Editorial

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!

Pier divers in Bournemouth

Several (actually all) of my recent blog postings have been about old pictures that I have found lying around or in searches for something else and why they are important to me. The latest one shows some young guys diving of of Bournemouth Pier in the early 1990s and it was part of a set that I did for a trades union magazine. The commission was as simple as it was vague – to produce images of the seafront at Bournemouth that could be used in a preview of the union’s annual conference that was being held in the town.

Bournemouth Pier divers. ©Neil Turner, June 1992

Commissions in those days always attracted expenses and that invariably included the cost of film and processing. The job was only a half-day but what a beautiful half day it was. The sun shone, the beaches were packed and nobody seemed to mind me wandering over and shooting their picture. The people diving from the pier made some great pictures but the dangerous nature of what they were doing meant that the client didn’t even want to consider them.

Shooting slide film in those days carried certain risks, not the least of which was that there was only one original. If that got lost or if the client decided to hold on to it there was nothing that could be done about it. Affordable scanners didn’t really exist and getting duplicate transparencies made was very expensive. These days we can just keep as many copies as we have hard drives and in the days of black and white it was always easy enough to knock out an extra print but there was that scary and even precarious time where you had to get the exposure spot on, hope that the film was processed correctly and that the couriers wouldn’t lose the package containing your work. It is quite amusing to think that “fast turnaround” was measured in hours and the three days or so that it would have taken me to get these images from the camera to the client would have seemed eminently reasonable.

How times have changed!

I’ve always liked this picture. It was shot on a Nikon F4S camera with a 24mm f2 Nikkor using Fuji RDP100 transparency film

Back on Memory Lane again

I don’t know about you but I can put my finger on exact dates and point to pictures that changed the way that I shoot pictures. Aside from the obvious ones such as the day that I used a digital SLR for the first time and the day that I bought my first medium format camera one very special day and one picture made me think really hard about the kind of lighting that I wanted to use.

Desmond Fennell QC. ©Neil Turner

This black and white portrait of Desmond Fennell OBE QC was taken in his chambers at one of London’s famous Inns of Court – The Temple. It was shot for a newspaper and it was during a time in my career that I was using a single Elinchrom 23 flash head with a soft box and a bit of cable connecting the camera to the flash. Nothing unusual there I hear you thinking… how did this change Neil’s life?

Cue anecdote: I was sent to shoot a portrait so I took my standard gear. When I was shown in to the eminent man’s office I started to look around for a power point to plug my Elinchrom into. He answered the phone at that moment (he was chairing a major public enquiry at the time) and so I looked at the desk lamp and followed the cable to the socket in the wall. The trouble is that it was the wrong kind of socket… the UK standard three pin plug has rectangular prongs and his only socket had round holes. Square pegs, round holes… ohhh c**p.

It wasn’t that I was incapable of shooting with either a speedlight or just using the ambient light it was just a bit of a shock. This was actually the second frame that I shot – Nikon FM2 with a 35mm f2 Nikkor, Kodak Tri-X film pushed to 800 ISO.

I like to think that I learn from my professional mistakes and I like to think that after a few days a shock turns into an eye-opener and I remember coming away from this shoot with two lessons learned. The first was to always shoot some ambient light because it often makes stunning pictures – especially at quiet, off-guard moments and the second was to buy some battery powered lights. In truth, that took about three years to accomplish properly and I invested in a lot of extension leads in the mean time. I recall the day that my first Lumedyne kit went into action – complete with a Wein infra-red trigger. No cables. I shot a portrait of another lawyer and left her office singing one of the songs from the Disney version of Pinocchio – “I got no strings to hold me down…”

A mission statement or two

Yesterday morning, The BBC presenter and former Economics Editor Evan Davis was sharing his approach to interviewing senior business people. He said that he wanted to relax them, tempt them into talking more openly and frankly than they might want to and because so few of them are media professionals he has a form of words that he uses to let them know what his role is. He says to them “I’m not here to make you look stupid but if you decide to make yourself look stupid it isn’t my job to stop you”. That, my friends, should be the mission statement of every editorial and news photographer working right across the world. And that got me thinking about some equally succinct statements for other kinds of photography and that in turn got me thinking about definitions of types of photography.

“I’m not here to make you look stupid but if you decide to make yourself look stupid it isn’t my job to stop you”. – Evan Davis

Thanks to the verbal clarity and dexterity of Evan Davis we have news and editorial photographers pretty much covered and the next category of photographers that I wanted to think about was PR photographers. For me this comes next for two reasons: firstly that I do quite a bit of PR work myself and also because so many of the good PR photographers here in the UK have a background as press and editorial photographers. The role of the PR photographer is to shoot editorial style images that show their client in a positive light. I don’t have the same ability with words that a senior BBC journalist does but I came up with the following:

“I’m here to help make you and your business look good by concentrating on the positives and ignoring the negatives.”

