contact sheet

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.

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.

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.

Michael Rosen portrait – the “contact sheet”

This set of portraits was shot in a London park and the graffiti covered walls were the exterior of a closed outdoor swimming pool.

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 2004, London

Several of the portraits in my portfolio were shot for the same “My Best Teacher” feature in the TES “Friday Magazine” when I was working at the newspaper. For quite a while the format was fixed and so every single frame was shot as a landscape and every photographed used was selected because it coped with the gutter or split across a double page spread.

I submitted a selection of fifteen to the Picture Editor but, quite frankly, there were about sixty pictures that could have made the cut because Michael was such a brilliant subject and such an easy person to work with. This job was featured a few days ago as one of my Folio Photos and you can read a little more there. The whole job was shot on two lenses and two cameras. The bodies were both 4.7 Mp Canon EOS1Ds and the three lenses were 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L IS. I also used a Canon 1.4x Extender on some frames and they were either available light or used a Lumedyne Signature series flash kit with a Chimera soft box.

Vic Reeves portrait – the “contact sheet”

No sooner had I posted the folio photo of comedian Vic Reeves than I received an email asking to see more of the set. I have all of my work from that period backed up and catalogued and so it was really easy to lay my cursor on them. How to display them was less obvious. WordPress has plenty of gallery and slide show options but I wanted something a bit more “old school”  something like a contact sheet.

©Neil Turner/TSL | May 2006

The final edit of 18 images that were submitted. This job was slightly unusual for me because there are no upright images – everything was landscape because the magazine double page had already been laid out with the copy written, headline in place and the designer was just waiting for my pictures to be slotted in and sent to the plate makers. I have always had a soft spot for frame 004 but the page went with a slight crop of 015. I actually shot about 80 frames on the job but I’m afraid that even I don’t keep everything.

If this page gets some “likes” and positive comments I will see if I can find the time to do a few more things in a similar vein.

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.