Editorial

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.

What they don’t teach you in college

This post was originally written in 2003. Things, sadly, haven’t really changed and so I thought that it deserved yet another airing.

For better or for worse, the vast majority of people entering the photographic profession are coming from college courses. I have no problem with that, I came from one myself and so did a lot of my favourite photographers. But…

I’ve been a working photographer since 1986 and based on a few things I have picked up since then I have come up with a list of things that they should have taught us that were not on the syllabus. A whole range of vital skills that go a long way to marking out the complete professional from the aspiring “not there yet”.

Obviously when it comes to choosing which lens to use, or selecting backgrounds and props – only experience and familiarity with your kit and brief will do, and colleges are good at telling their students that. There are, however, some skills that are never even mentioned that are vital.

  • People skills: The ability to handle anyone that you are either photographing, who have influence over those being photographed or who are just getting in the way.
  • More people skills: You need to be able to charm the ‘jobsworth’ security man and persuade the reluctant PR and to do it all without breaking into a fit of temper until such times as all else has failed and you have no other option
  • Even more people skills: As a news photographer you need to be able to communicate with anyone from a starving refugee to a pampered celebrity in a meaningful and constructive way – often on the same day! You have to get them to trust you, to do what you want them to do and achieve all of this with dignity and respect.
  • Advanced people skills: As a portraitist you have to have the ability to talk to absolutely anyone and to keep the conversation going at a light but interesting level whilst setting up equipment, making vital technical decisions and shooting the job.
  • Extended people skills: You need to have a sense of your own place in the scheme of things. It’s no use throwing a prima donna tantrum if you are not getting what you want and are never going to get it. It gets even worse when the person you are arguing with is a close personal friend of the editor. Know when to give in, to make another plan and get your shot anyway.

You are probably getting my drift by now. Once you have acquired all of the technical skills and bought all of the kit that you need all that’s required is to learn how to conduct yourself. I often refer to the photographer as the “Social Chameleon”, changing colours and attitude to suit their surroundings. This should be both physical – dressing appropriately so as not antagonize the people that you are dealing with, and mental – adopting the right attitude – be it meek or aggressive, as friendly or confrontational as the situation requires.

Maybe photographers should all adopt some of the techniques used by the best sales people and mix them with skills more common in the diplomatic service. I have watched charity workers running soup kitchens and marvelled at their ability to be both understanding and firm, and I have watched police officers and been stunned by the way that they get the information that they want whilst conducting an otherwise friendly conversation.

My biggest tip on this subject is to find some common ground with whoever you are talking to and work it. It might be sport, it might be the weather or the journey that you both had to get where you have met. If I’m in someone’s home I will often talk about a piece of art or furniture on display or their pet cat or dog. It doesn’t matter what you chat about, you are chatting and barriers are coming down. Avoid contentious subjects unless you are really sure of yourself.

So there you are, what they don’t teach you in college is how to handle people. It’s not just a skill needed by photographers – it’s a life skill. I think that’s why a lot of the greatest photographers have come from other careers where they have learned about people and use those skills in their new profession.

Developing a new course

Several months ago I had a conversation with a man called Tom Hill who runs a private journalism school called Up To Speed Journalism in my home town of Bournemouth. We were looking at the options of expanding the range of courses on offer to include one for news photographers. A few weeks ago we started looking very seriously at the idea and Tom has now decided to start accepting applications for the first course which runs from January 2011.

I am delighted to have been involved in the development of the course and I will be teaching some of the elements of the course. The big tasks now are to attract the right students and to make sure that we bring the industry along with us at a time when there are very few jobs out there for new entrants to the profession. The idea is simple: to give those who come on the course the information, skills and techniques that they will need to start out on their careers as news photographers. It’s all very exciting and if you want to know more, go to the Up To Speed website where there is quite a bit of information and where you can ask questions about the course.

Colour calibrating digital camera bodies

When you work with one camera and you shoot RAW all of the time it really doesn’t matter if that camera has a tendency towards magenta, yellow or cyan – the shift will be consistent and you can cope with it very easily in post-production. If, on the other hand, you work with more than one camera and each of them has a subtle shift in a different direction then your workflow can be slowed down when you have to constantly colour correct images shot under identical lighting in different directions. Like all things in photography, there is more than one way to solve this problem.

