photography

The copyright symbol and Windows

I’m a Mac user and I have been for the last sixteen years. They make some great tools and some amazing gadgets but the best thing about Macs is that they seem to be made for people like me. I was having this conversation with a student on one of the excellent photographic courses at the Arts University College at Bournemouth and I realised that my preference for Apple computers can be summed up by the fact that the copyright symbol is just there – alt+g – whereas on a Windows machine you have to hunt for it. I have just Googled “how to find the copyright symbol on a Windows computer” and had to laugh out loud at the first website that came up:

“Hold down the Alt key and type 0169 if you have separate numeric keys on your keyboard. Alternatively you can go to programmes, accessories and select “character map” which allows you to assign a short cut to any symbol that you choose. Unfortunately not every copy of Windows has this loaded and you may need to reload it from your system discs”.

Does this seem long-winded to you? Shouldn’t a symbol as important as the copyright one just be there? I know that the option of using (c) is there and almost everyone recognises it but the correct symbol should be much easier to find than it is on most Windows machines.

The serious point here is that copyright is important. Actually, copyright is vital and we all need to mark our work at every opportunity to make sure that everyone knows that all intellectual property has an owner and stop copyright abuse.

Contact sheet: Dame Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, Oxford, September 1998

When this set of photographs, one of the last of her, was taken Dame Iris was in the latter stages of Alzheimer’s and her husband described her as being like “a very nice 3-year-old,”. She died in Oxford on February 8, 1999. In his memoir “Elegy for Iris” John Bayley portrays his brilliant wife lovingly but unsentimentally. He was in turn very much in love with her and very caring about her when I spent a brief time shooting this set of pictures. She was unaware of who I was or what I was doing but his hand was always in hers and she seemed to accept that everything was OK because of that.

The original caption simply read: Professor John Bayley and Dame Iris Murdoch photographed in the back garden of their home in Oxford. 09.09.1998 photo: Neil Turner/Times Higher Education Supplement. ©News International

The Times Higher Education Supplement was running a review of Professor Bayley’s book about his wife and the Picture Editor had asked me to drive to Oxford to shoot his portrait. While I was driving between London and Oxford I was told that at least two other photographers would be shooting before me and that it was “unlikely” that Dame Iris would be in the pictures. I don’t mind doing portraits of authors on those days when you form an orderly queue with reporters and television crews for your chance to do the same five minute job but this one seemed a little less “organised”.

I arrived in that part of Oxford where it seems every second home is owned by a Nobel Prize winner or a celebrity academic to find their house looking a little sorry for itself. The front garden, the fences and the paintwork all needed some TLC and I quite like to shoot portraits around those areas. I had twenty minutes to wait and started to think about the light, the colours and watch for other photographers and journalists to come out. Nobody appeared so I grabbed my gear and knocked on the door. When Professor Bayley answered, he looked like the gardener but spoke exactly how you might imagine an Oxford Professor would.

In the film “Iris” which stars Dame Judi Dench as the older Iris Murdoch the house is untidy. Actually having been there I can tell you that untidy doesn’t even come close. There were books and newspapers everywhere. Televisions were on the BBC in almost every room and there was Dame Iris herself sitting quietly at the kitchen table. I was nervous about asking if she would be available for the pictures but Professor Bayley seemed to know what I wanted to ask and told me that he wanted her to be in the pictures with him but that she found flash disturbing. I was shooting 35mm colour negative film at the time and so we decided that the house was too dark and too untidy to be a good location for a portrait. Ironically these days I would have probably done some pictures on my 5D MkIIs using the small amount of available light indoors at 3200 ISO but there was no way that 800 ISO colour negative would cope.

The beauty of these pictures is that nobody from the publishers had been round to tidy up, dress them up or even attempt to sanitise the images. Because of that we were able to make some lovely portraits. We chatted about garden birds, foliage and the English weather. It was a surreal time.

