As a good and honest news photographer I would never alter a photograph without clearly announcing in the caption that I had done so – and in capital letters too. This story about two teachers given a makeover so that their appearance at work fitted in with their position was best illustrated with before and after pictures, so why not make it a single image?

The idea was very simple, shoot the same scene twice – once with the subject in the left had half of the frame and once with him in the right hand half. Cut the images in two and join the two halves with him in together without being able to see the join. Simple plan, so many potential pitfalls.

I decided to do it as simply as I could and that meant having a physical line down the image along which to make the join, although the small space gave me a few worries about the patterned carpet. Having planned this idea in advance, I took my Manfrotto tripod with me as well as my usual Lumedyne flash units. I had never met the subjects before, and hadn’t asked the store if they would cooperate with my idea so it could have gone horribly wrong!

One of the great advantages of shooting digitally is that you can show people your ideas as you go, you can involve them in the conspiracy that is a heavily constructed image. My first task was to do some fly on the wall pictures of the subjects choosing some clothes as they walked around the store. I could write an essay on the nightmare that is the wide variety of white balances that can occur within a few feet in a large department store (and maybe I will one day!), but for now lets get back to the story. (more…)

Editorial photography, by it’s very nature, involves shooting pictures to work alongside words and working with the layout. The most common request is to allow space within the image to run copy and/or headlines across. This has always been a common request, but with the incursion of design into day to day news pages news photographers are having to shoot with this in mind too.

Just about the easiest way of leaving space in a photograph to run copy over is to have a large area of of plain colour. Obviously plain colours come in, well, every colour under the sun and some work better as a background for copy than others.
The safest bet with magazines and newspapers alike has to be white. It stands to reason that a magazine that has a default black typeface will handle black type on a white background better than anything else. The next most obvious colour is black. Most publications can handle “reversing out” copy in white on a black background, but some have trouble with it and it’s always worth asking before you shoot.

Studio photographers have always been able to give themselves the option of a plain background, but us location chaps have to take what we can get and the story of this picture will, I hope, illustrate the thought process behind giving the layout team as many options as possible. (more…)

If you ever get the chance to photograph an artist with their work I hope that they are as much fun and as cooperative as Finn Stone. Shooting somebody who is themselves aware of the subtlety of visual imagery means that you can reason with them, explain what you are doing hopefully carry them with you.

I have written on this website and elsewhere about how important it is to formulate your ideas about a portrait before you arrive and to refine/change those ideas very shortly after getting there. The small industrial unit that doubles as this artists studio was covered with bits of crumbled polystyrene (Styrofoam), shreds of fibre glass and paint. The presence of these creates a difficult environment for sensitive camera equipment so it was important to keep everything as far away from them (especially the highly static polystyrene crumbs) as possible.

This photograph was the second idea that I tried during the three quarters of an hour that I spent photographing him. The first was to use the various bits of furniture and sculpture to look through at him and having successfully bagged a selection of images I moved onto this idea. (more…)

I used to know my way around a press pen at big events, but I haven’t had much practice recently so when this job came up in the diary I was a little less confident about what I was going to get than I normally am.

The protocol that surrounds official visits by presidents, kings and queens around the world is pretty well defined and sufficiently restrictive that good pictures are pretty common, but great ones are rare indeed. I find the crowds and lesser dignitaries far more interesting subjects than the stars of the show because they are far more excited and far more interested in having their pictures taken anyway.

The average child in the United Kingdom might see the Queen once every twenty years, so even if they are from a non-royalist background the chance to witness a visit will inevitably get them pretty excited. This school group were in place ready for the arrival of the Royal party and the weather wasn’t too good. I was drawn to the colour of the small plastic flags that they had been given and as soon as I looked towards them from the press pen they turned around and started waving the flags. (more…)

Every once in a while someone throws down a technical gauntlet and I always find myself picking it up. I like the challenge I suppose, and I’m usually waiting for the challenge to be made. On this occasion it came from left field with no real warning, but a challenge is a challenge….

