London

The anguish of editing your own pictures

©Neil Turner. London, January 2011

I’ve written about this kind of thing many times but it seems to come to the forefront of my photographic consciousness over and over again so I hope that you will forgive me if none of this is new.

There are a lot of great reasons why photographers have to edit their own work. They are the only ones who truly know what was shot, why it was shot that way and how well the pictures reflect the situation. For news photographers the idea of someone else doing their edits is, largely, a far-fetched and even unwelcome notion. It is happening more and more though.

Some of the big wire agencies and more progressive newspapers are using direct wireless transmission from cameras to editors on big sports and news jobs where the time between shooting the pictures and getting them to market is absolutely critical.

If, however, time is not quite so much of an issue photographers like to sit down and go through their own pictures, make their own selections, add their own captions and prepare the files for delivery. That’s how I’ve worked for the last fifteen years or so and even before then I was often in charge of my own edits because that was how things were done.

Every once in a while (mostly on commercial shoots) someone else edits my pictures. I find it both liberating and scary in equal measure. The liberation is that I get to concentrate on shooting pictures and the scary bit is that someone else gets to see everything – the good, the bad and the downright indifferent. What if they miss the subtlety of that amazingly constructed picture on the second memory card? What if they don’t appreciate the ultra-shallow depth of field that I grafted so long and hard to realise?

There’s a good counter-argument to that of course: If a professional editor doesn’t get what I was trying to do, neither will the client, neither will the designer and neither will the viewer. There are some pictures that you take on almost every shoot that are there for you and for you alone. That is true but every once-in-a-while those pictures do get used. Every once-in-a-while somebody else gets your vision and loves the ‘weird one’ as much as you hoped that they would.

Editing your own work is a tough thing to do. Try editing a full set of someone else’s pictures and you will realise just how easy it is to be dispassionate and just how readily you are able to discard pictures that don’t work. Editing your own work can be a minefield. Every step can bring a very tricky decision. What about the pictures that you have a personal emotional connection with? What about the pictures that you have overcome huge technical challenges to secure? What about the pictures that don’t actually add to the edit or make sense as part of a set?

Taking a shoot and making sense of the pictures from that shoot is a skill that very few photographers ever truly get right. Those that do are blessed and really lucky because they avoid the regular pain and anguish of having to ignore their own ‘babies’.

I have four things that come into my mind every time I am struggling to decide about a single frame: light, composition, subject matter and technical quality. If all four are right the picture goes in. If three out of four are right it will probably make it too. Less than three and that’s where the anguish begins…

Portrait: Marsha Hunt, London, 2005

©Neil Turner/TSL, October 2005. London

Marsha Hunt is an actress, writer and model who shot to fame in 1969 when she was appearing in the musical “Hair”. She has a child with Mick Jagger and was famously photographed naked by Lord Lichfield. In the early part of the new century she had breast cancer and had a mastectomy. Her treatment became a documentary and she was photographed once more by Lord Lichfield. This set of pictures were taken for a feature in the TES Friday Magazine about her life and her memories of her own education at the London home of a close friend of hers.

This portrait was a lesson in letting the subject run the show. Marsha was lovely, as was our host. They were very old friends and chatted most of the way through the session. The wonderful thing was that she knew exactly when and how to look at me and at the camera. Models are good at this and actors, for my money, are better. It would seem that when someone has been successful as both an actor and a model they are better still. Some people are ultimately very comfortable in front of the camera and Marsha Hunt is in the top few percent of them. The shoot lasted a lot longer than it needed to – we chatted about all sorts of things and drank some rather good coffee too. It was a good day.

Geek stuff: In common with just about every other picture shot by me at the time, I was using a pair of Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L IS lenses. The lighting was Lumedyne Signature series packs and heads mixed with a fair amount of ambient light.

Reina Lewis – The contact sheet, June 2006

One of my favourite sets of portraits that I ever made was of a lady by the name of Reina Lewis who had just been appointed to a new post at The London College of Fashion to become Professor of Cultural Studies. The pictures were shot at her home and I could see when I got there that she was definitely aware of how important some good pictures in the right newspaper could be. We shot a range of images from some tight head and shoulders against a plain wall to some full-length sitting ones in one of the elegant chairs that she had.

