anecdote

One that didn’t make the folio
©Neil Turner/TSL. June 2008, Hertfordshire.

©Neil Turner/TSL. June 2008, Hertfordshire.

When I was putting a massive “long-list” of photographs that I was considering putting into one of the galleries on my portfolio website I looked at this picture and couldn’t make my mind up one way or the other. I was aware that I already had a lot of images from schools – which isn’t surprising when you consider that I have worked in over 3,500 of them in 15 different countries – and that it didn’t add anything to the mix.

I like this picture a lot because it is simple, demonstrates the use of good composition and shallow depth of field as well as reminding me of the kind of work that still makes me want to get out of bed in the morning and go and shoot pictures. These days most of my school based work is shooting for their prospectuses and websites with the odd news story thrown in from time to time but this remains the kind of picture that has a lot of uses and draws the most comment from those who are commissioning the work.

The truth is that almost anyone could take an acceptable picture of primary school children on a scavenger hunt in an enclosed copse. I hope that it also proves that it takes a lot more to produce as good as this on a miserable and rainy day early in the morning when the light is awful and the gear is getting wet. I have kept a few photographs that didn’t make it to one side and I intend to publish a few of them here on the blog with a bit of the background to why I like them along with a bit of the story.

 

Techie Stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII with a 16-35mm f2.8L lens at 16mm. Canon CR2 RAW file 640 ISO, 1/90th of a second at f2.8 on daylight white balance and converted using Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop. At the time it would have been ACR in Photoshop CS3 but the file was re-worked using ACR in Photoshop CC.

Space makes you think – part 2
©Neil Turner, March 2013. Family enjoying an early spring afternoon near Fisherman's Walk in Bournemouth, Dorset.

©Neil Turner, March 2013. Family enjoying an early spring afternoon near Fisherman’s Walk in Bournemouth, Dorset.

A very long time ago when I was studying photography at the Medway College of Design I was surrounded by like-minded and equally obsessive photography students who all wanted to unlock the many ‘secrets’ of great photography so that we could all some-day be someone. We were only a very short distance along the journey (it was the first term of the first year) when we were set a project to shoot an object against a background where the object would be very small and still have great composition and make sense. It was a lesson that I will always remember for two reasons:

  • The first is that I loved it and actually shot four or five entirely different pictures – ranging from a damp and golden autumnal leaf on a grey path to a red balloon against a bright blue sky.
  • The second reason is that during a group critique someone (and I have no memory who) said “space makes you think”.

Space makes you think has stuck with me to this day and as a short and snappy phrase it appears in my thinking and in my discussions on a very regular basis. From the day I learned that lesson and then learned to leave space in my compositions for mastheads, strap line, type and headlines I have always looked for pictures with space. Cropping images really tightly is a great way to shoot some subjects and I remember another phrase from my student days which sums that up too “if an element doesn’t add to the composition then it detracts from it”. That’s also true and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why photography is so enthralling, confusing, infuriating and rewarding. Two ‘rules’ that appear to directly contradict one another that form the basis of one of those secrets that we as students of the art/science/profession spend our lives trying to grasp and the interpret in our own ways.

Rules are there to be obeyed most of the time and broken often enough to make sure that we remain creative in our thinking. That was true back at Medway College, it still is and I hope it always will be.

* Those other “obsessives” included Jez Coulson, David Chancellor, Bill Green, Richard Gosler, Mike Cooper, John Baxter, Richard Ansett and Andy Eaves who, I am delighted to tell you, are all still as obsessed as they were! There were 28 photographers in our year and I’m sure more than those listed above are still plying the trade.

The light on the train
March 2014. Passenger on the train between Bournemouth and London Waterloo reading HEAT magazine as the train passes through Woking. ©Neil Turner

© Neil Turner, March 2014. Passenger on the train between Bournemouth & London Waterloo reading HEAT magazine.

 

Every once in a while I take the train to London for meetings and the occasional job where I don’t have to carry half a ton of cameras, lights and computers. One of my favourite ways to pass the time is to do a bit of train photography and yesterday’s journey gave me a few nice frames where the light was good. Normally I just bung them from the camera (in this case my adorable Fujifilm X20) via an Eye-Fi card onto my iPhone or iPad and then straight to Twitter or EyeEm. I rarely give them a second glance when I get home but I wanted to post this picture because of the light. The sun was coming at just the right angle to reflect a lot of light back into the woman’s face from the pages of Heat Magazine at exactly the same time as the woman sitting behind her appeared to be getting interested in the page through the small gap between the seats. I have no idea if she was actually looking at the page or whether it was a happy coincidence – either way, the light made me do it!

