photography

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.

Brutal architecture and portraits

I have an admission to make… I love shooting portraits on cloudy days around concrete buildings with urban skylines. There, I’ve said it. As a photographer I find brutal architecture and grey winter days both challenging and creatively stimulating. Combine the two and you have a blank canvas for interesting images – as long as you have a cooperative subject.

©Neil Turner, February 2009

This portrait is of an academic working at a central London research and teaching institute. The building is a classic modern brutal concrete one and I have shot pictures there dozens of times over the years. I have never managed to get access to the roof before and I have always imagined that it would be a great place to shoot, with decent views of the surrounding skyline.

It was a windy and dark February day and so I wanted to find a spot out of the wind. The roof features a couple of large concrete towers which contain lift machinery and other services and the southerly one has a short walkway running through it. On a sunny day this would be perfect shade in which to place your subject. On this day it was equally perfect shelter from the wind and probable rain. There are also railings which are perfect for attaching lighting stands to so that they don’t blow away.

The picture above wasn’t the first that I shot. I had tried quite a few angles to get the London skyline in but the wind forced a retreat into the covered walkway. I decided that being out of the wind gave me the chance to shoot with a 24″ x 36″ (60cm x 90cm) Chimera soft box on my Lumedyne flash head. The softbox is old and has both the inner and outer diffusers permanently sewn in and I wanted to make use of it’s softness so I placed it as close to the subject as possible. In this frame it is about three feet (90cm) from his face off at about a 45 degree angle to the left of the camera with the bottom of the softbox about level with his chin.

I always try to start with an available light reading for the sky which came out at about 1/250th of a second at f5.6 on 200 ISO. I wanted the sky to be darker and so I decided to shoot at f8 instead. This meant that I had to adjust the power output on the flash to give me the aperture that I wanted and that meant 1/4 power (50 watt/seconds). The first test shot told me that I needed some separation between his hair and the dirty grey concrete and so I set a second flash (Vivitar 285 HV) on a stand directly behind him on 1/16th power to give him a fairly aggressive hair/rim light. This isn’t a technique that I use very often but in this case it made the difference between a muddy image and one with some real edge. The combination of the big soft light and the hard hair light gives the portrait a particular mood which compliments the sky and the architecture.

Like many of the techniques that I use, this one needs to be used sparingly so that it has maximum effect when it does get used.

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?

Income breakdown

If you have been reading this blog you’ll know that I went freelance in September 2008 after fourteen and a half years with a staff job on a specialist newspaper. Like most self-employed people I’m now working on my end of year accounts and I thought that it would be interesting to compare the figures for the last seven months with the equivalent period fifteen years ago. I wanted to know if I was a) Turning over the same kind of figures b) How my turnover breaks down compared to 1993 and c) Am I earning the same sort of money? Amazingly I have kept my hand written ledgers and so, in no particularly logical order, here is what I have discovered:

Comparing turnover for 1992-1993 and 2008-2009

Comparing turnover for 1992-1993 and 2008-2009

For anyone who is interested in actual numbers – I apologise, I’m going to talk about percentages and relative figures rather than pounds, shillings and pennys. Being English, I’m shy about disclosing my actual earnings.

The easiest figure to compare is my gross turnover. This, for the non-accountants like me out there, is the total figure for which I have invoiced for. My gross turnover for 2008-2009 was only 74.4% of the figure for 1992-1993. Given that the average cost of living has gone up by nearly 60% over the same period, that doesn’t look like a healthy figure. I haven’t calculated my own cost of living increase but I would expect it to be a little less than the average figure. This graph shows the percentage of my total turnover broken down into categories as I have invoiced them. The red is for 1992-1993 and the blue is for 2008-2009.

The breakdown of turnover is far more revealing. In 1993 28% of my gross figure came from reproduction fees for pictures being used from my own library, re-use of images held on file by newspapers and magazines or sales by my agency on my behalf. In 2008-2009 that figure is down to under 5%. That is partly because I haven’t built up much stock but I believe it’s also due to the fact that so many publications are either paying nominal amounts for re-use or not paying reproduction fees at all.

More interestingly, my turnover consisted of far larger amounts of expenses charged to clients. Film, processing, printing and delivery (postage and couriers) accounted for about 38% of my gross figure, whilst travel expenses made up another 13%. That’s grand total of 79% of my 1993 turnover that wasn’t fees for photography. Turn that around and only 21% of my invoicing was for actually going out and taking pictures. So how does that compare to this year? This is a tricky one because several of my clients pay “all-in” fees which are not broken down into creative fees and expenses and so I have had to separate these myself. The best “guesstimate” that I can come up with is that my travel expenses are up to about 18%, film and processing no longer exist in the way that they did and printing has been replaced by burning CDs. A few clients pay extra for processing files, but most don’t.

The time spent digitally processing files has to be accounted for but it doesn’t really show up on my turnover figures. Another “guesstimate” would put the time spent in front of the computer at just under half of my creative time – shown on the graph above in the lighter blue.

So what about my actual expenditure? My costs these days are very different. Gone is the need to have a darkroom in central London. Gone is the need to send prints and transparencies around by courier. Gone is the huge expense of buying film and processing it. Gone is the cost of storing negatives and transparencies. The missing costs have been balanced by the expense of owning computers, mass digital storage, digital cameras and having to constantly update and upgrade the technology. Going through my expenditure, I calculate that it’s actually cheaper for me to be a photographer now – that’s quite a shocking conclusion but the cost of renting premises and using so many couriers was huge. I used to charge clients for the film and processing and make a few percent on doing so. Now, few of them pay extra for the processing of digital files. My average photography fee is between 70% and 100% higher but that is swallowed up by the time spent in front of the computer and the increase in the cost of living.

My conclusion? Swings and roundabouts come to mind here. Costs have changed, turnover is down and we are in the middle of a recession. Am I better off? No. Am I worse off? Probably not. There isn’t a definitive answer but I would say that, despite everything, nothing has changed – well, I’m fifteen years older and (I hope) a better photographer. I’m going to re-visit this topic in a few months and see if I can make more sense of it.

There are, apparently, two types of news photographers…

News photography isn’t a huge industry. It employs a few thousand people here in the UK and it’s amazing how many of those know each other, or at least know of each other. That having been said, it’s also amazing that so few people can be divided into so many small pockets. Sports photographers, news photographers, local newspaper photographers and features photographers all come to mind as sub-divisions of the business. Whilst talking to a couple of colleagues the other day I was made aware of another division. A division that you seem to fall on one side or the other of according to the way you see and shoot pictures.

John Redwood MP – back in the day. ©Neil Turner, January 1994

Apparently I’m a “light and shader” whilst my two colleagues referred to themselves as “tight and brights”. They told me that the division here in the UK was broadly along the lines of tabloid versus broadsheet, mass market versus serious. This explanation was both amusing and, in a lot of ways, pleasing. I like to think of myself as a more serious photographer – one whose use of light and shade is central to their style but I was a bit worried that they seemed to be writing off what they do at the same time.

Make no mistake, these are two top class photographers, each with a staff job on one of the two biggest selling newspapers in the country. They provide their picture editors with the right images day in and day out that satisfy the constraints of the designs and the tastes of the readers. Both are also intelligent and articulate journalists and so I did start to wonder whether they were just taking the mickey out of me – implying that I take myself and my work too serioiusly.

The chances are that it is a little of everything. I suspect that they and the other tight and brighters like to differentiate themselves from the mainstream and I also suspect that they envy the small amount of extra creative freedom that the light and shaders seem to get. It also makes you realise how hard the job of wire service and agency photographers must be – satisfying two very distinct markets at the same time and having to have an eye for different types of images on the same job.

No doubt there are other divisions between photographers. I can think of a few other ways of dividing us up: I once heard one of my photographic heroes talking about the “that will do gang” – referring to an attitude amongst some professionals whereby they will do enough to satisfy their brief without going the extra yards let alone the extra mile in order to produce the best work possible that he contended was what made doing the job so satisfying and what made hime rush to get out of bed almost every working day.

I know what he means. I found myself getting excited about shooting an interesting portrait a week or so ago – excited enough that it would be slightly uncool to admit it. I love taking pictures and I love to make use of light and shade. I’ve got to shoot some tight and bright images later this week and I will think of my two tabloid colleagues when I do.

The photographer’s “uniform”…

I was told the other day that I was wearing my uniform with pride. What uniform you may ask? It seems that the uniform in question was that of a freelance news photographer. I have known for many years that many of us tend to dress in similar ways: we all spend a lot of our time kneeling down or lying down to get the best angle. In the winter we all get cold when we are working outdoors and so it comes as no surprise that we all choose similar clothing. So what was I wearing?

The first thing that I did was to look down and make a mental note of my attire. Heavy duty winter coat, fleece scarf, heavy weight denim jeans and my much loved Timberland boots. They are ancient, they are warm and the tread is still pretty good. These boots have waded into the sea, they have stomped through Scandinavian snow and they have marched across many miles of the New Forest with the family. Most importantly of all, they have seen me through a lot of miles on the streets of London.

You’d be right to think of this as a uniform – how many of my colleagues have a black or grey North Face jacket on their backs? It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say “most”! I have no idea if mine is the latest technology (its Hyvent, whatever that is) or the coolest (black and grey?) but it works amazingly well. This too has kept me warm in the northern areas of Finland in the depths of winter. In fact, I even have a warmer one that I find it hard to wear. That McMurdo parka was a big investment for me and I’ve worn it twice.

I have just remembered that I was also wearing some amazing grey fleece gloves that my brother bought me a while back. They are made by Rohan and they are perfect for a photographer. They allow you to use the camera well enough (even the tiny buttons on the back of a Canon EOS 5D MkII) and manage to keep the worst of the chill off of your hands. The trouble is that they don’t have a name on them and the Rohan website doesn’t show any gloves so I guess that the recommendation isn’t all that helpful.

I’ve written before (although I really cannot remember were) about the photographer as chameleon. The idea is that we need to adapt to our surroundings and sort of blend in. In the city, surrounded by other members of the media it is pretty simple – once you’ve seen one black winter jacket with cameras hanging from it then you’ve pretty much seen them all. It gets trickier when you are the only one there. I’ve done jobs that required a dinner suit and others which asked for high visibility vests and construction helmets (more of the latter recently) but the majority of the jobs don’t come with a written dress code. The trick is to go for the right kind of smart casual wherever possible and to cover it all up with an expensive looking coat.

What you wear says plenty about you. Looking like a photographer tends to help you be accepted as a professional and helps you shortcut the whole credibility issue. I want my Doctor to wear a white coat and my postman to have the right clothing too. If you look like an archetype, if you play along with people’s prejudices it tends to relax them. If I turn up to shoot someone’s photograph dressed like a postman or a doctor I’m going to have to work that little bit harder to convince them that I know what I’m doing and that I am a professional photographer.

So that’s my winter uniform sorted. What shall I wear this summer?