of Bournemouth Pier in the early 1990s and it was part of a set that I did for a trades union magazine. The commission was as simple as it was vague – to produce images of the seafront at Bournemouth that could be used in a preview of the union’s annual conference that was being held in the town.

Bournemouth Pier divers. ©Neil Turner, June 1992

Commissions in those days always attracted expenses and that invariably included the cost of film and processing. The job was only a half-day but what a beautiful half day it was. The sun shone, the beaches were packed and nobody seemed to mind me wandering over and shooting their picture. The people diving from the pier made some great pictures but the dangerous nature of what they were doing meant that the client didn’t even want to consider them.

Shooting slide film in those days carried certain risks, not the least of which was that there was only one original. If that got lost or if the client decided to hold on to it there was nothing that could be done about it. Affordable scanners didn’t really exist and getting duplicate transparencies made was very expensive. These days we can just keep as many copies as we have hard drives and in the days of black and white it was always easy enough to knock out an extra print but there was that scary and even precarious time where you had to get the exposure spot on, hope that the film was processed correctly and that the couriers wouldn’t lose the package containing your work. It is quite amusing to think that “fast turnaround” was measured in hours and the three days or so that it would have taken me to get these images from the camera to the client would have seemed eminently reasonable.

How times have changed!

I’ve always liked this picture. It was shot on a Nikon F4S camera with a 24mm f2 Nikkor using Fuji RDP100 transparency film

Back on Memory Lane again

I don’t know about you but I can put my finger on exact dates and point to pictures that changed the way that I shoot pictures. Aside from the obvious ones such as the day that I used a digital SLR for the first time and the day that I bought my first medium format camera one very special day and one picture made me think really hard about the kind of lighting that I wanted to use.

Desmond Fennell QC. ©Neil Turner

This black and white portrait of Desmond Fennell OBE QC was taken in his chambers at one of London’s famous Inns of Court – The Temple. It was shot for a newspaper and it was during a time in my career that I was using a single Elinchrom 23 flash head with a soft box and a bit of cable connecting the camera to the flash. Nothing unusual there I hear you thinking… how did this change Neil’s life?

Cue anecdote: I was sent to shoot a portrait so I took my standard gear. When I was shown in to the eminent man’s office I started to look around for a power point to plug my Elinchrom into. He answered the phone at that moment (he was chairing a major public enquiry at the time) and so I looked at the desk lamp and followed the cable to the socket in the wall. The trouble is that it was the wrong kind of socket… the UK standard three pin plug has rectangular prongs and his only socket had round holes. Square pegs, round holes… ohhh c**p.

It wasn’t that I was incapable of shooting with either a speedlight or just using the ambient light it was just a bit of a shock. This was actually the second frame that I shot – Nikon FM2 with a 35mm f2 Nikkor, Kodak Tri-X film pushed to 800 ISO.

I like to think that I learn from my professional mistakes and I like to think that after a few days a shock turns into an eye-opener and I remember coming away from this shoot with two lessons learned. The first was to always shoot some ambient light because it often makes stunning pictures – especially at quiet, off-guard moments and the second was to buy some battery powered lights. In truth, that took about three years to accomplish properly and I invested in a lot of extension leads in the mean time. I recall the day that my first Lumedyne kit went into action – complete with a Wein infra-red trigger. No cables. I shot a portrait of another lawyer and left her office singing one of the songs from the Disney version of Pinocchio – “I got no strings to hold me down…”

Street photography 1989 style

“Street photography is back” was the title of an email that I received today. Funny, I never knew that it went away. Having said that, the current exhibition taking place at The Museum of London has given the genre a bit of a boost. There are so many great exponents of street photography working in London today that even I have to admit that it isn’t so much back as resurgent. This got me thinking about some of my own work from early on in my career. I remember sitting in my office one day and a very old friend rang me and asked if I have any pictures of street markets that his younger sister could borrow for a school project. I had a few but, in the absence of anything better to do, I went off to Leather Lane market and shot a couple of rolls of film.