This frame was taken about five minutes after I’d posted a similar but inferior one on EyeEm so I kept it and decided that it would make a nice “just because” picture on this blog. I’m sure that I’ll get around to writing something more serious soon…

A very different kind of photography
©Neil Turner February 2014. Low level Aurora activity over a frozen lake, Inari County, Finland

©Neil Turner February 2014. Low level Aurora activity over a frozen lake, Inari County, Finland

Just a week ago I was standing on a frozen lake in northern Finland with my Wife and a dozen other people watching and waiting for the Aurora Borealis to charm us with its dancing and colours. We were in Finland because it was my fiftieth birthday and my Wife had spoiled me with a trip to see if we could see the Northern Lights. Being an obsessive photographer I wanted to shoot some nice pictures of some amazing skies but it was this frame which shows some light pollution and very low levels of activity that I love the most.

This kind of photography is a million miles away from what I do best and this is the first time that I’ve ever seriously tried to photograph a night sky in this way. It was dark (three hours after sunset) and it was cold and it was magical. As you can see from the image below, we went on to shoot some much prettier Auroras but there’s something about this frame that makes me want to go back and try again.

©Neil Turner February 2014. Medium level Aurora activity near Ivalo, Finland

©Neil Turner February 2014. Medium level Aurora activity near Ivalo, Finland

Techie stuff:  Exposures varying from 10 to 30 seconds at between f2.8 and f4 on 2000 ISO. Canon EOS5D MkIII with a 16-35 f2.8L lens on a Manfrotto 055 tripod

An interesting portrait
©Neil Turner/TSL. Sanjit Bunker Roy - founder of The Barefoot College in his native Rajasthan in 1984 is also heavily involved in the Global Rainwater Harvesting Organisation. Photographed at the Said Business Centre at Oxford University .

©Neil Turner/TSL. Sanjit Bunker Roy – founder of The Barefoot College in his native Rajasthan in 1984 is also heavily involved in the Global Rainwater Harvesting Organisation. Photographed at the Said Business Centre at Oxford University .

Whilst looking for an image to demonstrate a specific point to a group of NCTJ Photojournalism students I re-discovered this portrait of a charming businessman and philanthropist that I shot back in March 2006 for The Times Higher Education Supplement. The point that I was making was actually about histograms but I wanted to say a little more here about why I liked this picture so much at the time I shot it.

Firstly, he was a really nice man who gave me the time to shoot a small range of images. He was happy to chat, happy to be directed and trusted me to do my job. You would think that the majority of people would react the same way when being photographed by a professional but that is sadly not how it is. I was delighted that, despite being a businessman, he was wearing something a lot more interesting than a grey or navy suit. I got the distinct impression that he had cultivated an image and that he was very happy with it.

My second point is the degree to which I had to mix ambient light, the sky and my own flash. I couldn’t do too much to balance the sky and the lighting around the quadrangle but I had to get the balance between the subject and the ambient just right and I ended up allowing the walkway to the left of the frame go a lot darker than I’d originally intended so that the depth of the blue in the sky was exactly as I’d wanted it. Looking back, I was always keen to see the lighting balance on the screen on the camera and I often shot two versions of a picture with differing balances so that I could choose when looking at it on a decent sized screen in the edit. These days, the screens on cameras are so much better and you get a far better impression of how the photograph will look on the LCD.

My third and final point about this portrait is the way that it applies the old “rule of thirds” in an unusual way. Yes he is almost exactly one third of the way into the frame from the left (classic composition) but his body is facing out of the frame (not classic composition) and everything on the right hand side of the frame isn’t much more than decorative.

I think that the light, the tones and the colours all add up to an interesting and very usable portrait – one that I remember enjoying taking. I also remember the speed with which I had to offload the images over a slightly dodgy GPRS mobile connection. But what about the histogram? The students who were at the lecture would tell you that I spent a lot of time comparing good, bad and ugly histograms and explaining what they all meant before admitting that I rarely, if ever, look at them myself! I know that in certain circles that would be a heretical thing to admit but all photographers have to have some sort of rebellion in them.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII, Canon 16-35 f2.8L lens at 16mm, ½ second at f8 on ISO 200 with a Lumedyne Signature series flash with no light modifier. Canon CR2 RAW file converted using Adobe Photoshop.

