London

Possibly the oddest picture I ever took…

©Neil Turner/TSL | London | January 2006

The story was simple: we were doing an anonymous interview with a man who needed to remain unidentifiable for legal reasons and we had to shoot a picture of him at a time and a place that wouldn’t give his identity away. It seemed to be important that it was actually him in the picture and that became obvious when I had to shoot a proper portrait at the same time just in case the court case was decided and we needed a proper picture of him to go with a future follow-up article. Still with me?

The reporter arranged that I meet the subject at a London tube station and to get around the problems of finding someone whose name you don’t know and who you don’t have a picture of I always describe myself and what I’m likely to be carrying and wearing because a) I’m probably going to be there first and b) I’m probably going to be easier to spot (being big and carrying a lot of kit).

The venue turned out to be quite close to where he works and we decided that if any of his colleagues happened to spot us the cover story was that we were doing a fashion vox-pop on what the well-dressed office worker was wearing that season. The cloak and dagger details just kept multiplying.

I decided to go with a silhouette (you can read my thoughts on them here) and just for good measure I added an extra twist with a bit of motion blur too. The result was quite striking if bafflingly anonymous!

The technique is pretty simple. It was a dull winter’s morning in the city and we found a under cover area. I used a Lumedyne flash kit to light the brick pillar and silhouetted the subject against it. Without the flash, he would still have been a shadowy outline but so would the pillar and the picture would have been pointless.

The light that was coming from either side of the pillar was OK but it wasn’t plentiful and so I decided to give it a bit of movement blur by zooming the lens whilst the shutter was open. I ended up with an exposure of 1/8th of a second at f13 on 200 ISO using a Canon EOS1D MkII with a Canon 16-35 f2.8L lens triggering the flash with a pair of Pocket Wizards. Zooming during an exposure as relatively short as 1/8th of a second means that you have to have quite a few attempts to get it right and it also pays to tell the subject what you are doing if you don’t want them to think that you are a lunatic!

In the end I was very happy with this genuinely odd picture. I had arrived at the assignment with almost no idea what I was going to do and pretty much made it up as I went along. That’s why I love my job…

Fun picture: stray apostrophes, London.

When the news broke that UK booksellers Waterstone’s were going to drop the apostrophe from their logo to “make things simpler” the story was greeted with a mix of horror, outrage and cynicism. I was part of the cynical camp: what better way to get your company on the news than to pull a stunt like that? Leak a story that you might be about to do something and then sit back and watch it go viral and, more importantly, go viral amongst the very people who would be your core market. It was either brilliant, fortunate or (the least likely in my view) a genuine story.

©Neil Turner/TSL | London | October 2003

I was reminded of the last time that I was involved in a “stray apostrophe” outrage story. Back in 2003, yet another report on the use of punctuation in grammar singled out signs and posters for special criticism and so I was asked to go and find some examples. For a city reputed to have “thousands” of examples I struggled and it wasn’t until I was in the second hour of driving around looking that I finally found this gem on a secondhand video, DVD and CD shop near King’s Cross. The shop was on a one way system with almost no chance of stopping and very little parking nearby but I was desperate and so I went around again, found a parking meter and shot some pictures of the sign. The cafe next door was also the perfect place to have a quick coffee and send my pictures. Job done.

Compose the picture and then wait

I have a folder full of images on my hard drive that I use for teaching. They aren’t always my best work but they help to illustrate a point better than others from my portfolio. This is a perfect example of that idea.

Sometimes you can see the potential for a picture but the picture isn’t happening. This is a common issue for news photographers who have to shoot pictures to go with stories about something quite specific but aren’t allowed to set a lot of shots up. This picture was to go with a very small story about an art exhibition that had been put on by some young female artists on a very tight budget. The venue was a shopping centre (mall if you are from the USA) and I could see that some human interaction with the work was the best way to cover it. I grabbed a tripod from the car and stuck my camera on it. Composing the frame was pretty easy and all I had to do was wait for the right people to walk past and look at the work. People came along and I tried various shutter speeds to get some blur in order to keep the ‘focus’ of the story on the art. Soon I was happy with my plan (1/10th of a second at f4.5 on 200 ISO) and I waited, shooting frames as people came past in ones, twos and threes.

