London

When Time Out did real news…

Right back in the early days of Insight Photographers, the small agency that we ran from an office in the rather un-trendy (how times change) Hoxton area of London, we used to shoot a lot of stories for Time Out magazine. Some weeks they would have five or six pages of real news and they used to commission some nice work too. One of my favourites from that era was this picture of a man who was part of a group of residents and squatters trying to stop the Department of Transport from bulldozing their houses to build a new piece of road in the Archway/Highgate area intended to speed up the journey up the A1 from Holloway (bear with me if the geography of north London bores you). When I arrived on a hot day from the a brisk walk up from the underground station the bailiffs had gone.

Archway Jack. ©Neil Turner/Insight, May 1989

I found this chap looking rather pleased with himself and asked what had gone on. He just smiled and said “we’ve seen them off”. I asked him if it was OK if I shot his portrait and he agreed. After that, I got my notebook out and asked him his name. He thought about it for a few seconds and then said “call me Jack… Archway Jack”. Of course I asked if that was his real name but he smiled and walked off trying to whistle a tune.

The News Editor somehow tracked him down, got some good quotes from him and the story probably got more space than a simple eviction piece would have. A definite case of “just because the story you were expecting didn’t work out, it doesn’t mean you haven’t got a good story anyway”. All of the Time Out news reporters and editors that I recall went on to do great things. I guess that it was a mix of choosing the right people and being a great place to hone those journalism skills. Quite a few of the freelance photographers that they used did OK too.

This was shot on Kodak Tri-X film using a Nikon FM2 camera and a 24mm f2 Nikkor lens

Folio photo #08: Peter Snow, London, May 2004

©Neil Turner/TSL, May 2004

Peter Snow, BBC sephologist, journalist and newsreader photographed after an interview at a central London hotel for a “My Best Teacher” feature for the TES Magazine.

He had a book and a TV series with his historian son at the time and the interview was one of a long series that he had already done that day. The room was cramped and poorly lit and so I used a medium sized soft box very close to him to keep as much light off of the background as possible. One picture editor that I worked with used to call this very tight crop the “egg cup” because it was as if someone had flattened the top just like one.

Portraits, ID pictures and PR

I spend about forty percent of my working life shooting portraits for newspapers and magazines. It is my main passion as well as my career….

You will probably not be surprised to hear that I have some strong opinions about the art / science / craft (delete where applicable in your work) of photography. As an editorial photographer I am really lucky because there are three parties involved when I am shooting someone. There’s me, there’s the subject and there’s the paper – and that is really important to me and to the freedom I have to shoot the picture.

Social photographers usually have only two parties involved in the process – themself and the subject who often doubles as the customer. They are suddenly having to please the person who is sitting there in front of the camera. I really hate having to shoot portraits of family and friends because that’s even worse – imagine having the hassle of shooting a picture of someone who you love and care about and portraying them in a way that they may not have chosen. The freedom of being able to be objective and detached is a wonderful thing!

I have been involved in many arguments, both in person and on the web, about exactly when a photograph of a person becomes a portrait. It is really difficult to give a list of criteria about what constitutes a portrait, but somehow you can just look at a picture and say “yes” or “no” pretty much straight away.

I think that there are three categories of pictures of people. There are photographs that are merely record of what someone looks like that are perfect for ID badges or criminal records that say little or nothing about the subject. There are photographs where what is happening in the picture is more important than who is in it, such as a picture of someone playing sport or a musical instrument. Thirdly there are portraits, where there is enough in the image besides the subject to give a few clues about the subject, but not so much that the viewer is left thinking about what, rather than who. As a location only portraitist I have the added luxury of having the subject’s surroundings to help the image work. Studio photographers have to work really hard with fake props and painted backcloths to do what I can do very easily. Mass produced accessories, even student gowns, add little or nothing to the information that the photographer can give about their subject and can detract from the individuality of an image. You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned any particular focal length of lens or lighting rig, and that’s deliberate. You can shoot a great portrait with any lens, and in any place – it’s all about your relationship with the subject.

Portraiture is something that you either find easy or you don’t. There are things that you can learn to make the whole process less painful and there are ways of shooting that eliminate risk (and creativity) if you really find that saying something about your subject isn’t what you were cut out to do with your camera. My advice is to talk to your subject, look around the room or the garden for something that they relate to and shoot a lot of frames. You can add a lot of athmosphere with lighting, but if you get the pose, props and position right you have the battle half won. Get your “bedside manner” right and you can call yourself a portrait photographer.

The relationship between the photographer, their subject and their client is vitally important. Editorial photography usually has three parties and it’s a great way to create good images. A while ago I shot a PR portrait of two businessmen. It had to be done in fifteen minutes and the deadline for the pictures to be with the designer was very tight. PR is a strange hybrid of social and editorial photography. There are usually more than two parties involved and they want editorial style shots but they have to be flattering to the subject. It doesn’t matter if the client is a PR company or if you are being paid directly by the company that you are there to promote – the images have to be positive and show no flaws. Is that a two party or a three party relationship? I would call it two and a half.

“Nothing unusual about this job?” I hear you ask. The answer is OH YES! The number of parties involved was as many as six and the decision making process was made harder by the two people in the pictures having the final decision about which image was chosen. Let me explain…

The end client was a European division of a multinational company who needed a picture shot in London. They had asked their London office to arrange a photographer to supply the pictures to the designer who was in another country (that’s three parties so far). The two men in the picture both had a say in the shoot (parties four and five) and then, of course, there was me (party number six). I had to set up the shot without the two businessmen but with the London PR people present. The two men arrived and I shot for ten minutes with two differing backgrounds and then offloaded my RAW files into my laptop. There then followed a quick Photo Mechanic slide show for the two subjects and the London PR where they selected two possible images in which they felt they looked good. We finally settled on the very last frame that I had shot – taken, ironically, about a minute after the two subjects started to make noises about leaving to catch a flight!

