Bournemouth

It’s not really that funny…

I’ve just had yet another conversation with a keen photographer who wants to become a photojournalist. For the sake of anonymity, let’s call him Charlie. I have quite a few of these chats and they regularly leave me feeling in need of a joke or two to help overcome the worries I have for some of these (mostly) young people looking for the right career. Last year I uploaded a load of photographer based jokes to a web forum where a lot of news, sports and press photographers hang out. You know the kind of thing:

Q. How many photojournalists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. None – they aren’t allowed to change anything…

The silly thing is that I spent several minutes agonizing over whether to answer the question as ‘we’ or ‘they’. Am I a photojournalist or aren’t I? In the end, I chickened out and went with they telling myself that just because I used ‘they’ it didn’t mean that I couldn’t count myself in. Typical cop-out!

There were plenty more jokes in a similar vein:

Q. How many art directors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. Does it have to be a lightbulb?

Q. How many newspaper photographers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. No time for that, just stick the ISO up to 6400 and shoot it with available light.

I think that the list (and my colleagues’ patience) eventually stretched to ten lightbulb jokes and I’m pretty sure that I could have managed a few more.

Anyway, let’s get back to the point of this blog post. I was talking to Charlie (our potential student) a few weeks ago and I was telling him how tough the market is right now and how competitive it is to even get a foot on the ladder. I pointed out that news photography and photojournalism were careers in which you were most unlikely to ever make a lot of money and I even told him the other photographer joke that I know: “What is the best way to make a small fortune in photojournalism? Start with a large fortune!”

Charlie was still keen and was still interested in studying the subject but there was something about him and his manner that made me think that he still didn’t really understand what the job was really about and how tough it would be – even if the economy made a rapid recovery and even if advertising revenues came back to newspapers and magazines in sufficient quantities to help remove some of the financial pressures that we battle with every day. We shook hands, I gave him my card and offered to talk again if needs be.

He rang me this morning saying that he had been to a university for an interview where they were offering him a place on a three-year degree course at huge expense and that my opinion of the current market was not shared by the teachers he had met there. They had sold him the dream and he was considering buying into it. Don’t get me wrong, being a photographer and working for the media is often exciting, regularly rewarding and always unpredictable but I am worried by educators selling courses that are largely not fit for purpose. These days a three year degree is a huge investment to make and I have written before about the pros and cons of formal study versus the kind of shorter course (that I now teach on) versus learning as you go.

My main advice to Charlie was to consider what the worst thing that could happen if he did the course and in three years time he had £30,000 worth of debts and no clear idea how he was going to start to earn enough to repay the money. That was a question his parents had asked and he said he had ignored. Now that someone from within the business was asking it he seemed to take it more seriously. It was a telephone conversation but I could sense that his passion for photography had become more real since we had first met. It seemed to me that he had been bitten by the bug.

We talked a little more and I suddenly remembered two more photographer lines that always make me smile:

(Tongue in cheek)

You know when you are a photographer when…

Somebody asks you what your favourite colour is and you consider answering “18% grey”.
Somebody asks what your lucky number is and you find yourself wanting to say “1.4”.

There you go – I’m smiling again. Good luck Charlie… (even if that’s not your real name)

The 11″ Apple MacBook Air

A couple of weeks ago I took the plunge and bought a new laptop. I have been looking at small lightweight notebooks for quite a while and I have been trying to work out out whether the iPad or any of the other tablets would be OK for the work that I do. You see, I am getting a little bit older and I want to carry less weight – partly because I seem to be getting on and off of planes a lot more and partly because I would like to use trains instead of automatically driving everywhere.

Until very recently nobody made the right piece of kit. Apple have been promising to come close with the first and second generation MacBook Air models as well as the 13″ MacBook Pro but, somehow, none of their kit has quite got it right. I have looked at Windows notebook and sub-notebook models from a range of manufacturers and both HP and Sony have come close.

Then along came the third generation Apple MacBook Air and I am delighted by the 11″ model that I now own. I bought an i5 powered model with 4Gb of RAM and a 128Gb SSD drive and I am blown away by the performance – even compared to my 2010 15” MacBook Pro with an i5 processor and 8Gb of RAM.

When I got the new Air I posted on a Facebook group that I would report back about it. Two weeks later and having done a few jobs with it I thought that it was time to post my opening thoughts about it. It came with OSX Lion loaded which threatened to present a few compatibility issues with older versions of applications. Indeed, my main workhorse application Photo Mechanic was being reported as having one or two issues with slide shows. Two days after getting the Air Camera Bits released a Beta version of the software designed for OSX Lion and I have been using it ever since. In fact the second Beta is now loaded and it all seems to be going swimmingly. Issue number one sorted.

Issue number two concerned the software that controlled the two 3G USDPA mobile broadband dongles that I rely on when I am on the road. The 3 network posted an update for their drivers within a day or two and so I was left waiting for Vodafone to follow suit. It wasn’t a deal-breaker though because I have a Mifi unit for the Vodafone network and the new Air seems to work flawlessly with that. A few days ago a fellow Apple enthusiast and Vodafone customer Edmond Terakopian noticed that Vodafone had quietly put an update on their website and that meant that issue number two was sorted as well.

Issue number three was to do with loading Apple’s own Final Cut Express. It just would not load onto the MacBook Air and work. The first attempt to load it ended with having software in the Apps folder that wouldn’t open without getting a compatibility error message and the second attempt left me without even that. I searched some forums looking for the answer and the Apple community finally pointed me in the direction of an upgrade to Apple’s plug-in manager which let issue number three finally sorted.

What happened next is still a mystery. It seems as if getting Final Cut Express working stopped Aperture from functioning. Every time I try to launch Aperture I get an error message telling me to check with the developer to see if the version of Aperture is compatible with the latest OSX. Well, as far as I know I have the latest version having downloaded it from the App Store. Issue number four is most definitely NOT sorted!

That’s enough of problems – what about the good stuff? Well, the Air is small and light and pretty quick considering the specification. It runs my basic applications (Photo Mechanic, Photoshop CS5 for Adobe Camera RAW and Transmit) very well and the gloss screen is far less of an issue than I feared it might be. The lack of a Firewire 800 port means that my workflow has had to change a little – I am not ingesting everything as a matter of course on this laptop. Instead I am using the UDMA enabled Lexar USB card reader to do a rapid initial edit and only import the pictures that have a chance of making it into the edit – cutting a stage out of my usual workflow.

Someone, somewhere wrote that the best camera is the one that you have with you and with the MacBook Air that same description will be applied to laptops. So many times in the past I have left my laptops in the car or at home because they are heavy enough to notice. Even with the small power supply I would be happy to carry the Air almost all of the time.

The big bonus, apart from the size and weight of the MacBook Air is its solid state hard drive – which is a revelation. To say that it is fast to boot would be an understatement. To say that it is quick to perform it’s tasks would be to equally shortchange it’s efficiency. I hope that I will always get SSDs from now on, they make all sorts of sense and they are tougher, quieter and see to produce a lot less heat. Finally, a laptop you can use on your lap without getting second degree burns! This new MacBook Air is as quick as my seemingly far better specified MacBook Pro. It weighs very little, has excellent battery life and stays cool.

Given the choice between buying either a MacBook Pro OR a MacBook Air I would probably say that a Pro with a SSD would be the best option if it is your only computer. I am lucky, the Air isn’t my only computer and it isn’t crammed full of Apps that I use twice a month so it is running sweetly and I love it.

Social networking. Is it working?

I’ve been to seminars and I’ve read the opinions of experts. I’ve been to workshops and I have wasted time listening to gossip – and I still don’t really have a grasp of how I should be doing social media. I’m on Twitter and I am on Facebook but the one that I have put the most effort into is LinkedIn. Of course I could have been fooled by the ‘professional’ and ‘business’ tags that get applied to that particular on line network but, hallelujah, it has actually paid off and brought some work in. Great news, but then so has Twitter.

I’ve had a website – this website – for almost twelve years now and so I guess that you could say that I completely ‘get’ the need to be on line. On top of ‘getting it’ I also enjoy it and the ease with which we can all share information and network is amazing but I am finding it hard to break out of my comfort zone – talking with photographers about photography.

Where I need to concentrate my effort is in marketing myself to existing and potential customers but that’s the part of the business that I don’t enjoy. Spending a morning ringing Art Directors, Picture Editors and other buyers trying to get to see them with a portfolio used to be something that I endured because I always loved the bit that (hopefully) came next – meeting people, talking to them and showing them my work. These days the return on time invested in making calls is very poor. Eight calls this morning and nothing. Nobody wants to see my work.

There was a time when I thought that emailing people would work – based on the fact that just after I turned freelance again in 2008 I sent out twenty emails to potential customers and got six replies, three portfolio viewings and a good number of commissions. That day must have been a fluke because it has never worked again since.

