technique

The early days of digital

I took delivery of my first Kodak DCS520 digital camera in late November 1998. It was a revelation. I had used a previous model (DCS3) which was pretty poor and I wasn’t really that convinced about the whole process. After three days, I was a convert – the kind of convert who then sees it as their role to evangelise about their new-found wisdom/insight/faith. Based on the Canon EOS1n camera, the Kodak conversion replaced the whole of the back of the camera and quite a big chunk of the electronics too. It was expensive, relatively slow and it only had 1.9 megapixels. It had a tiny low resolution LCD screen on the back and it used enormous and expensive batteries that rarely lasted a whole day but I absolutely loved it from that first week!

©Neil Turner/TSL. 10th December 1998

This was one of the first proper portraits that I shot with my first DCS520 (known as the Canon D2000 in some countries) and it was of a double bassist and jazz teacher in his own home. My conversion was so dramatic and so complete that I even remember sulking a little when I had to shoot on film for the glossy sections of the newspaper. We worked with these early cameras for nearly four years until the Canon EOS1D came out. Nikon had introduced the D1 in that period and the see-saw battle for supremacy between the two big manufacturers with input from Kodak and Sony began in ernest.

I quite often get asked what the big trigger was for digital in the newspaper industry. There are a few factors;

  • The arrival of cameras capable of shooting quality images
  • The money saved by newspapers getting rid of darkroom staff
  • The arrival of new health and safety laws that meant waste chemicals became very expensive to dispose of
  • The speed of turnaround of digital pictures
  • The ease of archiving digital images

Talking with others who used the Kodak DCS series camera from that era we all agree about one thing – how good Kodak’s software was. What a shame that they threw away their lead in professional digital photography. If they had even kept their software development going, they could possibly have avoided needing to file for bankruptcy protection in the US courts last week. I look back at the early days of digital with a real fondness – they really were the most exciting of times. There’s something very cool and very rewarding about being in the second row of pioneers!

Folio photo #14: Children on a bug hunt, south London, May 1999

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 1999, south London

This picture from a story about children from a local primary school going on a “bug hunt” in Nunhead Cemetery was shot for a special supplement to the TES about the environment. The outdoor lesson was led by Richard ‘Bugman’ Jones, a professional entomologist who undertook a residency at the school. Like a lot of my favourite pictures it doesn’t tell the whole story but it is a ‘moment’ that hopefully makes you want to know more.

I had switched to shooting most of my work digitally the previous year but the Picture Editor working on this section was still keen that we shoot pictures for these glossy extra sections on transparency film. I think that this was the last commission that I ever shot using a Leica M6. The wider shots were definitely on the Leica but I also shot some longer lens pictures using a Canon EOS5 and a fixed 85mm f.18 lens

Geek moment: Leica M6 with 35mm f2 Summicron and Fuji RDP100 transparency film.

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.

Interviewing for September 2012 NCTJ Photojournalism course

It only seems like a few weeks ago that I was writing about how excited I was about being involved with the development of a new photojournalism course here in Bournemouth. It was actually well over a year ago and since then we have completed one cycle of the six month course and we are over half way through a second one. The course has already evolved and we are now in the process of recruiting people for the next course which begins in September 2012.

Photo of me playing the 'role' of a confused and lost motorist during a creative flash workshop. January 2012

The idea of the course is a simple one: to train people who already have a decent standard of photography to a level where they can start or improve their careers as editorial photographers. We cover news, features, portraiture, sport and several other sub-genres of photography as well as teaching about workflow, media law, video, caption writing and story development. At the end of the course, and all being well, our students have an NCTJ Preliminary Certificate in Photojournalism as well as a lot of business studies and market knowledge. It isn’t an easy course and it isn’t particularly cheap but it is highly focused on becoming a freelance photographer in today’s rapidly changing market place.

My own involvement averages out to one day per week during which I will bring all of my knowledge and experience into play as well as getting some of my contacts to come along to the course and give seminars and talks.

The course is run by Up To Speed Journalism, based in their offices at The Bournemouth Echo and is divided into two terms – one of which is very much theory and classroom based and the other is all about shooting portfolio pictures and arranging work placements. If you are interested in finding out more, please get in touch with Tom Hill at thill@uptospeedjournalism.com

Archive photo: Frances Partridge, London, May 1995

Frances Partridge was the last surviving member of The Bloomsbury set when she died, aged 103 in 2004. She had lived an amazing life full of love and tragedy and had known the brightest and the best people of her generation. She was a writer and a famous diarist. I photographed her when she was a mere 93 in 1995 at her home in London.

©Neil Turner/TSL. London, 10th May 1995

When I arrived she seemed agitated, which I didn’t think was unusual given her age and the fact that she had a stranger in her home but it became obvious that something specific was bothering her. She told me that her only corkscrew had broken and that she hadn’t been able to have a glass of wine. Like all good photographers I had a Swiss Army penknife and so I was able to open her bottle – which cheered her up a little. The thing that really made the rest of the job go very well was that I was able to fix her corkscrew so that she would be able to have he wine the following day too.

