portrait

Choice adviser – the “contact sheet”

This is another contact sheet that doesn’t quite fit in with my previous postings. The lady in the portraits is a “Choice Adviser” whose job it is to work with children and their parents to help them choose which secondary schools are best for them and to help them make their applications to their chosen schools. Part of her job is to hold workshops and the pictures were taken outside the most beautiful of the buildings where she does those workshops.

©Neil Turner/TSL. December 2006, Kent.

The portraits were done quite late in the afternoon on a cold and miserable December day back in 2006. I chose to shoot with quite a lot of light and there were two Lumedyne packs and heads used on most of these images balancing the flash with the ambient light. My brief was just to shoot nice portraits and I had no idea what kind of shape or even where in the newspaper they would go and so I had to give the Picture Editor as much choice as I could.

I wouldn’t normally choose to shoot someone in a black coat against a black door but on this occasion I really like the effect. For my money, making good portraits with people who are shy and who are unused to being photographed on cold, damp December days is a lot tougher than working with celebrities.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 85 f1.2L lenses. Mixture of available light with two Lumedyne Signature series flashes, a small soft box and a 70cm shoot through umbrella.

Ahmet Zappa – the “contact sheet”

Ahmet Zappa is the son of legendary rocker Frank Zappa and is an author who has written books for children. A resident of Los Angeles, he was photographed at the offices of his publishers, Penguin Books on The Strand in London. I was there at the same time as one other photographer and we played this weird “your go, my go” dance shooting portraits in turn in different parts of the beautiful building. He was more than happy to clown around – his PR team were less sure until we showed them what the pictures looked like on the LCD screens, at which point they became very happy indeed!

©Neil Turner/TSL. London, August 2006.

The magazine went for frame 032 but I have always preferred 027. It has been in and out of my folio over the last three years and I think that it will get another outing soon.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses. Some available light but mostly with a Lumedyne Signature series flash and a 24″ x 32″ Chimera soft box. There is also quite a bit of ambient light in the pictures.

The man who wrote “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”

Everyone who has ever read books to very young children should have seen “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”. It’s an absolute classic and, back in 1999 I had five minutes to shoot a portrait of Eric Carle, the American writer and illustrator who created it at a London Hotel. I should have had longer but I was badly late because I’d been given the wrong address but he was charming, patient and his PR people were relaxed as well. At the time, he was 70 years old and the book was coming out as a 30th anniversary edition.

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 1999, London.

As soon as I got there, I set up my Lumedyne battery powered light with a simple shoot-through umbrella and started to work.  The author was sat in a high backed chair and I decided to work around where he was already sitting – he looked relaxed and I was still in “full apology mode”.

Although this was nearly 13 years ago I can still remember a random throughout that came into my head “if I were casting someone to be Santa Claus, it would be this guy”. From then onwards all I could see was a really nice bloke with a twinkle in his eye that children would adore. The fact that he must have illuminated millions of childhoods was certainly in my mind and we shot some very nice pictures very quickly.

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 1999, London.

This set of eight pictures is all that remains from the shoot. Back in 1999 storage was still expensive and the company policy was to use Zip discs (remember them?). My laptop had a zip drive and I put the wider edit onto the “official” zip disc and kept the tight edit on another disc for my own records. The official disc with the Kodak RAW files was lost somewhere in the mists of time and we didn’t discover that it was gone until we started to upload the entire back catalogue into a managed and backed-up library a couple of years later. You learn from your mistakes.

I like the simple and innocent tight composition of frame 004 and I love the expression of frame 007. I have read his books to young members of the family ever since and I try really hard to do so with the same twinkle in my eye that the author had.

This was still the early days of digital and I was using a Kodak DCS520 (Canon D2000) with Canon 17-35, 28-70 and 70-200 f2.8 lenses. At 200 ISO, with good light and if you didn’t need to use the pictures too large the quality of the files was actually very good indeed.

Archive photo: Private investigator. December1990

©Neil Turner/Insight. December 1990. London

Back at the end of 1990 I was sent to accompany a reporter to do an interview with a private investigator. He was an ex-Metropolitan Policeman who had a very good reputation and track record in finding runaway children. He was possibly the severest looking person I had ever met and his penchant for big fat cigars did wonders for his image. The truth is that he was actually a very caring man and both the reporter and I liked him a lot.

When I did a quick “Google” for the man I found that he had given another interview to the newspaper ten years later and that he was still as forthright as he had been. I would imagine that he has since retired but I still look very fondly at this picture and remember it’s place in one of my old portfolios.

This was shot using ambient light at his office in Southwark. I was probably using a Nikon FM2 with a 180mm f2.8 Nikkor which I had at the time and the film is Kodak Tri-X. This was scanned from a fibre-based print which was printed full frame with the rebate showing.