©Neil Turner

At that time I was part of a small agency and we had a rapidly growing library of images that was starting to make us some money. Stock photography was a good marketplace back in the late 1980s and early 1990s and I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to add a few market pictures.

This was my favourite frame of the lot. Shot on a Nikon FM2 with a 35mm f2 Nikkor lens and Kodak Tri-X film – a copy of this print made on old-fashioned bromide paper still hangs on my own office wall. The reasons that I like it are many and varied but the fact that it was born of a simple request from a very good friend (in fact, two years later he was my Best Man at my wedding) gives it extra weight for me. The fact that it has made me quite a bit of money as a stock image certainly doesn’t detract from its appeal but the other thing that makes me love this picture is that it reminds me just how simple photography can be. A mechanical camera with a fixed focal length lens, no automation whatsoever and time. Street photography is all about opportunity and patience.

Waiting for the moment to happen is part of the way that I shoot anyway but I also spend a lot of time looking around trying to anticipate good compositions, watching for the way that light hits surfaces and people. I have a very clear recollection of how this picture was made. I had seen the man walk up through the market and grabbed a couple of frames of him as he walked and shopped. Then I saw this nice gap between stalls and concentrated on framing it and I have the same composition with at least five different people passing through. Finally the interesting person that I really wanted came back and I clicked one frame of him (no motor drives on my FM2s that day). The little black border around the print is the rebate of the film which means, for those of you who are too young to have shot much in the pre-digital era, that this is the whole frame as it was shot – no post production cropping.

When I scanned the print this morning I noticed that this was one of a short edition of hand-prints that I made of this frame and you can see the stamp and date that were on the back with my pixelated signature.

©Neil Turner

Simple and happy days but I don’t particularly want them back. Opening a box of prints brought back the smell of the darkroom and the associated cough rather too vividly. I haven’t made a black and white print in a traditional darkroom since January 1994 and I don’t miss it one bit!

Two surprisingly similar portraits

©Neil Turner/TSL

The great challenge in photography for me is to keep shooting pictures without keeping shooting the same picture. There are thousands of ways of taking a photograph – let’s say that the number is, for argument’s sake, twenty-five thousand. What happens when you have shot two hundred and fifty thousand pictures – have you shot each possible picture ten times? I was looking back through a folder of favourite images today and found two that were taken at a similar point in my career and in a fairly similar location.

So are these two pictures the same, similar or different? It doesn’t matter really what anyone thinks but I really like to see them together. I like to see the similarities and the differences and once you get away from the fact that both are women sitting in a chair in a bay window in London with a quality rug on the floor the differences in the pictures start to matter much, much more. I promise that I haven’t cropped them to match – this is how they were in my folder.

The light comes from the side on both and, knowing the way that I work, that has a lot more to do with eliminating reflections in the glass in a hurry than any creative impulse. The amount of ambient light is higher on the left (yes, that is author Jacqueline Wilson) and the books make the picture feel a lot different to the harder light with less ambient, no books and peeling paint of the left hand portrait of blind sculptor Gohar Kordi.

I love looking at my own work, trying to get ideas for new work from examining old work and I know very well that there will come a time when I do the same (?) shot again and can picture these two frames and what they say in my mind. Next time I will use a longer lens. Next time I will pay even more attention to the symmetry of the composition. I can’t wait…

Good, bad and ugly purchasing decisions

If you talk to any photographer they will almost certainly tell you about the catalogue of bags, cases and pouches that they have bought thinking and hoping in equal part that their lives would be made better by owning and using the perfect holdall. We all know it’s a myth but we all keep buying in the hope that one day that elusive bag will be made and that it will (somehow) save our poor battered spines. Well that’s one kind of bad purchase that we will all own up to but I was put on the spot the other day by a young photographer and asked about my best and worst purchases of recent years. Hmmm…

My reply was that I had been pretty fortunate where cameras and lenses were concerned. I had made pretty good choices on the ‘big ticket’ items – my camera bag is full of the same kit that it was two years ago and (apart from getting newer versions of the same) I’m still happy with my gear. It’s the small things and the software where the good and bad choices seem to come – maybe because they are the nearest thing to impulse purchases that I make.

The Good, the bad and the ugly…

Software tops my list good purchases that I’ve made recently and at the very top is the invoicing software that I’ve been using since I went freelance again in 2008. I found BILLINGS as a ‘staff pick’ at the Apple Store on line and right from day one I have genuinely enjoyed using it and the development that has since taken place from version 2 to version 3 and the addition of an iPhone app has made a good package very good and there is nothing like getting your invoicing right to make you a happier photographer. My other good/great purchase was the iPhone itself. I had tried a Blackberry and I had used a Nokia smart phone but from day one the iPhone has proved itself. It seems as if I get a new ‘life enhancing’ app every week: from cinema bookings to a brilliant parking control app the iPhone becomes more and more important and having the back-up of Mobile Me really helps too.

Back to software – I have used Photo Mechanic for many, many years and I still love it. It is fast, intuitive and does exactly what I need it to do. One colleague refers to it as ‘old school’ and I’ve heard people say that it’s functions are available within newer programmes but I’m far from convinced. Workflow is completely central to the work that we do and so I’m a sucker for anything that is presented as a ‘better, faster, easier’ in the workflow area.

My first ‘bad’ purchase was Adobe Lightroom 3. There is nothing wrong with it. The RAW conversion is exactly the same in Photoshop CS5 but the rest of the file handling and workflow part of it’s capabilities require huge computing power and the patience of a saint. Out of the box it is set up to be thorough but that makes it really slow for the kind of work that I do. By working out the preferences you can decrease it’s thoroughness and speed it up quite a bit but it is still never going to replace Photo Mechanic in my life. That’s an expensive mistake to make but that’s life.

My next ‘bad’ purchase was Apple’s Aperture. Once it came down to just £45.00 in the App Store I was tempted and I gave in. Aperture was an attempt by Apple to take professional workflow, give it the Cupertino treatment and give us a workflow designed from scratch. From version 1 it was flawed and my first experiment with it left me feeling “if only” – in fact a whole list of “if onlys”. Version two came along and they had ticked a couple of boxes but left far too many questions to make it worth pursuing. I bought version 3.1 safe in the knowledge that several of my peers are using it, loving it and even teaching it. I wanted to love it. I tried for well over a month to get on with it but two weeks ago I finally admitted that it was never going to be. Aperture needs power – my Mac has plenty, a Core i5 processor and 8Gb of RAM, but it still never seemed enough. I think that the realisation that Aperture is only at it’s best when you have some expensive plug-ins was a turning point but I soldiered on.

You also need plenty of screen real estate to make the interface appear anything other than cluttered and I do half of my work on a 15″ laptop. I disliked the keyboard shortcuts to start with but got used to those but the reality check was that using Photo Mechanic plus Adobe Camera Raw just makes sense for me.

And here is the truth – what makes a ‘bad’ purchase for one photographer doesn’t mean that it was a bad product. I have owned an Canon 85mm f1.2L lens and sold it again because it didn’t suit me – it’s a hell of a lens, just not for me – I prefer the bargain 85mm f1.8.

So what about an ‘ugly’ purchase? I’m struggling to think of one in the software field. Had I actually bought version 1 of Aperture instead of doing the free trial, that would qualify but I didn’t. I cannot be bothered to list all of my ‘ugly’ camera bag mistakes and so I come to the countless times that I have bought cheap options and regretted them. If I’m shooting with Canon or Vivitar flash units on stands I use the bomb-proof Manfrotto Light-Tite adapters. I tried to use a couple of cheaper ones but they were rubbish and broke under heavy use.

Tripod heads are another way to spend money unwisely. When I left college in 1986 I bought a Manfrotto 155 tripod with a basic head. That got stolen and so I bought another one just the same. When I joined the staff on the newspaper they bought me a new tripod – exactly the same again but with a three-way pan and tilt head complete with a quick-release system and spirit levels. It was a good buy, it worked well and I still have it but I have always wanted an even easier to use tripod head and have bought and sold about half a dozen ball and socket, joystick, friction controlled and fluid heads. I did spend time watching eBay for a geared head at a good price – safe in the knowledge that it would be exactly what I didn’t need and I’ve abandoned the search.

My ugliest purchase ever was a Maxtor USB2 portable hard drive. It failed within days, having never really worked that well anyway. I took it back, they swapped it and the new one failed too. I didn’t lose any data and my only expense was two round trips to the shop to get drives replaced. After the second failure I got a LaCie Rugged drive which is still absolutely fine nearly four years on. I know that it will fail one day and I have duplicates and triplicates of the data stored on it but it has done it’s job.

Making purchasing decisions as a photographer is a tough job but when photography is your livelihood as well as your passion choosing when and what to buy becomes a really tough call. I have a basic kit and I have back-ups for most of it. I have rental accounts with four different companies and I have insurance that should cover my kit against loss, theft and breakages. But what about new, different or specialist gear? The more commercial work that I do, the more that I find myself needing to rent or borrow specialist kit. I have spent hundreds of pounds hiring Canon tilt and shift lenses over the last year or so. I need to seriously consider investing in one or two TSEs because the cost of renting might well be greater than buying, using and then selling on. If a lens costs £2000.00 to buy and it costs £50.00 a day to hire, how many days in a year should you hire before it becomes a better idea to buy? It isn’t 400 days because the lens can be sold. The depreciation on a £2000.00 lens would be somewhere between 1/3 and 1/4 over six months or between £500.00 and £700.00 which is only ten to fourteen days rental (if the days are not continuous) and maybe twenty to thirty days given that you would hire by the week from time to time.

To buy or not to buy, to rent or not to rent – a couple of big questions. One thing is for sure, had I ever been able to rent a Crumpler rucksack camera bag for a few days before lashing out £130.00 I would never, ever, have bought it!

A mission statement or two

Yesterday morning, The BBC presenter and former Economics Editor Evan Davis was sharing his approach to interviewing senior business people. He said that he wanted to relax them, tempt them into talking more openly and frankly than they might want to and because so few of them are media professionals he has a form of words that he uses to let them know what his role is. He says to them “I’m not here to make you look stupid but if you decide to make yourself look stupid it isn’t my job to stop you”. That, my friends, should be the mission statement of every editorial and news photographer working right across the world. And that got me thinking about some equally succinct statements for other kinds of photography and that in turn got me thinking about definitions of types of photography.

“I’m not here to make you look stupid but if you decide to make yourself look stupid it isn’t my job to stop you”. – Evan Davis

Thanks to the verbal clarity and dexterity of Evan Davis we have news and editorial photographers pretty much covered and the next category of photographers that I wanted to think about was PR photographers. For me this comes next for two reasons: firstly that I do quite a bit of PR work myself and also because so many of the good PR photographers here in the UK have a background as press and editorial photographers. The role of the PR photographer is to shoot editorial style images that show their client in a positive light. I don’t have the same ability with words that a senior BBC journalist does but I came up with the following:

“I’m here to help make you and your business look good by concentrating on the positives and ignoring the negatives.”

The cynic in me wanted to go with “he who pays the piper call the tune” but PR photography done well is a lot more than just pointing the camera where you are told and cashing the cheque. Next in line in both my life and in the photography that I do is commercial work. I guess that this differs from PR not so much in what I shoot but for where the pictures end up which is mostly in brochures, company reports and on their websites.

“I’m here to shoot the pictures that you want in the way that you want me to shoot them and to add my own input in achieving the right images”.