A very old favourite portrait

I don’t know if it happens to you when you are looking for something specific but I often search for images and, quite by accident, find something I wasn’t looking for and then that sends me off on a trip down memory lane. I’ve certainly blogged quite a few times in the past about images that meant something to me – either personally or professionally. This portrait of former General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, John Monks (now Baron Monks of Blackley) was taken in his office at the TUC during an interview with the Times Educational Supplement about his appointment to the Government’s Learning and Skills Council in October 2000.

©Neil Turner/TSL, October 2000. John Monks, TUC General Secretary.

©Neil Turner/TSL, October 2000. John Monks, TUC General Secretary.

The reason that I like this picture is that when I shot it I was delighted to have turned a complete disaster of a shoot into a really nice image. The interview wasn’t going well and the room had a huge picture window which Mr Monks insisted was behind him. The room had dark walls, very dark furniture and no matter how hard I tried the pictures weren’t coming together. I had moved the light (I was working with a single Lumedyne battery powered pack and head with a 70cm shoot through umbrella) to the left of the interviewer and the picture was still boring. There was a decent reflection of the subject in the highly polished table but balancing the lift between the ambient coming through the window and the flash in the room was proving tricky. You need to remember that in those days we were shooting on 1.9 megapixel Kodak DCS520 cameras with tiny LCD screens and you could only get a basic idea of lighting balance.

I was limited where I could place the flash because at that time I was still using Wein optical triggers and the lights in the room had a fault which made them flicker – enough to trigger the flash every second or so. That meant reverting to the emergency back-up synch lead and all of the range restrictions that it placed on where the cable could reach and how it ran around the room.

Gradually I kept changing the shutter speed to allow more and more ambient light into the exposure. I had started at 1/125th of a second at f5.6 on 200 ISO and by the time I got to 1/15th of a second the ambient light really started to kick in and the light reflecting off of the blue tiles and glass in the courtyard outside his window magically took over and eliminated virtually all traces of the gloom and dark wood in the room. I managed to turn the main light off in the room without causing too much trouble – I had to do it because the ambient light inside the room was starting to have an effect on the exposure.

A colourless portrait of a greying man in a dull room sprang into life and I started to relax. This was one of the last frames, shot just as the interview was winding up and it was at 1/8th of a second with the camera resting on the table to try to make sure that there was as little shake as possible. I shot almost all of the interview on a Canon 70-200 f2.8L with a few frames on a Canon 28-70 f2.8L and my old 17-35 f2.8L. Apart from having overcome some difficulties to shoot the portrait, I genuinely loved the colours and I loved the placement of his spectacles. This is a gentle crop that got rid of anything that didn’t add to the overall feel and it quickly became a favourite for a few of the right reasons and many of the wrong ones. That means that it is a good picture and possibly worthy of a place in my portfolio back then but that I was too pleased with my own input to judge that properly!

Sometimes when you shoot pictures through an interview it all goes well and you listen to what’s being said because you are so relaxed. If the pictures are going badly you pick up on the mood of the interview but don’t really hear the conversation. This was definitely a case of the latter. I had no real idea that the interview had been a tough one!

Monochrome and me

I was asked by a good client of mine to have a look at a set of black and white photographs that a new photographer had shot for them. They quite liked them but couldn’t see why they weren’t enthused by them because they fitted the brief. My answer was that if they had been in colour they’d have been seriously dull but that in black and white they were elevated to mediocre because black and white has impact. I tried to find the words to say that for monochrome to work really well you needed the light to contribute to the finished picture in an even more compelling way than it has to for good colour images. That wasn’t to say that great light doesn’t make for great colour pictures – far from it – but by this time my explanation was foundering and I was starting to sound less than coherent. At that point I cut my losses and simply said “to sum up, the light isn’t very interesting and without colour all you have is light and shade”. Wow… nailed it right at the end!

I drove home thinking about my own long and chequered history with shooting black and white: from the first frames I ever shot as a young kid through the exercises in light and shade, focal length and depth of field and movement that I did as a student to the hundreds of rolls I shot as an emerging professional photographer I have never been all that pleased with my ability to consistently shoot interesting black and white images  – ones that I didn’t privately think would look better in colour.