It was then a simple case of converting the RAW file on site and sending it as a high resolution email attachment to the designer, copying everyone else who hadn’t seen the choice in at the same time. That, ladies and gentlemen, was a complicated relationship. Editing the images later to send a choice of twenty to the client I decided that there was a better file but by then it was too late.

The difficulty for me with this job was that one of the two subjects vetoed several of the images because he didn’t think he looked right in them and the other subject vetoed one or two as well. The old adage about asking a committee to design a horse and ending up with a camel comes to mind. If too many people have a right to say no, you inevitably end up with the least offensive and least interesting picture!

In my camera bag

Nothing much has changed with my kit for everyday jobs, so here is a refresher of what I use…

It seems to me that every web site about a photographer or photography has to feature a shot of the packed bag with an accompanying view of all of the kit laid out. I’m going halfway with the obligatory bag shot but you are going to have to settle for a bulleted list of the contents. We all know what an EOS 5d MkII looks like and I’m pretty sure that you can guess at what a pile of 8 Gb compact flash cards look like too. My old site has quite a bit of this stuff if you really need a fix!

©Neil Turner

So, what’s in your bag mister? (sorry Mr Lehman, I know that’s your line). The bag that I’m using most of the time is a Lowe Pro Stealth Reporter 650AW, and from the left the main items are:

  • Two Canon EOS 5D MkII bodies
  • Two Canon 580exII flash units
  • Canon 16-35 f2.8L sitting above a Canon 1.4x extender
  • Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS
  • Canon 24-70 f2.8L sitting on an ST-E2 flash transmitter

The back section is able to hold an Apple Macbook Pro 15.4 and the various cables will go into one of the front pockets if I need to pack a whole kit into the bag for travelling. There are plenty of bits and pieces in the bag:

  • Think Tank pixel pocket rocket CF card holder with 8 x Sandisk 8Gb CF cards
  • Notebook, pens, business cards
  • 16 x 2700 MaH AA rechargeable batteries
  • 2 x Spare Canon LP-E6 batteries
  • 2 x Honl Photo Speed Straps
  • 1 x Honl Photo Speed Gobo
  • 1 x Honl Photo Speed Snoot
  • Canon RS-80N3 Remote Switch
  • Various bits of coloured gel (red, green, blue, Full and 1/2 CTO orange, 1/2 CTO blue, purple)

Added together, this is one heavy bag. If it has the laptop and all of the computer accesories as well it is barely portable. If I’m travelling on the London Underground or having to do a lot of walking for a job I will try to cut things down and even spread the load in two bags. I’ve written before about the search for the perfect bag and all I can say is that the search continues.

Sometimes I use a nice small Domke J3 bag with two EOS5D MkIIs and some prime lenses – 28mm f1.8, 50mm f1.4 and 85mm f1.8 but most of the time I rely on zoom lenses.

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…”

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.

Metropolitan Police guidelines for dealing with the media

Guidelines for MPS staff on dealing with media reporters, press photographers and television crews.

Members of the media are not only members of the public; they can influence the way the Metropolitan Police Service is portrayed. It is important that we build good relationships with them, even when the circumstances are difficult. They have a duty to report many of those things that we have to deal with – crime, demonstrations, accidents, major events and incidents. This guide is designed to help you take the appropriate action when you have to deal with members of the media.

Members of the media have a duty to report from the scene of many of the incidents we have to deal with. We should actively help them carry out their responsibilities provided they do not interfere with ours.

Where it is necessary to put cordons in place, it is much better to provide the media with a good vantage point from which they can operate rather than to exclude them, otherwise they may try to get around the cordons and interfere with police operations. Providing an area for members of the media does not exclude them from operating from other areas to which the general public have access.

Members of the media have a duty to take photographs and film incidents and we have no legal power or moral responsibility t prevent or restrict what they record. It is a matter for their editors to control what is published or broadcast, not the police. Once images are recorded, we have no power to delete or confiscate them without a court order, even if we think they contain damaging or useful evidence.

If someone who is distressed or bereaved asks for police to intervene to prevent members of the media filming or photographing them, we may pass on their request but we have no power to prevent or restrict media activity. If they are trespassing on private property, the person who owns or controls the premises may eject them and may ask for your help in preventing a breach of the peace while they do so. The media have their own rules of conduct an complaints procedure if members of the public object.

To help you identify genuine members of the media, they carry identification, which they will produce to you on request.

Members of the media do not need a permit to photograph or film in public places.

To enter private property while companying police, the media must obtain permission, which must be recorded, from the person who owns or is in control of the premises. We cannot give or deny permission to members of the media to enter private premises whether the premises are directly involved in the police operation or not. This is a matter between the person who owns or is in control of the premises and the members of the media.

Giving members of the media accident to incident scenes is a matter for the Senior Investigating Officer. The gathering of evidence and forensic retrieval make access unlikely in the early stages and this should be explained to members of the media. Requests for access should be passed to the Senior Investigating Officer who should allow access in appropriate cases as soon as practicable.

Advice and assistance in dealing with members of the media is available 24 hours a day via the Press Bureau at New Scotland Yard.