The cynic in me wanted to go with “he who pays the piper call the tune” but PR photography done well is a lot more than just pointing the camera where you are told and cashing the cheque. Next in line in both my life and in the photography that I do is commercial work. I guess that this differs from PR not so much in what I shoot but for where the pictures end up which is mostly in brochures, company reports and on their websites.

“I’m here to shoot the pictures that you want in the way that you want me to shoot them and to add my own input in achieving the right images”.

This process could go on and on and I have been trying to think of a mission statement for the paparazzi but the truth is I’m not actually sure what they do and why they do it – and I’m pretty sure that some of them are in the same boat. The best and most successful paps know exactly what they are about and that’s why they get paid the big money for the right pictures. My final thoughts on these definitions and mission statements goes to the names given to themselves by wedding photographers and which of the three mission statements above applies to them. I have something of a problem with “wedding photojournalist” because, for me a photojournalist is there to record events and to help tell the story to the wider world – warts and all. It’s those last three words that I cannot believe any wedding photographer can truly sign up to. Your client is normally the bride and groom or at least a close friend or relative of theirs and I’m pretty sure that they would not be happy for every single element of the big day to be recorded and published. I have no issues with the phrases “documentary style photography” or shooting in a “photojournalistic style” but can a wedding photographer really be a detached observer and recorder of events? Please don’t get me wrong here, I have the utmost respect and admiration for the best wedding photographers who have broken with the wooden and formulaic styles that were around when I and most of my friends were getting married. The quality and volume of the work that they produce in such demanding and unrepeatable situations is amazing but I really don’t like the hijacking of the title photojournalist for what is, essentially, very good PR.

Sticks and stones

My mother told me that “sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can never hurt you” and I spent the first 40+ years of my life without questioning that piece of maternal wisdom. At the ripe old age of 46 I started to realise that certain derogatory terms, when applied to groups of people, can have a bad effect.

not going to equate my profession with religious or ethnic groups who have suffered real physical and emotional harm from the constant repetition of terms deliberately designed to insult them and from name calling intended to isolate them or to incite others to be prejudiced against them. What I am going to do is try to make a case for the quiet burial of collective nouns and occupation based slang terms for photographers that only serve to devalue what we do for a living.

Before I get into the arguments I want to say that photographers often use many of these names for each other in what is meant to be a light hearted and affectionate way. Words get borrowed, used and then abused so we are doing ourselves no favours by perpetuating them. There are a whole raft of pseudo-tabloid terms for photographers that I object to;

  • Snapper – implies that we take snaps, which we don’t. We take photographs, we make photographs and we create photographs.
  • Lensman – what does this mean? It’s just a pointless term that gets trotted out by people who cannot be bothered to use a thesaurus.
  • Camera monkey – particularly offensive, and usually used by ill informed and self important writers.
  • Pap’ – shortened form of ‘paparazzi’, which is liberally used by the ignorant to refer to a wide range of news photographers. I have nothing against the paparazzi (literally translated means buzzing flies) but I object to the pejorative connotations of the word when applied to other photographers.
  • Reptiles – used once to my face by an ‘old school’ journalist who was politely informed that I objected to the term on the grounds that it may well have been used affectionately by him, but that it may not be used so kindly by others.

The list could go on but the point that I’m trying to make here is that words used in jest by friends of our profession get picked up by others and used to denigrate us all. All of this is happening at a time when we are struggling to present a unified, dignified and professional image to a world which at best doesn’t understand what we do and at worst regards us with contempt. The terms that we use to refer to one another are important. Not as important as avoiding undercutting other professionals, not as important as selling out on copyright and not as important as belonging to professional bodies, but in a world where everyone who owns a digital compact camera thinks that they can take ‘professional quality pictures’ every small action has an effect. It’s like the old, and probably untrue, story about a butterfly beating it’s wings in China causing a hurricane in Florida – some very small actions have very large consequences.

As photographers we owe it to ourselves and to our colleagues to avoid using terms for each other that can have negative connotations. When was the last time you heard a Doctor call a colleague a “sawbones” in public? When did you ever hear a lawyer, an accountant, a teacher or a systems analyst use a potentially damaging slang term for a fellow professional? I believe that the use of slang terms is a sign of professional insecurity and we can all help ourselves and our peers by refraining form making those signs.

Names may not hurt you or me individually, but they can eat away at our profession.