Dorset

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

Mild winter – bees in January…

I know that I live in a temperate part of the United Kingdom but I really don’t remember seeing too many bees busy pollinating plants in January before. We were out for a walk this morning and saw this little chap (and several of his black and yellow friends) hard at work about two hundred metres from the beach at Boscombe…

©Neil Turner. 22nd January 2012. Bournemouth, Dorset.

Geek bit: Canon Powershot G9, cropped down to a 1:1 aspect ratio.

Vocabulary of photography

Language is an ever-evolving thing and a quick search for a famous quote on the nature of language brought up two very interesting thoughts. The first is accredited to Karl Albrecht – a German latter day renaissance thinker (I wish it were the co-founder of Aldi who had the same name)

“Change your language and you change your thoughts.”

This is an important idea when, as press photographers, we are trying to get the world, the rest of the media and the Leveson Inquiry to think about photographers differently. Words like paparazzi have been liberally used during the inquiry and by commentators about the inquiry. Fellow journalists and even some of our peers regularly use the words snap, snapper and snapped to talk about our work. As long as this kind of unhelpful vocabulary carries on being used we are almost bound to carry on having a problem. We are photographers, we take photographs and what we do is photography. Get a thesaurus out and there are plenty of other words that can be used (with increasing degrees of pompousness). It seems likely that it is up to us to start the ball rolling. It is one thing to use slang terms within the tight confines of our profession but an entirely different thing to propagate them elsewhere.

As professionals we owe it to ourselves and our colleagues to change our own vocabulary and to correct everyone else who falls into the lazy trap of using short snappy terms that are just not accurate. Take last Saturday’s Times for example. On the front page of one of their sections they had a line about “What really happened when Beaton snapped the Queen”. Did Sir Cecil Beaton really “snap” anything? The Victoria and Albert Museum, a cultural institution that would claim to respect photography has on their shop website a line about the same photographer saying that after her 1953 Coronation

“(he) snapped the Queen in all her coronation finery.”

As long as what we do is trivialised in this way we are going to have an uphill struggle. A couple of other searches on the web brought up equally depressing quotes – this one comes from a careers website www.allaboutcareers.com and their description of the job “Press Photographer”:

“Press photographers are employed by newspapers, magazines and other print and web publications. These snap-happy professionals are tasked with recording images of current events to support news stories or taking interesting photos to emphasise the point of featured articles.”

We could go on but that would only serve to labour the point. It is hard to think of another profession whose work is so universally undervalued, whose work is widely misunderstood and about whom the vocabulary used is to pejorative.

One final note: whilst looking for quotes about language I found this one attributed to Federico Fellini – the man credited so widely with the origins of the term “paparazzi”;

“A different language is a different vision of life.”

Our language is a very visual one but occasionally even we need to resort to words to make our point. If we aren’t careful, the rapid evolution of the English language will leave us behind and the regular and repeated use of poor and inaccurate phrases will become “correct”.

Space makes you think

In general I am a fan of tighter compositions, but there are some subject matters that are just crying out for space. A large area of foreground or background can lend an enormous amount of emphasis to an image. Placing a small subject in a large space helps you to tell a story. If you place a person in one of the bottom corners you might suggest loneliness or vulnerability, whereas placing them at the top may well imply the opposite.

©Neil Turner | Bournemouth | January 2005

This photograph of a child playing on the beach in the winter suggests that he is really enjoying his freedom. The photograph was taken from quite a height (maybe 25 feet) to isolate the sand from the confusing background and the fact that he is nearer the right of the frame suggests that he has a lot more room to head into. The oldest rule about composition – the rule of thirds – is being observed.

If the space around the child in the photograph was full of details then the impact of the composition would be lost. You would inevitably give the image more than one subject and spoil the simplicity which is the real secret of the picture. Of course if the child’s mother was in another area of the otherwise empty frame then that would give another message altogether, the space would still be making you think – but differently.