As you can see from the top row of images above – the three cameras that I use have different colour shifts with my slightly newer 5D MkII (codename yellow strap… because it has a yellow strap!) displaying quite a strong magenta shift whilst the 7D (codename blue strap, you can guess why) is a little cold and my oldest 5D MkII (red strap) is pretty neutral but maybe 1/3 of an f-stop brighter. I am going to use the red strap body as my basis for changing the colours on the other two a) because it is the most neutral to start with and b) because it has been serviced and cleaned by Canon quite recently.

Obviously these pictures were shot under controlled conditions using the same light source, the same lens on a tripod and have been converted from their RAW using no adjustments whatsoever. I shot multiple frames using each body as a sample just to make sure that there was no shift between frames on the same camera.

The second row of examples are the same RAW files with a white balance applied to exactly the same spot on the white box between Mickey and Minnie’s ears. As you can see this gets us a whole lot closer to matching the pictures for colour and this technique is fine when you have something in the frame which allows you to use the eye-dropper tool in Adobe Camera RAW (and in other similar raw conversion applications) and it is also fine when you only have a few images to process in this way. If you shoot an event where there are hundreds of frames, then you would spend an unnecessary amount of time balancing in this way.

The third row of examples utilises one of the cool features of the latest versions of Adobe Camera RAW in either Photoshop or Lightroom (and I’m sure that other software does this too) which allows you to set a default set of settings ranging from white balance to black levels, contrast, saturation to sharpening and noise control for each camera which the software detects from the serial number in the EXIF data as you bring it into the RAW conversion control pane. This is great for a lot of work and is a good option if you usually shoot on a fixed white balance.

These three techniques work for pretty much every digital camera and every scan. Some, more modern and more expensive, cameras allow you to go one crucial step further and that is to tell the camera to automatically shift by a fixed amount of colour for every frame – so that if your camera has a magenta shift like my yellow strap camera you can counterbalance that in camera and your images will show up as they should – no matter which white balance you are using at the time. The next few illustrations are based on a Canon 5D MkII using Canon’s own EOS Utility:

The illustration above top left of the three shows the home screen of the EOS Utility application and the “camera settings/remote shooting option is what you need.

This brings up the window on the top right which has an option marked WB shift that allows you to control the cross hairs and set an exact shift for the camera that is connected at the time. It is simple and very, very useful.

The illustration bottom left refers to the technique in Adobe Camera RAW (Photoshop CS4 in this case) in which you set a custom import for each camera and this is the preference pane that you need to find it.

It would be great if there was some software that allowed you to perform an exact “chip” calibration in the same way that you can calibrate a computer screen. Of course, the ability to calibrate the LCD on the back of a DSLR would be cool too but in the mean time here are three ways that you can use the combination of a good RAW converter and your camera’s built-in options to get all of your cameras working the same way as each other. It takes time, it’s fiddly but will save you a great deal of hassle over the course of a few weeks work.

Five levels of image manipulation

The Curve section of the EPUK website has always been a great source of information for photographers already working in editorial markets and for those who would like to do so in the future. I have written a few pieces for them over the years and my latest piece is about five different levels of image manipulation and how they should be used in newspapers and magazines.

As we celebrate the twentieth birthday of Photoshop we should take a few minutes to think about how the subject of image manipulation is regarded both inside and outside of our profession. In truth there is a sizeable majority of the population who think that every image that they see has been heavily retouched or altered.

Documentary, news and reportage photographers have a real battle to convince a sceptical world that their images tell the truth.

You might find it helps you to form your own thoughts on image manipulation by looking at these five categories of altering pictures and deciding for yourself which are appropriate for the kind of work that you do, and then using them to educate clients, friends and colleagues about how we as an industry view this very important subject.