©Neil Turner/TSL. London, June 2006.

All of the pictures that you see here are entirely uncropped. They were shot on a pair of Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses and lit using a single Lumedyne Signature series flash kit with a 24×32 inch Chimera soft box. The Canon CR2 RAW files were converted using Adobe Camera RAW in Adobe Photoshop CS3.

College Principal – the “contact sheet”

Within two hours of posting a portrait of College Principal Jane Rapley at Central St Martins on this blog, I’d had four emails asking to see the rest of the shoot. I can’t do that but I can share the rest of the edit.

©Neil Turner/TSL. London, July 2006

I’m not going to repeat everything that I wrote on the original blog posting but you can see that the image I selected to feature was very much the “odd one out”. I have always thought that this set represented a good selection of portraits from a single session but looking back five and a half years on I have realised how many uprights there are and how few horizontal compositions. I’d like to think that was because I knew that the newspaper wanted uprights but I’m not sure that’s the case. Anyway, to those of you who wanted to see this selection… I hope that you like them!

Fifteen minutes of low level fame

To be entirely honest it was actually thirty-four minutes rather than fifteen but Andy Warhol’s observation that everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes is a gift of an opening and it’s so much punchier than thirty-four!

The half an hour plus four minutes in question was the time that I spent giving evidence to The Leveson Inquiry into the culture ethics and practice of the British press on behalf of The British Press Photographers’ Association. If you didn’t already know, I am very proud to be one of the two Vice-Chairmen of The BPPA – an organisation that supports and promotes news photography in the United Kingdom.

I have written a short blog about my experiences and there is a link to actually watch a Flash (boo!) video of me in action. This isn’t about self-promotion, its about the important message that I was given the honour of presenting to this important inquiry. Did it go well? Go to The BPPA’s blog site and find out…

Archive photo: Carl Djerassi, London, June 1999

©Neil Turner/TSL. London, June 1999

I shot this portrait of Carl Djerassi, co-inventor of the contraceptive pill, scientist and playwright in his London flat. He was mainly resident in San Francisco but kept a home in the UK as well. He was a very quiet and considered man who was used to, but not particularly keen on, publicity. I was attracted to the shape of his dining chairs and the almost egg-like shape of the top. I don’t recall whether we discussed the shape at the time!

College Principal, July 2006, London

©Neil Turner/TSL. July 2006, London.

Jane Rapley was about to take over as the new head of Central St Martins College in London when I shot her portrait in July 2006. After 17 years at the famous arts college in a variety of posts she became the Principal in August 2007. I photographed her in her office and then in one of the galleries that they use for student shows at Central St Martins on Southampton Row in central London.

This particular frame was shot in case the designer wanted to use the portrait full page and run a headline and some text over the image itself. The rest of the shoot was more varied and included some very wide portraits, which seem to have been what I was interested in at that time. It is fascinating that when you look back at your own work on a chronological basis you can definitely see trends and fashions in the way you compose, light and post-produce pictures. This was one of my softer lighting periods!

Carlos Fuentes portrait – the “contact sheet”

Going back through an old portfolio I was reminded of a lot of portraits that I used to love. One of them is this session with Mexican author Carlos Fuentes shot at his London home in December 1999. He was both charming and cooperative and his home was easily spacious enough to set up as much gear as I had been able to carry up the stairs.

©Neil Turner/TSL. December 1999. London

He had already been interviewed by a reporter to whom he was obviously a hero and I had spent a while asking her about him and his work. These were the days when the internet was just starting to become useful for background research. The trouble was that this was a last minute assignment and getting on line when you were on the road was a very tricky task. These days we all have smart phones with Google and Wikipedia but back then it was a lot tougher to become an instant expert of your subject. I looked his CV up later and was a bit embarrassed that I had never heard of him. I read a coupe of translations of his books over that Christmas break and I hope that I will never get caught out like that again.

Techie stuff: Kodak/Canon DCS520 cameras with 17-35 f2.8L, 28-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses. All lit with a Lumedyne Classic series flash and a 70cm shoot through umbrella with the hair light in some frames provided by a Canon 550ex flash unit.