portrait

Archive photo: Special needs school, March 1990

Following on from the March 1990 Conductive Education picture that I posted earlier in the week I remembered another special needs picture that I shot a short while later. As it turns out, exactly four weeks later. This shot isn’t as technically sound or as well composed as the previous picture but it does mean a lot to me – because there is a real story to go with it.

© Neil Turner | 30 March 1990 | Southampton

This boy had a target of learning to do up his own zip and was determined to succeed for the camera. I was touched by him and his determination and so I stayed with him whilst he kept trying. After nearly ten minutes he succeeded and I was very nearly in tears. One of the staff had been watching and she was in tears. I have never forgotten that moment.

For the geeks out there, the camera was a Nikon F3P, the lens was a 24mm f2 Nikkor and it was shot on Kodak Tri-X film.

Folio photo #11: Sir Paul Stephenson, February 2009

Sir Paul Stephenson at New Scotland Yard. ©Neil Turner, February 2009

This portrait was made when Sir Paul Stephenson had been in post as the Commissioner of The Metropolitan Police for less than two hours. He had been acting Commissioner but this was taken when he was actually given the job. This frame was right at the end of the session where I had already shot quite a wide variety of pictures in the time allotted. Having packed 90% of my gear away I was told that I still had a couple of minutes and so I did this picture with a press officer holding a Canon Speedlite off to my left with the head zoomed in to create this pool of light effect. Sir Paul has now left the post but this picture is staying in my folio. Shot using a Canon EOS5D MkII with a Canon 24-70 f2.8L lens and a single 580exII flash triggered by a Canon ST-E2 transmitter.

Archive photo: Conductive education, Sussex, March 1990

Please note that I have made a small correction to the caption. The pictures were taken a year later than I originally thought.

©Neil Turner, March 1990

This assignment opened my eyes to a whole world of education. I was fascinated by the ‘special needs’ systems that had grown up in the UK to try to provide a combination of tuition and therapies for children whose families were trying to do the very best for them. On this job I was working with a committed reporter who did her best to bring me up to speed on all of the terminology used in the field and years later I found myself telling younger reporters how things were. To this day, disability remains a topic that I get real satisfaction from showing to the world.

Young child who has cerebral palsy having a physiotherapy session at a residential school in West Sussex under the Conductive Therapy regime. This technique was brought to the UK from Hungary where therapists, known as conductors, use a range of very intensive methods to try to get children who have very badly compromised motor skills to walk unaided.

Judging from the date, I expect that this picture was shot on a Nikon FM2 with a 135mm f2 Nikkor. The film is Kodak Tri-X.

When Time Out did real news…

Right back in the early days of Insight Photographers, the small agency that we ran from an office in the rather un-trendy (how times change) Hoxton area of London, we used to shoot a lot of stories for Time Out magazine. Some weeks they would have five or six pages of real news and they used to commission some nice work too. One of my favourites from that era was this picture of a man who was part of a group of residents and squatters trying to stop the Department of Transport from bulldozing their houses to build a new piece of road in the Archway/Highgate area intended to speed up the journey up the A1 from Holloway (bear with me if the geography of north London bores you). When I arrived on a hot day from the a brisk walk up from the underground station the bailiffs had gone.

Archway Jack. ©Neil Turner/Insight, May 1989

I found this chap looking rather pleased with himself and asked what had gone on. He just smiled and said “we’ve seen them off”. I asked him if it was OK if I shot his portrait and he agreed. After that, I got my notebook out and asked him his name. He thought about it for a few seconds and then said “call me Jack… Archway Jack”. Of course I asked if that was his real name but he smiled and walked off trying to whistle a tune.

The News Editor somehow tracked him down, got some good quotes from him and the story probably got more space than a simple eviction piece would have. A definite case of “just because the story you were expecting didn’t work out, it doesn’t mean you haven’t got a good story anyway”. All of the Time Out news reporters and editors that I recall went on to do great things. I guess that it was a mix of choosing the right people and being a great place to hone those journalism skills. Quite a few of the freelance photographers that they used did OK too.

This was shot on Kodak Tri-X film using a Nikon FM2 camera and a 24mm f2 Nikkor lens

Folio photo #09: Bournemouth grave digger, October 2008

©Neil Turner. October 2008

Dave Miller has been working for the cemetries service in Bournemouth since leaving school. These days he even lives in a house inside one of the local graveyards. Photographed at dusk in Bournemouth’s North Cemetry for The Guardian. They were running a whole series of pictures of people who do slightly unusual jobs and they times this particular feature to run at halloween.