William Atkinson portrait – the “contact sheet”

When I took these pictures in May 2008 it was only a month before William Atkinson was Knighted in the Queen’s birthday honours list. He had been the Head Teacher at The Phoenix High School in west London since 1995. I shot these portraits on the school’s “farm” which had been an unused area of land which has been brought into use as a community resource and outdoor classroom.

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 2008, London

His CV is long and distinguished and he is an impressive man. Shooting his portrait took patience because he had quite a bit to say about quite a few topics and, like so many head teachers I have photographed, he was constantly watching what was going on around us. This wasn’t the first time I had photographed him – I first shot pictures at Phoenix when he first arrived back in 1995 and the lovely thing was that he still had a copy of that magazine cover on his wall.

I shot 92 frames on this job and submitted a tight edit of 11 having previously trimmed the selection down to 18. Looking back through a lot of the portraits that I did between 2000 and 2008 it is amazing how often 18 was the number of frames that I kept. There has to be an explanation but I am afraid that I cannot think of it!

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses. Lumedyne Signature series flash and a 23″x24″ Chimera soft box.

The personal frames you shoot…

I have shot thousands of editorial portraits over the last 26 years and every once in a while I shoot a few “personal frames” at the end of a job. What I mean is that there are pictures that I shoot if I have time that I know the client would not publish in a million years and so I am doing them for my own amusement/sanity/experience/curiosity. When you start shooting pictures, everything you do is an adventure. Slowly you learn how to achieve the results that you (and your client) want and it becomes very easy to just take the pictures that you need to take without pushing any boundaries or trying anything new.

Professor Lewis Wolpert. London, March 2004. ©Neil Turner/TSL

I wrote an essay in 2004 about why black and white is so effective and why so many people profess to preferring it to colour for a lot of ‘serious’ pictures. The reason that I have always believed is that good photography is about giving people a view of your subject that they recognise but that, at the same time, is not how they themselves would have see the same scene. There are plenty of ways of achieving this but the one that non-photographers seem to respond to most positively is to show black and white pictures. For about two weeks after writing that for the first time I consciously shot pictures that I could convert to black and white to prove or disprove my theory. I even submitted a few black and white images with my edits to the newspaper I was working for.

The experiment developed a little and I started to try to actually mimic the feel of black and white film and prints. Lots of filters and plug-ins were appearing on the market at the time and I played with as many as I could get my hands on. The experiment ended when I shot this portrait of Professor Lewis Wolpert at the Department of Anatomy, University College London in March 2004. I had spent quite a while using Photoshop’s darkroom style tools to dodge, burn, correct contrast and generally make an otherwise ordinary picture look rather nice. I really liked the picture but I decided that the personal frames idea needed to head off in a different direction and so I stopped shooting with mono in mind for quite a while.

In common with almost all of the work that I was doing at that time, this was shot on a Canon EOS1D with a 70-200 f2.8L lens. It was shot at 640ISO (which for me was the highest you could go on the original EOS1D without getting a lot of noise) at 1/125th of a second at f2.8.

Professor Paul Black portrait – the “contact sheet”

When I shot these portraits for the Times Educational Supplement in 2008, Paul Black was Emeritus Professor of Science Education at King’s College London. He started his career as a physicist before teaching physics and then moving into the world of educational research. He wrote a policy document for the then Conservative Government in 1988 and was widely regarded as one of the country’s leading experts on all form of assessment.

©Neil Turner/TSL. April 2008, London

The photographs were taken in his office at King’s College and he was a wonderful humble man. Like a lot of people who have never really been the subject of media attention he was bemused, amused and slightly confused by the process of having his portrait taken. I very much enjoyed taking his picture – partly because he was such a nice man and partly because I was using a Canon 85mm f1.2L lens for the very first time.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 85 f1.2L lenses. Mostly available light but some with Lumedyne Signature series flash and a 70cm shoot through umbrella.

Johnny Ball portrait – the “contact sheet”

Johnny Ball was always on television when I was growing up. He was a wonderful performer who gave a very human face to science and mathematics and made some otherwise difficult and dull concepts a lot easier and a lot more fun. These days he seems to be better known as Zoe Ball’s Dad.

©Neil Turner/TSL. January 2008, Berkshire

In much the same way that the Vic Reeves set was shot this final edit of 18 images that were submitted are all landscape. The TES magazine had a set layout by this time for these interviews with interesting and famous people about their time at school. The shoot took place in the back garden of Mr Ball’s house in and around various structures that he himself had designed and built. It was one of the most relaxed shoots that I did for the magazine and, although I was only there for half an hour, I think we got a really good variety of images from it.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses. Lumedyne Signature series flash and a 23″x24″ Chimera soft box.