In the end I shot 72 frames (two rolls of 200 ISO Fuji Colour Negative film) which I drove back to London where the film was processed by the newspaper darkroom and all scanned onto a Kodak Photo CD at a resolution unthinkable for a digital camera at the time – the equivalent of a 6 megapixel camera when the Kodak DCS520 was just becoming available with it’s 1.9 megapixel chip. The cameras used here were a Canon EOS1V and an EOS1N with 28-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses.

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.

Metropolitan Police guidelines for dealing with the media

Guidelines for MPS staff on dealing with media reporters, press photographers and television crews.

Members of the media are not only members of the public; they can influence the way the Metropolitan Police Service is portrayed. It is important that we build good relationships with them, even when the circumstances are difficult. They have a duty to report many of those things that we have to deal with – crime, demonstrations, accidents, major events and incidents. This guide is designed to help you take the appropriate action when you have to deal with members of the media.

Members of the media have a duty to report from the scene of many of the incidents we have to deal with. We should actively help them carry out their responsibilities provided they do not interfere with ours.

Where it is necessary to put cordons in place, it is much better to provide the media with a good vantage point from which they can operate rather than to exclude them, otherwise they may try to get around the cordons and interfere with police operations. Providing an area for members of the media does not exclude them from operating from other areas to which the general public have access.

Members of the media have a duty to take photographs and film incidents and we have no legal power or moral responsibility t prevent or restrict what they record. It is a matter for their editors to control what is published or broadcast, not the police. Once images are recorded, we have no power to delete or confiscate them without a court order, even if we think they contain damaging or useful evidence.

If someone who is distressed or bereaved asks for police to intervene to prevent members of the media filming or photographing them, we may pass on their request but we have no power to prevent or restrict media activity. If they are trespassing on private property, the person who owns or controls the premises may eject them and may ask for your help in preventing a breach of the peace while they do so. The media have their own rules of conduct an complaints procedure if members of the public object.

To help you identify genuine members of the media, they carry identification, which they will produce to you on request.

Members of the media do not need a permit to photograph or film in public places.

To enter private property while companying police, the media must obtain permission, which must be recorded, from the person who owns or is in control of the premises. We cannot give or deny permission to members of the media to enter private premises whether the premises are directly involved in the police operation or not. This is a matter between the person who owns or is in control of the premises and the members of the media.

Giving members of the media accident to incident scenes is a matter for the Senior Investigating Officer. The gathering of evidence and forensic retrieval make access unlikely in the early stages and this should be explained to members of the media. Requests for access should be passed to the Senior Investigating Officer who should allow access in appropriate cases as soon as practicable.

Advice and assistance in dealing with members of the media is available 24 hours a day via the Press Bureau at New Scotland Yard.

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.

Dusk… my favourite time of day for shooting pictures

Bournemouth beach. ©Neil Turner, July 2009

Anyone who knows me or who has ever looked at my folio will know just how much I like being by the sea and that the beach is my single favourite location. I’m a lucky guy and I live on the south coast of England – in the same town in which I was born, Unimaginative, I know – but it’s a great place to live and take pictures. Shooting portraits against the background of a mean and moody sky at dusk is one of my favourite things to do and shooting those skies without people is almost as much of a joy.

Going on the beach as the sun goes away is also a great time to capture very saturated colours. The picture to the left of the breakwater (we call them groynes here in Dorset by the way) with the low angle sunshine is a great example of the clarity and beauty of the evening light when the sun actually shines in the UK. I have no other reason to post this picture than to show that every once in a while you get light so pure, so perfect that no amount of lighting can improve upon it.

Bournemouth beach. ©Neil Turner, July 2009

This picture of the sun going down over the cliff tops is another story. I was walking on my own and took an EOS50D along for the fun of it. I didn’t have anyone to photograph and my lights were back in the car anyway so I had to shoot the sky whilst wishing I had someone interesting in front of the camera!

This kind of sky seems to be most common at the end of the summer and into early autumn. I’m looking forward to a few more and, with luck, I’ll get to shoot some portraits with them too.