©Neil Turner/TSL | London | October 1999

I could see these two women with very similar pink in their outfits coming. I could see that they were in perfect step and so the plan went from the occasional frame to a full burst (about 3 frames a second in those days) and got this shot. Of course I did a few more but the deep joy of those early digital SLRs was that you had great confidence in what you saw on the rear LCD.

The idea remains one that I use over and over again. I see pictures and I compose them around what’s there and then I just have to be patient and wait for someone or something to come along and complete the photograph. You can see the same idea here in an old post about walking with speed lights which has pictures taken a lot more recently!

For those who love detail, this was shot with a Kodak DCS520 camera (1.9 megapixels of class) and a Canon 17-35 f2.8L lens at the 35mm end of the range perched on a Manfrotto 055 tripod (which I still use).

Vocabulary of photography

Language is an ever-evolving thing and a quick search for a famous quote on the nature of language brought up two very interesting thoughts. The first is accredited to Karl Albrecht – a German latter day renaissance thinker (I wish it were the co-founder of Aldi who had the same name)

“Change your language and you change your thoughts.”

This is an important idea when, as press photographers, we are trying to get the world, the rest of the media and the Leveson Inquiry to think about photographers differently. Words like paparazzi have been liberally used during the inquiry and by commentators about the inquiry. Fellow journalists and even some of our peers regularly use the words snap, snapper and snapped to talk about our work. As long as this kind of unhelpful vocabulary carries on being used we are almost bound to carry on having a problem. We are photographers, we take photographs and what we do is photography. Get a thesaurus out and there are plenty of other words that can be used (with increasing degrees of pompousness). It seems likely that it is up to us to start the ball rolling. It is one thing to use slang terms within the tight confines of our profession but an entirely different thing to propagate them elsewhere.

As professionals we owe it to ourselves and our colleagues to change our own vocabulary and to correct everyone else who falls into the lazy trap of using short snappy terms that are just not accurate. Take last Saturday’s Times for example. On the front page of one of their sections they had a line about “What really happened when Beaton snapped the Queen”. Did Sir Cecil Beaton really “snap” anything? The Victoria and Albert Museum, a cultural institution that would claim to respect photography has on their shop website a line about the same photographer saying that after her 1953 Coronation

“(he) snapped the Queen in all her coronation finery.”

As long as what we do is trivialised in this way we are going to have an uphill struggle. A couple of other searches on the web brought up equally depressing quotes – this one comes from a careers website www.allaboutcareers.com and their description of the job “Press Photographer”:

“Press photographers are employed by newspapers, magazines and other print and web publications. These snap-happy professionals are tasked with recording images of current events to support news stories or taking interesting photos to emphasise the point of featured articles.”

We could go on but that would only serve to labour the point. It is hard to think of another profession whose work is so universally undervalued, whose work is widely misunderstood and about whom the vocabulary used is to pejorative.

One final note: whilst looking for quotes about language I found this one attributed to Federico Fellini – the man credited so widely with the origins of the term “paparazzi”;

“A different language is a different vision of life.”

Our language is a very visual one but occasionally even we need to resort to words to make our point. If we aren’t careful, the rapid evolution of the English language will leave us behind and the regular and repeated use of poor and inaccurate phrases will become “correct”.

Archive photo: Inner London Education Authority, April 1990

When the Conservative Government finally abolished the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) which had shared County Hall with the Greater London Council (GLC) Mrs Thatcher could finally look out of the House of Commons and not be reminded of the opposition that her party had faced from across the river. I was sent to shoot a picture of one of the last people still working at ILEA who had done an interview for the Times Educational Supplement about his work wrapping up the affairs of London’s last unitary body (until the Labour government reestablished a London Mayor’s office in May 2000).

I went equipped with a notional headline of “will the last person to leave County Hall please turn out the lights” and I was very pleased when it turned out that the desk where he was working was in a windowless room in the basement of the beautiful if tatty building. I was even more pleased when I had processed my film and had a look at my pictures.