  • Photographic heresy alert – I’m a better photographer in colour and so are 90% of my fellow photographers.
  • Photographic jealousy alert – I envy those who can just “see” in terms of black, white and shades of grey
  • Photographic honesty alert – I have decided to do something about it, 27+ years into my professional career

Thinking long and hard about monochrome and me has been an interesting experience. I’ve found myself examining the way images look through the viewfinder and asking whether the picture I’m about to take relies on colour, light, both or neither. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a clipboard or a mental checklist to hand – it’s just a momentary thought that pops up a few times on each job. I’m definitely making progress. I’ve been shooting a lot of events during the Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival over the last three weeks and on more than one occasion I knew that some of my pictures were destined to be monochrome, better in black and white.

©Neil Turner, September 2013. The vesry first frame I shot during the Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival 2013 - a man reading the programme a few minutes before it all started.

©Neil Turner, September 2013. The very first frame I shot during the Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival 2013 – a man reading the programme a few minutes before it all started.

©Neil Turner, October 2013. Mark Kermode playing bass with The Dodge Brothers at the Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival

©Neil Turner, October 2013. Mark Kermode playing bass with The Dodge Brothers at the Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival

©Neil Turner, September 2013. Violinist Jack Maguire warming up in his makeshift dressing room

©Neil Turner, September 2013. Violinist Jack Maguire warming up in his makeshift dressing room

It isn’t that I’ve never shot anything good in black and white it’s just that most of the time I wasn’t ‘seeing’ without colour. The market for black and white isn’t huge right now anyway and I haven’t had to develop myself in that direction. The funny thing is that it is the explosion of social media and sites like Instagram and EyeEm that have made me experiment more and, more importantly, it has been my love affair with the Fujifilm X20 that has pushed me into shooting pictures that bear little resemblance to the suff that I do for work – often monochrome fits that bill rather well.

Monochrome and Me… it’s been a long and weird relationship. I like to think that it is maturing nicely and that it is now entering something of a golden era. There’s still no money in it but that isn’t really the point.

©Neil Turner, September 2013. Pensioners walking out of the Pleasure Gardens, Bournemouth

©Neil Turner, September 2013. Pensioners walking out of the Pleasure Gardens, Bournemouth

Cool watchmakers
©Neil Turner, July 2013. Alex Brown and Ian Elliott of Elliott Brown.

©Neil Turner, July 2013. Alex Brown and Ian Elliott of Elliott Brown.

I promised to share new work as and when I could and to add a bit of technical detail whilst doing so. This two person portrait shot on a sweltering July day in Dorset for a leading UK business magazine is a great example of the kind of picture I get asked to shoot. The story was a simple one about a new business partnership designing, making and selling very high class mens’ watches.

There was a limited amount of time for the interview, the pictures and a short video grab and so when I got my slot the two subjects, the reporter and the Picture Editor all jumped into my car and we headed about three quarters of a mile from the company offices to shoot on some open heathland because the style of picture I was being asked for needed an expanse of deep blue sky. We couldn’t shoot at the offices because there just too many tall building around and I had to rely on some local knowledge to find the right spot.

The location was far from perfect because I would have liked a decent amount of shade to put my two subjects in. That wasn’t going to be easy and so I had the reporter holding a large black reflector aloft to give me some artificial shade. There was only the slightest breeze but that was enough to force me into something of a ‘plan B’ which was to move into the shade of some tall bushes about fifty yards away. The downside of this was to lose the unbroken blue sky from behind my subjects (you can see some scrubby heath behind them in the bottom of the frame) but it did allow me to balance the flash (single Elinchrom Ranger Quadra with a 32″ x 24″ soft box) with the sky without the subjects being in direct sunshine themselves. Free from his reflector holding duties, the reporter was happy to hold onto the lighting stand to make sure that it didn’t blow over. No matter how light the breeze, soft boxes act like sails!

I have described shooting from the shade a couple of times before and the basic principle is an easy one: the subject is in deep shade and only lit by the flash whereas the rest of the scene is metered normally and the skill comes from balancing the two halves of the exposure. In practice on a bright and sunny day this almost always means the ambient exposure is going to be 1/200th of a second on 200 ISO at somewhere between f16 and f22. All you then need to do is to get enough power out of your flash to balance that. This sometimes means that you have to lose your light modifier (soft box/umbrella etc) if you don’t have a lot of power and almost always means moving the flash quite close to the subject if you want to keep the light modifier in place. Compromise… I’ve used that word once or twice before too. The camera was a Canon EOS5D MkII and the lens was a Canon 24-70 f2.8L.

The two guys in the photograph make some very cool watches. It’s a new business by the name of Elliott Brown and their first collection goes on sale about now.

©Neil Turner, July 2103

©Neil Turner, July 2103