This process could go on and on and I have been trying to think of a mission statement for the paparazzi but the truth is I’m not actually sure what they do and why they do it – and I’m pretty sure that some of them are in the same boat. The best and most successful paps know exactly what they are about and that’s why they get paid the big money for the right pictures. My final thoughts on these definitions and mission statements goes to the names given to themselves by wedding photographers and which of the three mission statements above applies to them. I have something of a problem with “wedding photojournalist” because, for me a photojournalist is there to record events and to help tell the story to the wider world – warts and all. It’s those last three words that I cannot believe any wedding photographer can truly sign up to. Your client is normally the bride and groom or at least a close friend or relative of theirs and I’m pretty sure that they would not be happy for every single element of the big day to be recorded and published. I have no issues with the phrases “documentary style photography” or shooting in a “photojournalistic style” but can a wedding photographer really be a detached observer and recorder of events? Please don’t get me wrong here, I have the utmost respect and admiration for the best wedding photographers who have broken with the wooden and formulaic styles that were around when I and most of my friends were getting married. The quality and volume of the work that they produce in such demanding and unrepeatable situations is amazing but I really don’t like the hijacking of the title photojournalist for what is, essentially, very good PR.

Sticks and stones

My mother told me that “sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can never hurt you” and I spent the first 40+ years of my life without questioning that piece of maternal wisdom. At the ripe old age of 46 I started to realise that certain derogatory terms, when applied to groups of people, can have a bad effect.

not going to equate my profession with religious or ethnic groups who have suffered real physical and emotional harm from the constant repetition of terms deliberately designed to insult them and from name calling intended to isolate them or to incite others to be prejudiced against them. What I am going to do is try to make a case for the quiet burial of collective nouns and occupation based slang terms for photographers that only serve to devalue what we do for a living.

Before I get into the arguments I want to say that photographers often use many of these names for each other in what is meant to be a light hearted and affectionate way. Words get borrowed, used and then abused so we are doing ourselves no favours by perpetuating them. There are a whole raft of pseudo-tabloid terms for photographers that I object to;

  • Snapper – implies that we take snaps, which we don’t. We take photographs, we make photographs and we create photographs.
  • Lensman – what does this mean? It’s just a pointless term that gets trotted out by people who cannot be bothered to use a thesaurus.
  • Camera monkey – particularly offensive, and usually used by ill informed and self important writers.
  • Pap’ – shortened form of ‘paparazzi’, which is liberally used by the ignorant to refer to a wide range of news photographers. I have nothing against the paparazzi (literally translated means buzzing flies) but I object to the pejorative connotations of the word when applied to other photographers.
  • Reptiles – used once to my face by an ‘old school’ journalist who was politely informed that I objected to the term on the grounds that it may well have been used affectionately by him, but that it may not be used so kindly by others.

The list could go on but the point that I’m trying to make here is that words used in jest by friends of our profession get picked up by others and used to denigrate us all. All of this is happening at a time when we are struggling to present a unified, dignified and professional image to a world which at best doesn’t understand what we do and at worst regards us with contempt. The terms that we use to refer to one another are important. Not as important as avoiding undercutting other professionals, not as important as selling out on copyright and not as important as belonging to professional bodies, but in a world where everyone who owns a digital compact camera thinks that they can take ‘professional quality pictures’ every small action has an effect. It’s like the old, and probably untrue, story about a butterfly beating it’s wings in China causing a hurricane in Florida – some very small actions have very large consequences.

As photographers we owe it to ourselves and to our colleagues to avoid using terms for each other that can have negative connotations. When was the last time you heard a Doctor call a colleague a “sawbones” in public? When did you ever hear a lawyer, an accountant, a teacher or a systems analyst use a potentially damaging slang term for a fellow professional? I believe that the use of slang terms is a sign of professional insecurity and we can all help ourselves and our peers by refraining form making those signs.

Names may not hurt you or me individually, but they can eat away at our profession.