Editorial

Owning up to some bad habits

“It’s all about light”. That’s a message that I hope everyone who visited the technique pages on my web site will take away. When you are the one who controls that light, you have a large number of options open to you. This month I have been trying a new toy and I thought that I’d use that as an excuse to write about how and why I choose the quality of the light.

©Neil Turner/TSL | London | December 2004

The first thing I have to do is own up to some fairly bad habits:

The first is that I go through personal fashions in the way I light and in the kit that I carry with me. One month I’ll use softboxes and then the next month I’ll use umbrellas. One week I will keep the flash as only one element of the scene and the next the flash will overwhelm the ambient light.

My second bad habit is that I will light women in a different way to men. 99% of the time I will use a much softer set up for female subjects than I would for males.

Thirdly, I’m aware that I tend to use a harder light on older skin (especially men). Older people seem to have a lot less moisture in their skin and so their faces have a lot less shine.

I’m much more likely to direct a spectacles wearer about the angle of their head, simply to avoid getting bad reflections in their glasses. I also try to find out if people wear contact lenses and get them to look more squarely at me to avoid getting any strange shapes in their eyes.

So far I’m painting myself as a bit of a lazy photographer. I like to think that it’s not laziness – more a realistic attitude towards getting the shot right. When you are shooting people, you often end up shooting a very different picture than the one that you first envisaged so my bad habits are there to simply give me an easy starting point. Getting on with the shoot is part of my style. I rarely spend very much time wandering around formulating ideas, largely because I am regularly expected to set up, shoot and break down in a matter of minutes. Having the “safe shot” in the bag is something of a religion to me and I find that giving in to my “bad habits” makes my practice a lot easier.

Many photographers use the same technique day in and day out. I cannot claim to do everything differently every day, and sometimes I feel like a chef who has a limited range of ingredients that I can select, mix and adapt to create new and interesting combinations. Every once in a while a new ingredient becomes available, a new toy to play with. Does that make me gadget boy? Or does it simply help to keep my work fresh?

The photographer’s “uniform”…

I was told the other day that I was wearing my uniform with pride. What uniform you may ask? It seems that the uniform in question was that of a freelance news photographer. I have known for many years that many of us tend to dress in similar ways: we all spend a lot of our time kneeling down or lying down to get the best angle. In the winter we all get cold when we are working outdoors and so it comes as no surprise that we all choose similar clothing. So what was I wearing?

The first thing that I did was to look down and make a mental note of my attire. Heavy duty winter coat, fleece scarf, heavy weight denim jeans and my much loved Timberland boots. They are ancient, they are warm and the tread is still pretty good. These boots have waded into the sea, they have stomped through Scandinavian snow and they have marched across many miles of the New Forest with the family. Most importantly of all, they have seen me through a lot of miles on the streets of London.

You’d be right to think of this as a uniform – how many of my colleagues have a black or grey North Face jacket on their backs? It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say “most”! I have no idea if mine is the latest technology (its Hyvent, whatever that is) or the coolest (black and grey?) but it works amazingly well. This too has kept me warm in the northern areas of Finland in the depths of winter. In fact, I even have a warmer one that I find it hard to wear. That McMurdo parka was a big investment for me and I’ve worn it twice.

I have just remembered that I was also wearing some amazing grey fleece gloves that my brother bought me a while back. They are made by Rohan and they are perfect for a photographer. They allow you to use the camera well enough (even the tiny buttons on the back of a Canon EOS 5D MkII) and manage to keep the worst of the chill off of your hands. The trouble is that they don’t have a name on them and the Rohan website doesn’t show any gloves so I guess that the recommendation isn’t all that helpful.

I’ve written before (although I really cannot remember were) about the photographer as chameleon. The idea is that we need to adapt to our surroundings and sort of blend in. In the city, surrounded by other members of the media it is pretty simple – once you’ve seen one black winter jacket with cameras hanging from it then you’ve pretty much seen them all. It gets trickier when you are the only one there. I’ve done jobs that required a dinner suit and others which asked for high visibility vests and construction helmets (more of the latter recently) but the majority of the jobs don’t come with a written dress code. The trick is to go for the right kind of smart casual wherever possible and to cover it all up with an expensive looking coat.

What you wear says plenty about you. Looking like a photographer tends to help you be accepted as a professional and helps you shortcut the whole credibility issue. I want my Doctor to wear a white coat and my postman to have the right clothing too. If you look like an archetype, if you play along with people’s prejudices it tends to relax them. If I turn up to shoot someone’s photograph dressed like a postman or a doctor I’m going to have to work that little bit harder to convince them that I know what I’m doing and that I am a professional photographer.

So that’s my winter uniform sorted. What shall I wear this summer?

Photocalls… aaaargghhh!

On the day when several US wire services took the principled decision not to distribute images from the White House that they had not themselves taken I thought that the timing was right to resurrect one of my own opinion pieces which expresses how I, and many of my colleagues, feel about the pre-arranged photocall. At their very best they can provide useable photographs, but the rest of the time they merely offer up banal images. The question is…does it have to be this way?

Organising photocalls should be a separate profession, but it isn’t. Public relations firms seem to have the knack of setting up ridiculous tableaux with pointless props and “C” list celebrities whilst many companies have their own in-house marketing teams who try to shoehorn as many executives in grey suits into a photograph as possible.

No matter how many of the assembled highly skilled and hugely experienced professional photographers tell the PRs that their idea of a photograph will never make it into their newspapers, the PR people still seem to make it a matter of pride to stop us getting good pictures.

Just when you think it couldn’t become more farcical they hand out the press releases. Many of these documents weigh more than a decent SLR (lens included) and a large photocall may well account for a couple of trees (branches included). How many times do we have to tell the PR people that a single sheet of paper with the relevant names and a one paragraph summary of the event would be a lot more desirable? (and environmentally friendly!). These days the release could even be on a USB memory stick or even passed around by bluetooth, which goes even further to reduce the carbon footprint of the event.

In these days of digital photography and laptops you would think that they would at least organize a bit of space so that some of us could use it to acquire and send our pictures – maybe even lay on some wi-fi. Apparently what is actually needed is some fatty canapes, white tablecloths and wine at 11am. We would really appreciate some thought about parking (not plentiful in London) and rapidly approaching deadlines, but the PR would rather fuss about name badges and being seen to be working hard trying to accommodate some obscure request from someone with little or no need to be there. PRs – get your priorities right!

So, if you are organizing a photocall soon here are some tips:

  • Make sure that the photocall notice is issued in good time and doesn’t make inflated claims about what is on offer.
  • Organize parking or make it clear where the nearest public parking can be found.
  • Keep any signs and logos to a minimum – if it doesn’t need to be there, get rid of it.
  • Welcome photographers and give them a run through of what might be likely to happen.
  • Listen to the constructive criticisms of experienced photographers who will suggest changes and improvements to your plans.
  • Make sure that the photographers are given enough time and space to do their jobs. Keep bystanders at bay and, if you have employed your own photographer, make sure that they allow the invited photographers priority.
  • Provide an accurate and concise press release – it could be on a USB flash stick to save paper and help photographers cut and paste correct spellings
  • Arrange space, power points and even wi-fi connections to enable photographers to file their images

Photocalls are the jobs that none of us want to be sent on. It need not be like that, but a small army of PRs out there seem determined to promote mediocrity and banality.