  1. Normal darkroom practices – correction of colour, tone, contrast and saturation to reflect the way the image should look. Light dodging and burning.
  2. Darkroom interpretation – changes limited to colour, heavier dodging and burning, unnatural saturation and contrast that make the image an interpretation of reality.
  3. Minor alterations – adding or removing elements to or from the image, other than by cropping, that do not change the essential message of the image.
  4. Major alterations – adding or removing elements to or from the image that heighten or change the essential message of the image.
  5. Image montage – using elements of more than one image to make a photograph that is no longer a genuine representation of the scene.

For the purposes of news I would say that 1 is OK, and that 2 might be.

By the time you get to 3 then I would say that was unacceptable for news – unless there is a label attached or there are good public interest reasons for the manipulation (such as preserving the anonymity of vulnerable people).

The real danger here is that much of the public assume everything we do is altered. It does us no favours for this assumption to go unchallenged. The real sadness is that so many photographers supplying news images ignore the ethical implications – largely because they know no better.

Image manipulation is a serious subject and one that should be addressed by every photographer every time they sit at their screen and every time they see their work in print

Contact sheet: Dame Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, Oxford, September 1998

When this set of photographs, one of the last of her, was taken Dame Iris was in the latter stages of Alzheimer’s and her husband described her as being like “a very nice 3-year-old,”. She died in Oxford on February 8, 1999. In his memoir “Elegy for Iris” John Bayley portrays his brilliant wife lovingly but unsentimentally. He was in turn very much in love with her and very caring about her when I spent a brief time shooting this set of pictures. She was unaware of who I was or what I was doing but his hand was always in hers and she seemed to accept that everything was OK because of that.

The original caption simply read: Professor John Bayley and Dame Iris Murdoch photographed in the back garden of their home in Oxford. 09.09.1998 photo: Neil Turner/Times Higher Education Supplement. ©News International

The Times Higher Education Supplement was running a review of Professor Bayley’s book about his wife and the Picture Editor had asked me to drive to Oxford to shoot his portrait. While I was driving between London and Oxford I was told that at least two other photographers would be shooting before me and that it was “unlikely” that Dame Iris would be in the pictures. I don’t mind doing portraits of authors on those days when you form an orderly queue with reporters and television crews for your chance to do the same five minute job but this one seemed a little less “organised”.

I arrived in that part of Oxford where it seems every second home is owned by a Nobel Prize winner or a celebrity academic to find their house looking a little sorry for itself. The front garden, the fences and the paintwork all needed some TLC and I quite like to shoot portraits around those areas. I had twenty minutes to wait and started to think about the light, the colours and watch for other photographers and journalists to come out. Nobody appeared so I grabbed my gear and knocked on the door. When Professor Bayley answered, he looked like the gardener but spoke exactly how you might imagine an Oxford Professor would.

In the film “Iris” which stars Dame Judi Dench as the older Iris Murdoch the house is untidy. Actually having been there I can tell you that untidy doesn’t even come close. There were books and newspapers everywhere. Televisions were on the BBC in almost every room and there was Dame Iris herself sitting quietly at the kitchen table. I was nervous about asking if she would be available for the pictures but Professor Bayley seemed to know what I wanted to ask and told me that he wanted her to be in the pictures with him but that she found flash disturbing. I was shooting 35mm colour negative film at the time and so we decided that the house was too dark and too untidy to be a good location for a portrait. Ironically these days I would have probably done some pictures on my 5D MkIIs using the small amount of available light indoors at 3200 ISO but there was no way that 800 ISO colour negative would cope.

The beauty of these pictures is that nobody from the publishers had been round to tidy up, dress them up or even attempt to sanitise the images. Because of that we were able to make some lovely portraits. We chatted about garden birds, foliage and the English weather. It was a surreal time.

In the end I shot 72 frames (two rolls of 200 ISO Fuji Colour Negative film) which I drove back to London where the film was processed by the newspaper darkroom and all scanned onto a Kodak Photo CD at a resolution unthinkable for a digital camera at the time – the equivalent of a 6 megapixel camera when the Kodak DCS520 was just becoming available with it’s 1.9 megapixel chip. The cameras used here were a Canon EOS1V and an EOS1N with 28-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses.