portrait

Calm, confident and in control

Dame Janet Baker operatic mezzo soprano. January 2008. ©Neil Turner/TSL

In my career (39½ years and counting) I have shot a lot of portraits and probably as many headshots. I’m not going to go back over my definitions of either or the subtle differences between them right here but when I point my cameras at the subjects there’s one question that I get asked. A lot.

“How should I look?”

For the first bit of my career I didn’t have a stock answer so I would often turn the question back on them: “How do you want to be seen?” It worked sometimes, occasionally failed miserably but mostly solved nothing. “Just relax and pretend that there isn’t a big bloke with a big camera and a few lights pointing at you” was never going to become the simple and snappy response that I required. It didn’t even worked on the few occasions that I tried to inject some humour with it.

I started to make mental notes about who asked the question, what kind of person they were and one thing started to become really obvious – those who had been photographed professionally a few times before rarely asked whilst those who hadn’t often did. Not entirely surprising, but interesting nevertheless.

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Recent portrait work: The Bishop of Salisbury


A couple of weeks ago I shot some portraits of The Bishop of Salisbury, Rt Revd Stephen Lake, in the grounds of Salisbury Cathedral. The first few frames were for part of a release to the press along with an extended caption explaining a conference he had hosted that was exploring the relationship between the Church of England and Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. I also shot some of the outdoor activities that went along with the event.

The rest of the images of The Bishop were for stock and I really enjoyed shooting them. He and I had met before, we are almost exactly the same age and grew up just a couple of miles from one another and so it is no surprise that we got on pretty well. As we chatted I shot pictures. What you see above is fifteen of the edited frames including a much needed headshot but as I carried on shooting I got closer and closer to what I really wanted to achieve – which is the frame below.
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Thirty-plus year old memory
Sir John Cassels – Chair of a Government Inquiry into post-sixteen education. Photographed at his home in south-west London. May 1991. Photo: ©Neil Turner

When I published this May 1991 portrait on my Instagram feed a couple of years ago I was shocked by the clarity of my memories of shooting it. A year or so after publishing it I was giving a talk to a wonderful group of people at a camera club who had invited me to come and show some work and tell some anecdotes and, once again, I remembered so much detail about the day and the pictures. The power of still images to evoke a time and a place is a wonderful thing. I thought that it would be good to share those memories again here and this is what I wrote underneath the post on Instagram:

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One more from the archive project
Professor Richard Dawkins, Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, University of Oxford. © NEIL TURNER/TSL. October 2001.

When I was posting an archive portrait a day to my instagram account during the COVID-19 lockdown I had about thirty images in my mind that were ‘must-have’ pictures that I remembered being something special. When I started to put to the set together two things surprised me;

  • Some of those thirty must-have pictures weren’t as good as my memory told me they were.
  • Quite a few others were available top take their place in the top thirty – either because they were way better than I had remembered or because I had totally forgotten about them.
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Magic moments – I’ve had a few
©Neil Turner/TSL | March 1997

Working with teams of photographers on big sports projects is one of my main sources of income these days. Get a bunch of photographers together and they will almost inevitably start to tell stories about what they’ve done and who they’ve met.

Recently a colleague mentioned my Instagram project from last year and how he had enjoyed seeing my early work. That lead to a discussion about how lucky we are to go places and to see things that the general public can’t or, at least can’t without spending a lot of money.

For me the places come second to the people.

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One hundred and eighty portraits later

A section of 180 of my portraits posted to Instagram during my project.

After six months and 180 portraits posted to Instagram and Facebook I find myself at a point where I’ve shown enough archive imperfect portraits for now. It’s nearly Christmas and it feels like the right time to hit the pause button on, what has been, a very enjoyable diversion from the woes of the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns, restrictions and the lack of new work on offer.

As I sit here and contemplate what has been good, bad and indifferent about posting so many of my favourites from 1988 to 2008 the temptation to perform some sort of statistical analysis has been quite strong and the parallel temptation to draw conclusions from the feedback has been stronger still. For now I am going to settle for some general impressions and some feelings that have struck me during the whole process so here’s a bullet-pointed list of some of them: (more…)

Two set-ups at once

Bill Cockburn at the School Teachers Review Body. ©Neil Turner/TSL

From time-to-time I repost one of the fifty technique examples that were posted on the original dg28.com website between 1999 and 2008. I have timed this one to go with uploading this particular frame to my Instagram feed as one of the series of archive portraits that I’ve been putting there for well over five months.

The idea here is to have two separate lighting set-ups for one interview portrait without having to constantly move around the room adjusting lights. This interview was with a senior businessman who chaired a body that decided how much teachers’ pay rises will be each year. The reporter wasn’t all that comfortable with me shooting through the interview but it was what the picture editor wanted, so that’s what I did. This job required a bit of quick thinking so that I could get two different set-ups in place. (more…)

Johnny Ball – the contact sheet

When I posted a frame from this set on my Instagram feed it attracted a few comments and an email from a colleague asking to see the contact sheet for it. I’m only too happy to oblige so here it is – a sixteen image edit from the job. The words that I posted with it on Instagram were these:

I cannot remember photographing anyone who was more accommodating, nicer to be around and generally more cheerful than television presenter and educator Johnny Ball. In January 2008 when I photographed him in his back garden in Farnham Common, Berkshire it was cold and a little bit damp but we both wanted to work outside and so, after a brief tour of the garden, we chose two spots to shoot pictures. This location was crying out for a big shadow so I used a single battery power flash to light him and create the shadow. He was laughing and chatting right through the twenty or so minutes we were shooting pictures before retreating indoors for coffee and warmth. (more…)