Editorial

In praise of Photo Mechanic

Every software package has its fans, its designers and its detractors. If we all loved the same system then there would be no choice. I wanted to blog about Photo Mechanic and to say how much I like it. That isn’t to say that the others are rubbish – that would childish and purile – just that I find this one application suits me and what I do extremely well. So what is Photo Mechanic? I thought that the description on the company’s own website was hard to beat:

Photo Mechanic is a standalone image browser and workflow accelerator that lets you view your digital photos with convenience and speed. Photo Mechanic displays your “thumbnails” in a familiar “contact sheet” display window. Photo Mechanic helps you find the best photo amongst several similar shots in a preview display that lets you flip through a group of selected photos at high resolution.

Photo Mechanic’s super fast browsing enables you to quickly compare multiple images and select the best ones from a sequence. Its powerful batch processing, full support for image variables, IPTC and Exif metadata, make it the perfect tool for any digital photographer.

Before this becomes an advert and a love-in, there are a few tiny issues with the current (4.6.8) version that I’d love to get sorted. The trouble is that we quickly revert to the “love-in” because the team at Camerabits who design, code and sell Photo Mechanic are second-to-none when it comes to listening to the views, issues and suggestions of their customers. Got a problem? Email Camerabits and nine times out of ten they sort it the same day and the other one out of ten times sees a resolution in the next upgrade.

Screen grab of a Photo Mechanic "contact sheet" window.

Anyway, what do I use it for? Photo Mechanic is the package that I use to import RAW images from my memory cards, edit out the bad pictures, IPTC caption, batch rename, edit again and then send the selected RAW files to my RAW converter of choice (which happens to be ACR in Photoshop CS5.5 but that isn’t important right now). Once the files are converted there they are right back in Photo Mechanic where I can save them to a separate folder, create HTML web galleries, burn discs, FTP or email images to clients or pretty much whatever I might need to do with photographs.

I can hear people saying that there are plenty of packages that can do all or some of the above and even ones that remove the need for a separate RAW converter – all true, but that misses the point. I want my workflow to be fast, repeatable, adaptable and generally hassle free. I want to rely on the trackpad or the mouse as little as possible and have a good, strong set of keyboard shortcuts instead. Bingo – that’s what I get from Photo Mechanic.

In an earlier post I talked about how teaching helps you to get your own practice right and this is very true with using software. If I had to work without Photo Mechanic tomorrow I have a good knowledge of Apple’s Aperture and a very good knowledge of Lightroom and I would never try to dissuade anyone from using those packages. Having had to buy and learn other software has made me appreciate what I have.

The Camerabits website says that version 5 of the software is due in the early part of 2012 and that there will be a separate but interconnected cataloguing application available too. That’s two things from my wish list sorted out – all we need now is a version of Photo Mechanic for the Apple iOS and that would be another thing ticked off that list.

Archive photo: Conductive education, Sussex, March 1990

Please note that I have made a small correction to the caption. The pictures were taken a year later than I originally thought.

©Neil Turner, March 1990

This assignment opened my eyes to a whole world of education. I was fascinated by the ‘special needs’ systems that had grown up in the UK to try to provide a combination of tuition and therapies for children whose families were trying to do the very best for them. On this job I was working with a committed reporter who did her best to bring me up to speed on all of the terminology used in the field and years later I found myself telling younger reporters how things were. To this day, disability remains a topic that I get real satisfaction from showing to the world.

Young child who has cerebral palsy having a physiotherapy session at a residential school in West Sussex under the Conductive Therapy regime. This technique was brought to the UK from Hungary where therapists, known as conductors, use a range of very intensive methods to try to get children who have very badly compromised motor skills to walk unaided.

Judging from the date, I expect that this picture was shot on a Nikon FM2 with a 135mm f2 Nikkor. The film is Kodak Tri-X.

The BPPA and The Leveson Inquiry

I have been involved in writing, amending and publishing a second submission on behalf of The British Press Photographers’ Association to the Leveson Inquiry into  the culture, practice & ethics of the press in the United Kingdom. It has been a huge task and the work of propagating it using social media has now begun.

Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry was founded to look into the phone hacking scandal that brought about the closure of The News of The World and other unsavoury practices in play within the UK news media. In the first week of evidence it turned into a “photographer bashing” event and The BPPA had to respond on behalf of the thousands of perfectly well behaved and law abiding news photographers out there. Lots of countries have a problem with rogue paparazzi or “stalkerazzi” as they have been memorably named by one UK academic.

If you are a lover of great news photography, please follow @TheBPPA on Twitter like The BPPA on Facebook and read The BPPA blog here on WordPress. The industry is at a crossroads and we need our friends and colleagues to help us get where we need to go.

When Time Out did real news…

Right back in the early days of Insight Photographers, the small agency that we ran from an office in the rather un-trendy (how times change) Hoxton area of London, we used to shoot a lot of stories for Time Out magazine. Some weeks they would have five or six pages of real news and they used to commission some nice work too. One of my favourites from that era was this picture of a man who was part of a group of residents and squatters trying to stop the Department of Transport from bulldozing their houses to build a new piece of road in the Archway/Highgate area intended to speed up the journey up the A1 from Holloway (bear with me if the geography of north London bores you). When I arrived on a hot day from the a brisk walk up from the underground station the bailiffs had gone.

Archway Jack. ©Neil Turner/Insight, May 1989

I found this chap looking rather pleased with himself and asked what had gone on. He just smiled and said “we’ve seen them off”. I asked him if it was OK if I shot his portrait and he agreed. After that, I got my notebook out and asked him his name. He thought about it for a few seconds and then said “call me Jack… Archway Jack”. Of course I asked if that was his real name but he smiled and walked off trying to whistle a tune.