Recently I have tried local business networking groups and one industry specific networking group. I met a lot of people, handed out a lot of business cards and it looks as if there will be some work coming from it.

So, back to the social media thing: I still have high hopes for it. I have started getting and giving recommendations on LinkedIn and I have started to join non-photographer discussion groups. My tweets are getting better and I seem to be getting more followers. I am a professional and I always advocate that people use a professional so that’s my next step. I’m going to get a pro’ in to sort out my on line profile so watch this space – and the many other spaces that I virtually hang-out in

Loving f1.8…

If you are a reader of this blog and have followed any of my technique articles over the last few years you will, no doubt, have an impression of me as a photographer who lights most of his work – especially portraits. That would, I guess, be a fair impression based on my body of work but the last couple of years have seen a shift in my style and I thought that it would be cool to share a couple of more recent pictures with you.

©Neil Turner, July 2011

This gentleman is an author and a ceramic artist whose portrait I shot recently for a Dutch newspaper in London. The bulk of the pictures were taken during the interview and the light in his loft studio was very lovely. The deep joy of modern full-frame cameras is that you can shoot beautiful quality at 1600 ISO and beyond and whether or not to light something has gone from being a technical necessity to a creative decision. Ten years ago, anything over 400 ISO was awful and five years ago the ceiling was probably not much over 800 ISO. These days we have so much freedom that even a committed lighting nut like me often goes with the ambient option.

My ‘nut’ credentials were further emphasised on this job however: I chose to shoot a lot of the pictures at 100 ISO like we used to do in the days of shooting transparencies just to see if I could.

So while the excellent reporter was asking the questions and getting some interesting and thoughtful responses I was moving around with my two Canon EOS5D MkII cameras with prime lenses on making interesting portraits. Most of the pictures were made with a Canon 85mm f1.8USM lens (is there a better bargain lens on the market?) but I also shot with a 50mm f1.4USM and a 28mm f1.8USM (both cut-price gems too) whilst using my position to alter the crop and not simply relying on a zoom ring. I’d never say that this is a better or worse way of working – it is just different. I was loving the freedom of shooting at, or near, the widest aperture and the shot above was taken at 1/80th of a second at f1.8 at 100 ISO.

Much has been written about the failings of the focusing on the EOS5D MkII but I have to say that for my work I rarely stray off of the centre focusing point, which seems to be pretty accurate and easily quick enough for me – especially when using a fast lens. I concentrated very hard on the subject’s eyes and an overwhelming percentage of the pictures were bang in focus where it mattered. Shallow depth of field on people pictures has always excited me and I made full use of it on this job.

©Neil Turner, May 2011

This simple headshot was part of a project that I did for Photography Monthly magazine’s August 2011 edition. The idea was to shoot some very simple headshots without any lighting. The edition of the magazine is still current as I write this but the idea was very simple: get the subject into reasonably open shade and shoot with the same camera and 85mm lens combination as the previous picture. The trick here is to have interestingly out of focus backgrounds – in this case it is grass with dappled light and an absolutely crisp area of focus.

This portrait was shot at 1/640th of a second on 400 ISO at f1.8. I had set out with this young actor to shoot some new headshots and then write about it for the magazine. If they put the piece on line, I will link to it.

Twenty years ago… TODAY

Whilst memory lane is the venue I thought that I’d add this photograph of the former British Prime Minister, John Major along with his cabinet colleagues Kenneth Clarke and Michael Howard taken on the 20th of May 1991. This isn’t a particularly interesting picture except that it is from the set that became the very first ever colour front page on the Times Educational Supplement. This was almost three years before I actually joined the paper on the staff but it has always been a matter of pride that I was the one who shot the picture that changed the paper for ever.

John Major with members of his cabinet. ©Neil Turner, May 1991

This picture was at the press conference where John Major and his Government launched their new policy for post sixteen education. It wasn’t that long after Mr Major had taken over from Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister and press photographers were still trying to get the hang of the new man and his rather relaxed style. It’s amazing to think that the man in the foreground (Ken Clarke) is once again a member of the government all of these years later and still clearly loving the cut and thrust of political life.

When we first started to shoot colour for the paper we just adapted the way that we already shot pictures for a variety of news magazines – on colour transparency stock. It was always funny to be rubbing shoulders with other photographers, almost all of whom were shooting fast black and white film, and having to get good pictures in often poor light with either 100 ISO Fuji RDP transparency film or Kodak’s rather good 160 ISO tungsten balanced slide film. This one was shot on the Kodak tungsten film pushed one f-stop to 320 ISO – which was about as high as you could go without getting washed up pictures. Back in the day the transparency would have been scanned by an expert on a very expensive drum scanner and the separate plates for the pages would have been made by other technicians. How things have changed.

London had a couple of very good 24 hour labs in those days and shooting transparency was, in a lot of ways, pretty relaxing once you had got the exposure correct. All you had to do was drop off the film, go and have a cup of coffee and pick up your processed images about an hour and a half later. The TES offices were very close to my favourite lab – Metro – and so you could either let the paper collect your film or go along yourself and do an edit before they saw them.

I have been filing some old pictures and found this one completely by chance twenty years down the line. I guess that my journey down memory lane is still going on!

1995 author portraits with new gear

It’s funny how you remember pictures that you have taken. I was rummaging through a box of Kodak Photo CDs that were in my loft and found a set of portraits of the wonderful children’s illustrator and author Helen Oxenberry that I took in March 1995 for The Times Educational Supplement. The pictures were taken during a period where I seemed to be photographing the entire back catalogue of authors and illustrators whose work was aimed at children and there are four things that I distinctly remember about these particular portraits.

Helen Oxenberry with her dog, ©Neil Turner, March 1995

The first thing that I remember is that this was the first live job that I shot using Canon cameras. A few days before, I had taken delivery of a box full with 2 shiny new EOS1N bodies, a 28-70 f2.8L, a 20mm f2.8 USM and a 300mm f2.8L as well as two 540EZ flash units and a lot of other bits and pieces. The 70-200 f2.8L that we had ordered arrived a day or so after this shoot.

The excitement and mild terror of shooting with brand new gear that I had only tried out for the first time over the weekend was very real and so I also took along a Leica M6 with a 35mm f2 lens and a roll of Ilford XP2 black and white film that I had half used on another author portrait the previous week. The picture that you see above is a scan of the negative, made using an automated Kodak scanner that was set up for scanning colour negative film but I quite like the quality that this print-free process gave me.

Helen Oxenberry at her home. ©Neil Turner, March 1995

The second thing that I remember about this job was that she was a really lovely lady and that she made good coffee. When I arrived she was very apologetic that she had forgot to tell my Picture Editor that she lived in one of London’s more vicious residents’ parking permit areas and that there weren’t any public spaces nearby. I smiled and told her that I only lived 100 metres away and had the right permit, which seemed to confuse her – I imagine that she was trying to work out how a photographer could possibly afford Hampstead!

My third memory was that just after leaving I turned the radio on in the car and there was a programme about children’s literature where another author called Michael Rosen was talking about Helen Oxenberry. The phone rang and it was the Picture Editor telling me that I was going to photograph an author called Michael Rosen the next day!

The fourth and final memory was going back to Helen Oxenberry’s house about a month later to photograph her husband – another brilliant illustrator and author called John Burningham who went on to apologise for the lack of parking…

Another old picture from the loft

©Neil Turner, October 1988

I keep on finding old pictures that I want to talk about so if you are bored by this stuff – I apologise. I have started getting my loft ready for some 21st century insulation and that means getting every last box and filing cabinet out… and of course that means having a peak in them as you go.

The two piers in my home town of Bournemouth have played a huge part in my life and in my photography. My family spent a huge amount of time during the summer months on the beach and I used to play the arcades with my pocket money when Boscombe Pier had a building on the end which housed all manner of slot machines and one-armed bandits.

This picture is, I guess, street photography but on a pier. It was taken on the day that I first used a truly wide angle lens on a Leica M6 – the 28mm f2.8. I would guess that it was October 1988 and I spent a lot of time wandering around just shooting for the fun of it. The roll of Tri-X film that this frame is on holds a wide variety of pictures but this has always been my favourite. The shot has no big meaning – just a pensioner enjoying the late afternoon sunshine but it never fails to make me smile.

Testing a new camera bag

Much has been written about the shared fetish of professional photographers for equipment and their passion for finding the ever elusive perfect camera bag. We all know that its a myth, yet we all keep on plugging away buying new bag after new bag in the hope that we will somehow stumble upon THE ONE – the bag that is lightweight but protective, small but takes a huge amount of kit, good looking without attracting the wrong kind of attention. Recently I was offered the chance to try out an interesting new bag without laying out the cash first…

©Neil Turner, April 2011

I had responded to a blog posting on another photographer’s website about bags, back pain and my lack of experience with either rucksack or rolling bags when I got an email from the Think Tank team offering me the chance to try out their Airport Take Off which has wheels and back pack straps. I have looked at the Think Tank gear many times since it came onto the market and, to be honest, the only thing that has stopped me investing in one was failing to decide between back pack and rolling models.

These bags come with a curiously compelling life size poster of a couple of sample layouts of gear. One side shows some Canon kit packed into the main compartment and the other shows a set of very impressive Nikon gear. I spent almost two hours packing and re-packing my Canon gear until I was happy and I was amused that my configuration was nothing like either of the two samples. That doesn’t matter the “serving suggestion” poster helped me to work out my own system a lot quicker that I would otherwise have done – it’s only a detail, but its a nice touch.

The following day I went off for the very first time as a photographer with a rolling bag. The job was at London’s Battersea Power Station and it was the launch of a new video game called DiRT3 and the pictures were going to be of a couple of top class drivers doing some fast action slides, drifts and turns around the place. It was a very hot day (well, by London in April standards) and the amount of dust that the event promised to create was going to test everything.

There were photographers and film crews everywhere and, as an aside, I have never seen so many Canon DSLRs in one place being used to shoot video.

The 200 metre walk from the car park to the press area was easy enough and I started to work from the bag. I had 3 camera bodies, 4 lenses, 2 flash units, a MacBook Pro laptop and all of the bits and pieces that you would imagine needed packed into the bag and I found it surprisingly easy to work with the bag and a belt pack. I kept the Think Tank zipped up when I wasn’t accessing it and my prediction of much dust came true. There was not a speck of dust in the bag after an hour so I didn’t bother using the rain cover, which I would have done if I had been worried about dust getting in.

I was at the job for well over 8 hours and my back didn’t complain once. I was editing in the shade of a Ford tent quite a lot of the time and I even used the Airport Take Off as a seat for a while. To cut a very long story short, the bag passed the test with flying colours and it worked superbly well as a rolling bag on day one.

Day two was a shoot on a beach so sand rather than dust was one issue and the need to use the bag as a back pack rather than relying on the wheels was the other. It was a reasonably straightforward portrait and the bag again performed very well. I was dipping in and out a lot more on this shoot and keeping the bag zipped up wasn’t really possible. I would have used a top opening shoulder bag for this shoot in the past and, on balance, the top opening bag would have been easier to work out of. This is the compromise. This bag is easy to carry, easier to roll and in terms of getting to and from the job is far and away the best bag that I have ever used. On the first job where I was working with cameras over shoulders all day I didn’t miss the traditional bag style but on job two I did miss it a little.

I’m still deciding whether the ease of transportation outweighs the slight inconvenience of working from the bag and I suspect that the answer will be that it depends on what I’m doing that day. On the two other occasions that I used the Airport Take Off with camera gear in it the ease of transportation won rather easily, so it was 3-1 to the Think Tank rolling back pack.

Camera gear layout (left), Elinchrom Ranger Quadra layout (right) ©Neil Turner, April 2011

I think that by this stage I had made my mind up that the Airport Take Off is a great bag for carrying camera gear so I decided to see what it was like with my standard lighting kit in it. That consists of an Elinchrom Ranger Quadra pack, two heads, spare battery, triggers, charger, cables and various accessories. The bag swallowed the kit with plenty of room to spare and I almost managed to fit a second Quadra pack in too. With two packs it was heavy and, to be truthful, I rarely work with two packs anyway. This configuration is SUPERB. From the first minute of the first day I knew that I had found a new way to carry my lighting kit. It packs in easily, you can get it out quickly and the system that Think Tank supply for attaching a tripod doubles very well as a way of attaching a stand bag with two Manfrotto medium weight stands and a good sized soft box – and that’s without using the front pocket which is designed for a laptop.

Yesterday I went out with the bag fully loaded with lighting kit, with my MacBook Pro in the front pocket and a Domke J3 camera bag with two bodies, two lenses and a Speedlight resting on top as I rolled the bag to my destination. I can see that this is how I’m going to roll from now on (apologies for the pun) for a big percentage of my jobs.

I haven’t had the bag for long enough to have tested its durability. There are a few bits that I will be watching such as the folding handle and the plastic pouches on the inside of the lid (which now hold AA batteries, a flash meter and plenty of coloured gels). The handle is a miracle of engineering but I worry that it may not be as durable as the rest of the bag. Having said this, and knowing that the people behind the company are working photographers, I’m not put off at all. A little over a week in and I’m as happy as I have ever been with a bag – the fact that I’m likely to use it for a purpose that I hadn’t intended is a mere side issue!