©Neil Turner. September 1990

For the camera geeks: Nikon F3P with 85mm f1.4 Nikkor and Kodak Tri-X film

Two portraits, one poet and a fifteen year gap…

Working as a photographer you often shoot pictures of people before they become famous and then get to shoot them again once they have “made it”. I don’t know if you can really categorise a poet as ‘famous’ but the British Poet Laureate is about as famous as you can get for poetry. In 2008 and towards the end of his term as Laureate, I photographed Andrew Motion at his London home but this wasn’t my first “one-to-one” with him. Back in 1992 when he was already established as a poet, and just ahead of the publication of his biography of Phillip Larkin, I had taken pictures of him at a different London home.

©Neil Turner/Insight | London | 14th September 1992

A lot of people are a lot more accommodating and easier to photograph before they become famous. They are often friendlier, more likely to offer you a cup of tea and are generally easier to work with. That wasn’t the case with Mr Motion. Back in 1992 I had caught him on a bad day – or at least a day when he had far more pressing matters to attend to than getting his picture taken whereas fifteen and a half years later he was well used to being photographed and had developed an easy manner when dealing with people like me. It could be that I was also fifteen and a half years older and more able to handle myself but whatever the reasons, shooting him in 2008 was a lot easier.

©Neil Turner/TSL | London | 28th March 2008

Of course the technology had moved on: in 1992 I was shooting with Nikon F4S cameras and some lumpy f2.8 Nikkor zoom lenses (35-70 f2.8 and 80-200 f2.8) on black and white film. By 2008 I was onto Canon EOS1D MkII and 20D cameras with some lovely L series Canon lenses and shooting digitally. The quality difference is also very noticeable and I wouldn’t want to shoot film on a job like this again.

Archive photo: Student demo, London, November 1988

On the day that I got my very first mobile phone I was sent to photograph a student anti-loans demonstration in London. Nobody was expecting anything other than a march by angry students on a very grey day in London. Part of the way through the march there was a large break away group that decided to head for Parliament – which was not on the agreed route. By the time they had broken away and reached the west side of Westminster Bridge the Metropolitan Police already had a cordon across with vans, horses and a large number of officers. Scuffles, charges and fights ensued but the police line held and the students never made it to Parliament – less than 200 metres away.

Photo: © Neil Turner | 24 November 1988

Contrast this photo with the student riots of 2011: the police are wearing no special clothing, no high visibility jackets, no shields and there was no overt photographing or filming of the students either. No buildings were ransacked, damaged or invaded and the whole thing felt relatively civilised. It did feel weird to be able to talk to reporters, other photographers and even the picture desk on the phone in the middle of a mini-riot: my phone was a Motorola 8000s which was known as the “City Brick” because it was so big and bulky.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t have a happy ending (apart from two front pages and a ‘congratulations’ from the editor). A few years before, I had broken a toe playing cricket and during the demo I had the same toe re-broken when a police horse moved backwards and trapped me between it and a van, crushing my toe. As a freelance, I couldn’t afford any time off so I limped from job to job over the following three or four weeks to Christmas. I also had a lens damaged and wasn’t properly insured so my old 35mm f2.8 Nikkor was replaced with a newer 35mm f2.

The camera and lens combo here was a Nikon FM with a 35mm f2.8 Nikkor using Kodak Tri-X film.

Folio photo #11: Sir Paul Stephenson, February 2009

Sir Paul Stephenson at New Scotland Yard. ©Neil Turner, February 2009

This portrait was made when Sir Paul Stephenson had been in post as the Commissioner of The Metropolitan Police for less than two hours. He had been acting Commissioner but this was taken when he was actually given the job. This frame was right at the end of the session where I had already shot quite a wide variety of pictures in the time allotted. Having packed 90% of my gear away I was told that I still had a couple of minutes and so I did this picture with a press officer holding a Canon Speedlite off to my left with the head zoomed in to create this pool of light effect. Sir Paul has now left the post but this picture is staying in my folio. Shot using a Canon EOS5D MkII with a Canon 24-70 f2.8L lens and a single 580exII flash triggered by a Canon ST-E2 transmitter.