Mrs Partridge looked old and she knew it. She had spent most of her life surrounded by artists and writers and had been photographed many, many times. She celebrated her age and was keen that I portray her in my own way. We spent a good deal of time working out where she should be in her flat and the light coming in in early May changed every few minutes. I tried to shoot as little flash as I could – not because she didn’t like it but because somehow I thought that ambient light was more in keeping with the ethos of the Bloomsbury group.

Geek moment… I was using two Canon EOS1n cameras with 28-70 and 70-200 f2.8 lenses and Fuji 800 ISO colour negative film without flash and the frames shot with flash were in Fuji 200 ISO colour negative film. The scans were done with a Kodak auto feed scanner onto a Photo CD.

Folio photo #13: Michael Rosen, London, 2004

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 2004, London

Michael Rosen is a poet, author, broadcaster and all round brilliant bloke. I spent a good hour shooting a whole range of pictures of him at a park near his home in East London. I have photographed him about five times in total and it is always a joy to spend time with him. I have also been interviewed by him for his BBC Radio 4 programme about words and etymology. We did a special about photographer slang. This set of pictures is ripe for a future “contact sheet” too.

Geek moment: Canon EOS1D with Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS lens.

Having an eye for detail

The choice between taking the same photograph as everyone else and standing back and getting something different becomes a matter of survival when you work on a weekly newspaper and the other five photographers around you will be publishing the next morning. Even if that weren’t the dilemma of every photo-call I go to, I like to think that as a photographer I am an individual. It’s a pretty useful mindset to sign up to, no matter how much or little photography you do.

Photo: NEIL TURNER. ©TSL. 04/09/2000. TES news.

This photograph of an elephant’s eye is a classic example of taking a mental step back from the herd and shooting something different. It is also an advertisement for having more than one camera with different lenses on. There were five other photographers at the job. The story was about this young Indian elephant who paints pictures, and about how he was being used to launch an environmental art competition for schoolchildren. We were all trying to make the same picture of the elephant, three kids, some paint and an easel. The composition was looking messy, and there were just too many elements in it. We all had 16-35 lenses on and were getting nowhere. I was getting nowhere faster than the other five who would all go to press that night leaving me with two more days during which the story could easily get scrapped without a strong image. My second camera had my 70-200 on it and I grabbed it, zoomed in and the picture almost took itself. Strong, arresting, different and wide open for headline writers to do their thing. Just about every base covered. I shot some of a paint brush in the elephant’s trunk too, but this was the picture chosen.

When an image is competing for space on a newspaper page it has to stand out. The enlightened editors at our papers allow images to arouse the reader’s interest and don’t insist that photographs tell the whole story all of the time. This approach works on every level, from the family album through e-mailed postcards to published images. Getting in close works.

See also: MINDSET FOR NEWS PHOTOGRAPHERS

Possibly the oddest picture I ever took…

©Neil Turner/TSL | London | January 2006

The story was simple: we were doing an anonymous interview with a man who needed to remain unidentifiable for legal reasons and we had to shoot a picture of him at a time and a place that wouldn’t give his identity away. It seemed to be important that it was actually him in the picture and that became obvious when I had to shoot a proper portrait at the same time just in case the court case was decided and we needed a proper picture of him to go with a future follow-up article. Still with me?

The reporter arranged that I meet the subject at a London tube station and to get around the problems of finding someone whose name you don’t know and who you don’t have a picture of I always describe myself and what I’m likely to be carrying and wearing because a) I’m probably going to be there first and b) I’m probably going to be easier to spot (being big and carrying a lot of kit).

The venue turned out to be quite close to where he works and we decided that if any of his colleagues happened to spot us the cover story was that we were doing a fashion vox-pop on what the well-dressed office worker was wearing that season. The cloak and dagger details just kept multiplying.

I decided to go with a silhouette (you can read my thoughts on them here) and just for good measure I added an extra twist with a bit of motion blur too. The result was quite striking if bafflingly anonymous!

The technique is pretty simple. It was a dull winter’s morning in the city and we found a under cover area. I used a Lumedyne flash kit to light the brick pillar and silhouetted the subject against it. Without the flash, he would still have been a shadowy outline but so would the pillar and the picture would have been pointless.

The light that was coming from either side of the pillar was OK but it wasn’t plentiful and so I decided to give it a bit of movement blur by zooming the lens whilst the shutter was open. I ended up with an exposure of 1/8th of a second at f13 on 200 ISO using a Canon EOS1D MkII with a Canon 16-35 f2.8L lens triggering the flash with a pair of Pocket Wizards. Zooming during an exposure as relatively short as 1/8th of a second means that you have to have quite a few attempts to get it right and it also pays to tell the subject what you are doing if you don’t want them to think that you are a lunatic!

In the end I was very happy with this genuinely odd picture. I had arrived at the assignment with almost no idea what I was going to do and pretty much made it up as I went along. That’s why I love my job…