Dorset

Portraits, ID pictures and PR

I spend about forty percent of my working life shooting portraits for newspapers and magazines. It is my main passion as well as my career….

You will probably not be surprised to hear that I have some strong opinions about the art / science / craft (delete where applicable in your work) of photography. As an editorial photographer I am really lucky because there are three parties involved when I am shooting someone. There’s me, there’s the subject and there’s the paper – and that is really important to me and to the freedom I have to shoot the picture.

Social photographers usually have only two parties involved in the process – themself and the subject who often doubles as the customer. They are suddenly having to please the person who is sitting there in front of the camera. I really hate having to shoot portraits of family and friends because that’s even worse – imagine having the hassle of shooting a picture of someone who you love and care about and portraying them in a way that they may not have chosen. The freedom of being able to be objective and detached is a wonderful thing!

I have been involved in many arguments, both in person and on the web, about exactly when a photograph of a person becomes a portrait. It is really difficult to give a list of criteria about what constitutes a portrait, but somehow you can just look at a picture and say “yes” or “no” pretty much straight away.

I think that there are three categories of pictures of people. There are photographs that are merely record of what someone looks like that are perfect for ID badges or criminal records that say little or nothing about the subject. There are photographs where what is happening in the picture is more important than who is in it, such as a picture of someone playing sport or a musical instrument. Thirdly there are portraits, where there is enough in the image besides the subject to give a few clues about the subject, but not so much that the viewer is left thinking about what, rather than who. As a location only portraitist I have the added luxury of having the subject’s surroundings to help the image work. Studio photographers have to work really hard with fake props and painted backcloths to do what I can do very easily. Mass produced accessories, even student gowns, add little or nothing to the information that the photographer can give about their subject and can detract from the individuality of an image. You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned any particular focal length of lens or lighting rig, and that’s deliberate. You can shoot a great portrait with any lens, and in any place – it’s all about your relationship with the subject.

Portraiture is something that you either find easy or you don’t. There are things that you can learn to make the whole process less painful and there are ways of shooting that eliminate risk (and creativity) if you really find that saying something about your subject isn’t what you were cut out to do with your camera. My advice is to talk to your subject, look around the room or the garden for something that they relate to and shoot a lot of frames. You can add a lot of athmosphere with lighting, but if you get the pose, props and position right you have the battle half won. Get your “bedside manner” right and you can call yourself a portrait photographer.

The relationship between the photographer, their subject and their client is vitally important. Editorial photography usually has three parties and it’s a great way to create good images. A while ago I shot a PR portrait of two businessmen. It had to be done in fifteen minutes and the deadline for the pictures to be with the designer was very tight. PR is a strange hybrid of social and editorial photography. There are usually more than two parties involved and they want editorial style shots but they have to be flattering to the subject. It doesn’t matter if the client is a PR company or if you are being paid directly by the company that you are there to promote – the images have to be positive and show no flaws. Is that a two party or a three party relationship? I would call it two and a half.

“Nothing unusual about this job?” I hear you ask. The answer is OH YES! The number of parties involved was as many as six and the decision making process was made harder by the two people in the pictures having the final decision about which image was chosen. Let me explain…

The end client was a European division of a multinational company who needed a picture shot in London. They had asked their London office to arrange a photographer to supply the pictures to the designer who was in another country (that’s three parties so far). The two men in the picture both had a say in the shoot (parties four and five) and then, of course, there was me (party number six). I had to set up the shot without the two businessmen but with the London PR people present. The two men arrived and I shot for ten minutes with two differing backgrounds and then offloaded my RAW files into my laptop. There then followed a quick Photo Mechanic slide show for the two subjects and the London PR where they selected two possible images in which they felt they looked good. We finally settled on the very last frame that I had shot – taken, ironically, about a minute after the two subjects started to make noises about leaving to catch a flight!

It was then a simple case of converting the RAW file on site and sending it as a high resolution email attachment to the designer, copying everyone else who hadn’t seen the choice in at the same time. That, ladies and gentlemen, was a complicated relationship. Editing the images later to send a choice of twenty to the client I decided that there was a better file but by then it was too late.

The difficulty for me with this job was that one of the two subjects vetoed several of the images because he didn’t think he looked right in them and the other subject vetoed one or two as well. The old adage about asking a committee to design a horse and ending up with a camel comes to mind. If too many people have a right to say no, you inevitably end up with the least offensive and least interesting picture!

Shooting in less than favourable weather.

Another re-posting; this time posted in April 2009 but from a job that I shot in 2006…

One of the best things about being a photographer is that you get to do some pretty odd things. Sometimes you climb to the top of a tall building and have a look at the view. At other times you get to meet interesting and amazing people and take their pictures. At other times you have to get up early on a bleak winter’s day, go to the beach, wade into the water just after dawn to get the tide and the picture. It all adds to the fun of the job.

©Neil Turner/TSL

I shot this commission a while ago and I have been meaning to write it up since then. The story was about a school head teacher who owns a horse that she keeps in stables near the sea. She refers to her horse as her “work life balance” – something that we all need, but few of us have quite such a visible symbol of it!

Being a teacher, she is at school most days. During the holidays she gets away to the coast and rides whenever she can and if the tide is right she can ride on the beach. It was an October morning and we met at dawn in the car park near the stables. My brief was to get a double page spread for a magazine which showed her enjoying herself.

Of course photographers rarely get to choose the weather and it was raining with a reasonably strong wind. The tide was just right (we checked the tables in advance) and so we started to shoot some pictures of her riding on the sand. It’s a stretch of coast that I know well and I knew that there was a high chance of poor weather. There’s nothing that you can do when the deadline is tight except to shoot the best pictures that you can.

The picture above was taken towards the end of the session and by this time it was getting lighter. The exposure was up to 1/500th of a second at f3.5 on a 24-70 f2.8L lens. We had started at 1/125th at f2.8 and the light was doubling every twenty minutes or so. Unusually for me I shot this job without lights, without flash – just good old ambient. Had there been any sunshine, there would have been the complicating factor of having to shoot almost directly into the sun if I wanted to stay on the beach.

Most of the pictures were taken on a 70-200 f2.8L lens and I made use of a monopod whilst the light was low. I shoot on beaches quite a lot and I always take a large piece of plastic to sit my camera bag and anything else that I put down onto. If the plastic sheet is big enough, you can also use it to wrap everything but sand still gets in and salt still seems to coat everything.

©Neil Turner/TSL

I always try to give picture editors a lot of choice and to give them small “drop-in” pictures to use if they need a second or third image for an article. The wider the variety of magazines and papers that I work for, the more I find that the drop-in picture gets used in unusual and creative ways. Magazine clients appreciate choice.

©Neil Turner/TSL

The reason that I wanted to mention this job was the combination of the early start, the poor light, the wind, the rain and getting absolutely soaking wet wading knee deep into the sea. Maybe it was because of all of these factors that I enjoyed it – who knows.

I wrote a while ago about my addiction to Timberland boots and I was very grateful for them on this job. My jeans were wet but my feet stayed dry.

Welcome to the new Blog…

I have finally done it. The pre-blog was intended to last about six months and it made it past three years. I have finally found the time to migrate a lot of the newer posts to this shiny new WordPress version with all of the bells and whistles that you’d expect from a templated site.

When I get time, I will migrate even more of the old content over to here so that it can be better indexed, more easily searched for and release some space on my main dg28 site. To those of you who have followed the blog patiently checking back from time to time I’d like to say ‘thank you for your patience’ and to let you know that the RSS feed is up and running.

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!