The News Editor somehow tracked him down, got some good quotes from him and the story probably got more space than a simple eviction piece would have. A definite case of “just because the story you were expecting didn’t work out, it doesn’t mean you haven’t got a good story anyway”. All of the Time Out news reporters and editors that I recall went on to do great things. I guess that it was a mix of choosing the right people and being a great place to hone those journalism skills. Quite a few of the freelance photographers that they used did OK too.

This was shot on Kodak Tri-X film using a Nikon FM2 camera and a 24mm f2 Nikkor lens

Chicken or egg? Workflow or mess…

Which came first… the Chicken or the egg, digital imaging or workflow?

One of the rather brilliant side effects of teaching is that you had to look very long and hard at your own practice to make sure that it will stand up to the examination of younger and more eager minds. I have taught workflow on and off for a few years now and I have come to the conclusion that all photographers should get theirs checked every once in a while to make sure that they haven’t fallen into the bad habits trap.

It doesn’t take much time and going through what you do and why you do it with an experienced teacher of these things is a great idea. I have also discovered how useful having a go at a proper edit of someone else’s pictures can be. Photographers are rarely their own best editors and it is a brilliant exercise to do an edit of a job where you give no attention to including pictures just because were hard to take or to pictures that you really like but don’t help tell the story. Captioning should also be part of that exercise because we all make assumptions when we do our IPTC that a disinterested party wouldn’t make. All in all, I thoroughly recommend these exercises to you.

In a rather tongue-in-cheek reference to the Alcoholics Anonymous “Twelve Step Plan” to beat addiction, I developed the photographers 12 step plan to get a good, dependable and repeatable workflow. It doesn’t matter that you can cut twelve steps down to seven or eight if you need to work fast and it really doesn’t matter that step twelve was “relax and put your feet up” anyway. What actually matters is that you have a tried and tested way of getting your valuable pictures from the camera to the client and back them up without making silly mistakes that cost you time, image quality and (worst of all) money.

For years I have been “quoting” the Hippocratic oath that Doctors and other medical folks take when they take up their calling. I have put “quoting” in inverted commas because it turns out that the phrase I have always used isn’t part of the oath at all – it’s just a line from a film!

Anyway I’ve been saying this; “First, do no harm”. It works for medicine and it certainly works for photographer workflows because the idea is that you never damage the original file – always working on a copy. Of course, with Jpegs that have had anything more than very light compression applied that means that you have already sacrificed some quality – but I don’t want to go down the whole RAW Vs Jpeg road again.

At some point in the future I will publish an updated version of the photographer’s 12 step plan with a step-by-step explanation of how my own workflow works but for now I wanted to just outline it. Remember that this can be edited down so that you have fewer steps if needs be:

  1. INGEST/IMPORT – get the images and any supporting files from the camera into the computer. Applications designed to ingest or import files look inside folders and sub-­folders on the memory card in a way that you might not be able to do by simply copying files from the card yourself. It’s important to note that this is one of the easier steps to cut out if you are in a real hurry.
  2. FIRST EDIT – make an initial selection of the images that you are interested in. At this stage you can dispense with very badly exposed frames, pictures where the focus has been missed, where important people have their eyes closed or pictures that are just not very good.
  3. COPY – move a copy of the selected images to a new folder.
  4. RENAME – give the selected pictures a new name. Some clients will have a formula that they want you to follow but otherwise try using a simple word identifier, followed by a six‐digit date and then a sequence number. All good software has the ability to batch rename and sequentially number files. A set of portraits of Tony Blair shot on the 3rd of April 2011 might be blair-­110403-­001 through to blair-­110403-­204. The exact formula that you pick isn’t as important as having one that works for you. The filenames that the camera assigns are not good enough and not unique enough for professional use.
  5. CAPTION – using the IPTC metadata fields to add information about what is in the picture, when and where it was taken and by whom it was taken. This is the best way to insure that your pictures can be found again – all image archiving and storage systems work with metadata.
  6. SECOND EDIT – narrowing the selection of images down to those that will make it into the final edit or the selection that will be delivered to the client.
  7. CONVERT – taking the RAW images from the final edit, making adjustment to colour, exposure, brightness, contrast etc using a RAW converter and then saving the toned images to the required file format.
  8. RETOUCH – opening the images into Adobe Photoshop or a similar application to remove dust spots, make subtle (but ethical) changes that cannot be made in the RAW converter, which, these days, are very few.
  9. SAVE – the final stage before sending to the client is to save the edit in the format that the client requires either JPEG or TIFF are most likely.
  10. DELIVER – most images these days are delivered using the internet. FTP is the most efficient but you may also be asked to email pictures, create web galleries, upload to third party viewing sites or simply burn everything to a disc and put them in the post.
  11. ARCHIVE – make sure that you back up copies of everything that you may need again. External hard drives, cloud storage systems and op?cal discs are the most common options. Multiple back ups are the best way to avoid losing your images due to the ageing of materials or the failure of drives.
  12. RELAX – that’s the end of the process!

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

Education… over on EPUK…

I write a lot for other websites and towards the end of last year the Editor of the Editorial Photographers UK site asked me to write something about photography education. It started like this:

What price your dream?

In Britain a staggering 1600 photography courses will be touting for students in 2012. Neil Turner, professional photographer and tutor on a new photojournalism course that starts in Bournemouth this month, asks whether enough of these courses actually prepare students for the harsh realities of professional photography today.

If you get a dozen professional photographers together and ask them about the state, standard and suitability of photographic education in this country you’ll get two dozen anecdotes about graduates who don’t know their arse from their f-stop, and a consensus that higher education is failing the students and the industry. Is this true? Are we missing something, or is the system getting it wrong big-time?

If you’d like to read the rest, you can go to THE EPUK WEBSITE

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.