Cluttered photographs are much harder to pull off, simple images are often more effective and this image proves that simple doesn’t necessarily mean tight.

Fun photo: Free cash machine

If only…

Moordown, Bournemouth. ©Neil Turner, December 2011

Folio photo #09: Bournemouth grave digger, October 2008

©Neil Turner. October 2008

Dave Miller has been working for the cemetries service in Bournemouth since leaving school. These days he even lives in a house inside one of the local graveyards. Photographed at dusk in Bournemouth’s North Cemetry for The Guardian. They were running a whole series of pictures of people who do slightly unusual jobs and they times this particular feature to run at halloween.

This frame features four separate flash units – one of which is down inside the grave (which was otherwise empty). Dusk is my favourite time of year for shooting pictures and this particular sunset was very colourful. If you’d like to know even more about this picture, go to this technique page

Mindset – small word, big concept for news photographers

©Neil Turner/TSL, March 2004

Written in 2002, this opinion piece still holds very true nearly ten years later…

What’s the difference between a photographer who takes pictures for fun, another who struggles as a professional and one who is on top of their game? The answer, well there are many but the top of my list is….mindset

It’s a pretty innocuous word, but it makes a massive difference. As I sit here writing this I’m trying to formulate some thoughts ahead of a talk to a group of postgraduate news photographers. Snappy titles are always a good start – according to the “Lecturing for Dummies” handbook so “Mindset” it is.

Next step – arresting opening sentence. That will have to wait until I have better formulated my ideas, but my handbook tells me that if you get people’s attention at the beginning you have won fifty percent of the battle and if you don’t you will waste a lot of time getting it back. Well, that’s a bit like writing and (spot the cheasy link) an awful lot like being a news photographer.

The narrative that runs through a well shot photo story or a well written essay is remarkably similar. I have been trying to find a way of telling eager “news photographers in the making” that the message is more important than the way it is delivered and I have decided that it’s worth keeping the writing analogy going.   Nobody denies that poetry is literature and everyone has respect for well written short stories. Good authors are comfortable with their medium, they structure their work and use words economically. Good photographers mirror this. The common thread is mindset; shaping what you have into what you want it to be. I’m not saying that you pre-judge an issue, but rather that you should edit before you shoot, as you shoot and after you shoot to tailor your pictures to a particular format.

If you are working towards an exhibition you work one way – adopting the right mindset, and if you are shooting a single image story you work a completely different way.  And then there are the differences between making and taking photographs, between being a welcome guest wherever you are or an unwanted intruder. News photography is a very broad church, with room for many ways of working and a lot of photographers find it very difficult to switch between the various sub-genres. It can be done.  The temptation for photographers new to journalism to assume that only great long complicated narratives qualify as news photography is understandable. It is also one hundred and eighty degrees out. The thought that it takes real skill to tell a story in a single picture is a difficult concept to master but the greatest story-tellers know that less can often be a whole lot more.

It’s all in the mind.  If you have a month to shoot a spread you can afford a few days (let’s say three to make the comparison easy) to acclimatise. If you have an hour to shoot a single image story and you take the same percentage of the job time to settle in, you’ve only got six minutes. You know what the score is, so you adopt the right approach before you start.  News photography, when it’s stripped down, is a really simple idea. You take pictures and you make pictures that tell stories. You can use photographs to spell out what you want to say, you can use them to intrigue the viewer or you can use them to infer things.

Good journalism often uses words, but it uses photographs just as often. If the photographer is thinking straight and can concentrate on the end product, good photography becomes great news photography.

Final step – the clever conclusion. I would advise anyone coming into the profession to read some good poetry and a few good novels, to work out how they were structured and to try adapting the simplicity of poetry to their photography. Why? The answer is all too simple, photography is all about creativity and it’s all about mastering the technical aspects but most of all it’s about a state of mind – a mental process – mindset.

2012 – bring it on

The new year is almost here and all I wanted to say was BRING IT ON!!!

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Christchurch Harbour & Mudeford Spit ©Neil Turner, 2011