This frame features four separate flash units – one of which is down inside the grave (which was otherwise empty). Dusk is my favourite time of year for shooting pictures and this particular sunset was very colourful. If you’d like to know even more about this picture, go to this technique page

Original dg28.com technique pages

Between January 2000 and June 2008 I posted a large number of technique examples taken from my daily work to show how I used light in an era where digital cameras were pretty poor at ISOs over 800 or even 400 in the case of the venerable Kodak DCS520. These days flash is a creative choice rather than a technical necessity but the techniques still stand up.

One of the technique pages was entitled simply “Why we use lights” and it is an extreme example of just how much difference some judiciously used flash can make. Early Autumn on a Friday evening in the UK isn’t often a time when the best opportunities to shoot great pictures present themselves. This one, was a real exception.

©Neil Turner/TSL

The subject of the portrait runs an educational organisation that serves a coastal area near where I was born. I should know the area like the back of my hand but I don’t and when my subject suggested that we went up on top of the Isle of Portland (not an island at all, just a peninsula!) I thought that it would make a decent enough backdrop but that the view might be obscured by mist. The two pictures below were taken with different lenses but they were taken within a few seconds of each other and show just how much of a difference a bit of flash can make.

Back in 2008 when I “retired” these pages I wrote the following as a background to my philosophy regarding portable location lighting:

A lot of news photographers don’t think that they are allowed enough time to light pictures, so they rely on their hot shoe mounted flash or on moving their subject into the daylight. If your kit is lightweight and well planned, if it’s reliable and quick to assemble then you can light as much of your work as you want to. I tend to specialize in editorial portraiture, so that is the area of work that I’m going to talk about.

When I was writing these pages my basic kit was one Lumedyne 200 joule pack, one Signature head, two regular batteries, one stand, an umbrella, a Chimera softbox and a Pocket Wizard kit – all in one sling bag. Since May 2009 that all changed and the Lumedyne kit was replaced by an Elinchrom Ranger Quadra system. I still like the Lumedynes but the Elinchrom is a few percentage points better! In October 2003 I added an Umbrella Box to my kit in the hope of replacing two light modifiers with one, which has worked in some ways but I have to confess that I go through phases of using each of the light modifiers for a while and then switching.

In the years when I was a staff photographer and posting regular monthly galleries as well as technique and opinion pages my website was getting up to 20,000 unique visitors a month. Numbers have clearly dropped off now that new content hasn’t been added for three and a half years but I’m still amazed by the the fact that in one day last month the technique home page still got 996 unique visitors.

Some day, I am going to write a book – yeah, I know – we all say that… The backbone of that book will be an up-to-date explanation of the theory behind some the 60+ technique samples posted on the original dg28.com. In the meantime, be my guest – follow the link below to the old technique pages and have look around. Be warned: one very well known blogger claims to have lost an entire night’s sleep doing just that.

ORIGINAL DG28 TECHNIQUE PAGES

Folio photo #08: Peter Snow, London, May 2004

©Neil Turner/TSL, May 2004

Peter Snow, BBC sephologist, journalist and newsreader photographed after an interview at a central London hotel for a “My Best Teacher” feature for the TES Magazine.

He had a book and a TV series with his historian son at the time and the interview was one of a long series that he had already done that day. The room was cramped and poorly lit and so I used a medium sized soft box very close to him to keep as much light off of the background as possible. One picture editor that I worked with used to call this very tight crop the “egg cup” because it was as if someone had flattened the top just like one.

Angry teacher portrait

©Neil Turner/TSL, April 2005

Back in April 2005 The TES had a great article written by a newly qualified teacher about how to avoid getting angry with pupils at an inner-city secondary school. It was clearly written from personal experience by a dedicated and keen young teacher working at a relatively tough school. He wanted to teach, he wanted to be good at it and he was working hard to achieve his goals.

When I arrived at the school it was the end of the day and both of us were a bit tired. We talked about how to illustrate the story and we decided that it would be great fun and have the desired amount of impact if he just stood there and yelled at me: full-on screaming. It was loud and, as it turned out, great therapy for him. All of the pent up emotion from the day came out is one long, loud and hilarious stream.

On my way home there was, coincidentally, a radio programme about anger management. None of the experts mentioned standing in an almost empty room screaming at a photographer while you had your picture taken. I couldn’t help thinking that they had missed out of an important therapy!

There’s nothing especially clever about the picture – a slightly desaturated image, lit simply an composed carefully but it had enormous impact on the page thanks to some brave and clever design.