The students at this acting school had been set a project where they were given a painting and had to reconstruct the scene as precisely as they could at the end of a short drama that they had to write which set the scene. A painting done in Spain by an Englishman a long time ago was the challenge that the students had accepted and they showed off their command of drama and Spanish for my journalist colleague and myself with great professionalism.

Unfortunately their command of lighting was less well developed. The few dim lights that there were mimicked the painting to the human eye but meant an exposure of two seconds at f2.8 (400 ISO) with the camera.
Being the kind of photographer who rarely has an assistant I had come without a tripod, so I was forced to light the scene myself. They had a print of the painting so I had to study it very quickly and make a plan. I have written before about reading other people’s work, but I had never had to do that quite so literally with any other job! The composition was their department so I concentrated on the light making mental notes of it’s direction, colour, contrast and intensity. (more…)

Some images are so obviously set up that there is little point in trying to make them seem otherwise. This job was all about a teacher who was in training for the London Marathon and was timed so that the pictures would be shot ready for the story to appear just two days before the event.

The photograph was commissioned by a picture editor who knew the area well, so I had to sure that the location featured in the final image.

Late afternoon is one of my favourite times of day for shooting photographs so I was pleased that the job was booked for about an hour or so before sunset, but less pleased to find out that I wouldn’t be able to make use of that sunset because the teacher had another engagement to make by then.

I picked him up from the school where he works as a modern languages teacher, and by the time I got there he was already changed into his training kit. We drove the mile or so to the shingle beach and I started out shooting some long lens pictures of him running along the crest of the shingle bank. (more…)

In a very similar vein to last month’s technique page I am going to talk about this portrait of a school head teacher that required a fair bit of messing around to get it right. It seems to me sometimes that the further you get the flash away from the camera, the more interesting the result!

This picture was shot as part of a set about the work of the headteacher of a very small school in rural Cambridgeshire. Her duties are many and various so as well as being the head, she is also a full time class teacher and general fixer. To add to her workload, the school is also being rebuilt and this metal shack doubles as the school office.

When I arrived at the school, the weather was sunny and she was teaching a class so I shot a lot of “fly on the wall” pictures of her teaching and of the kids doing their work. Playtime came and went and I shot more pictures of her interacting with the children, this time at play. What I didn’t have was anything of her role as an administrator and leader so we went to the office to see what we could do.

My instinct was to shoot some of the head with the secretary, so I tried all sorts of ways of doing so but the cramped space just made making good pictures extremely difficult. Then it started to rain so I went outside the room to grab a lighting case that was starting to get wet and as I turned I noticed the possibility for this composition.

Sometimes you just have to take advantage of chance so while she was happy to remain in the warm and dry I got my bags inside (out of sight of course) and positioned a Lumedyne head on a Manfrotto stand with a Wein high sensitivity slave inside the room at an angle of about seventy degrees from the axis of the lens. This was a bit wider than I would have liked, but the flash had to be inside the building to make the picture work and that dictated my angle. (more…)

I get a sore throat telling people that flash isn’t just a way of lighting the whole scene. It can, if used properly, pick out a small detail and give it real emphasis. Studio photographers and cinematographers have always known this, so it’s time that us little guys adopt the technique for ourselves. Taking a flash unit off of the camera for the first time is both a frightening and a liberating experience. When that little cartoon lightbulb goes on just above your head you instantly become a better photographer. You might not use the technique, but you know about it and therefore have it as part of your arsenal.
This job was on a sunny but cold beautiful January day. The light levels were pretty high, but the shadows were deep and plentiful. Once anyone was behind anything they were in the dark. Ordinary fill flash would have bleached out the concrete dinosaur’s jaw and thrown an awful shadow accross the restorer’s face.

The exposure for the general scene was a healthy 1/180th of a second at f5.6 on 200 ISO. The face of the restorer in the shadow was four stops down at 1/45th at f2.8 and the inside of the dinosaur’s mouth was nearly as bad.

That kind of exposure difference makes for poor images. This gives the photographer two options…change the composition so that everything is in sunshine or to balance the the background with the important shadow detail using flash. (more…)