neil turner

Define the word “PHOTOGRAPHER”

When does a person with a camera, even a person with an expensive camera, become a photographer?

Apologies if this seems to be getting a bit philosophical but it’s a question that someone casually threw at me a week or so ago and I’ve been struggling with it ever since. Let’s get the dictionary stuff out of the way…

Right now we can really get on with the real business of working out what a photographer is. I’ve always been a fan of simple definitions and I like the idea of making a comparison between things, so how about this:

Someone with a camera tries hard to get everything into the picture whilst a photographer does their level best to keep as much out of the picture as they can.

All that means is that there comes a point in your photographic journey where you realise that most pictures are much stronger when you leave absolutely everything out that doesn’t need to be in. In a paraphrase of the old saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” (which isn’t necessarily true by the way) we can come up with “what doesn’t add to the composition detracts from it”.

The dictionary definition above, which comes from the English dictionary built into the Apple OSX operating system, steers away from the word professional and I’m really glad that it does because there are an awful lot of superb photographers out there that take pictures for fun and not for a living. Being a good photographer is not the same as being a professional photographer. On balance, MOST professionals are good but there isn’t a direct relationship between earning a living and being proficient.

These days there is a belief that ‘everyone is a photographer’. I wouldn’t argue that almost everyone takes pictures and that almost all of them take two, three, four and even twenty times as many pictures as they would have done when we had to buy film. Someone who I once discussed photography with reminded of another old adage – the one about if you give enough monkeys enough paper, enough typewriters and enough time sooner or later one of them will create the complete works of Shakespeare. It doesn’t hold up here and I told him as much.

People with cameras are largely rational, intelligent and reasoning beings and so most will work out what they do and don’t like and then take better and better pictures over time. Their image making isn’t the random act of monkeys with no comprehension what they are doing – the point here is that when it comes to learning that less (content) is more (better pictures) some will figure it out for themselves , some will need to have it pointed out to them and the rest will remain blissfully ignorant of it.

For some lucky people the knowledge is instinctive. The rest of us have learned through trial and error and/or formal education to know a good picture when we see one. Those that take the next step by learning what makes it a good picture can call themselves “visually aware”. The final (and never ending) stage is to develop the skill to see the picture and make the best of it before and during the pressing of the shutter. Those people can call themselves photographers.

See also COMPOSITION

Fun picture: bird house to let

©Neil Turner. February 2012, Bournemouth

Completely staged photo opportunity this morning in Bournemouth…

The joy of cataloguing…

Whilst watching television a few days ago there was an interview with James Corden the actor. They had a couple of pictures of him as a younger man and he talked about working with Alan Bennett on The History Boys. That triggered a thought: I’m sure that I photographed the two of them together when they were doing an interview about the play and the film.

©Neil Turner/TSL. October 2006, London

I have always catalogued my pictures and so I decided to put my IPTC skills to the test and search my system using the two words ‘Corden’ and ‘Bennett’. My archive is currently run using Phase One Media Pro (the software that produces the lovely contact sheets used on this blog) and so I opened the catalogue window, typed in the two words and waited. I waited for less than two seconds for the first thumbnail to pop up and probably less that five for the search to be completed. I could see four JPEGs and four Canon CR2 files – that’s pretty efficient. The catalogue told me that the JPEGs were on a mounted drive and that the RAW files were on an external drive that wasn’t mounted. One double click later I had opened the chosen JPEG in Photoshop and resized it.

Metadata is magic when it works. It works best when you, as the photographer, are a bit anal about adding captions and keywords to every single picture that you save. I have been pretty anal about captions for as long as I can remember – even adding tiny typed labels to the mounts on 35mm slides and stickers on the backs of prints. It’s easy if you can add them in batches and there’s plenty of software options out there to handle the task. My chosen application for adding metadata is Photo Mechanic – I love it to bits!

So there we go. Mission accomplished. I tried to find a fairly random image and I found it in seconds. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to be able do that?

Choice adviser – the “contact sheet”

This is another contact sheet that doesn’t quite fit in with my previous postings. The lady in the portraits is a “Choice Adviser” whose job it is to work with children and their parents to help them choose which secondary schools are best for them and to help them make their applications to their chosen schools. Part of her job is to hold workshops and the pictures were taken outside the most beautiful of the buildings where she does those workshops.

©Neil Turner/TSL. December 2006, Kent.

The portraits were done quite late in the afternoon on a cold and miserable December day back in 2006. I chose to shoot with quite a lot of light and there were two Lumedyne packs and heads used on most of these images balancing the flash with the ambient light. My brief was just to shoot nice portraits and I had no idea what kind of shape or even where in the newspaper they would go and so I had to give the Picture Editor as much choice as I could.

I wouldn’t normally choose to shoot someone in a black coat against a black door but on this occasion I really like the effect. For my money, making good portraits with people who are shy and who are unused to being photographed on cold, damp December days is a lot tougher than working with celebrities.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 85 f1.2L lenses. Mixture of available light with two Lumedyne Signature series flashes, a small soft box and a 70cm shoot through umbrella.

Merger talks – the “contact sheet”

Until now all of the ‘contact sheets’ that I have blogged have been from portrait assignments. Whilst looking back through some old pictures that haven’t seen the light of day in many years I came across this set of images. I was commissioned to do a sort of ‘fly-on-the-wall’ coverage of a Board meeting of the combined Westminster and Kingsway College governors.

©Neil Turner/TSL. July 2000, London.

The idea was that two medium sized central London colleges were to merge and become a single large institution on multiple sites and a series of meetings like this one were taking place to make important decisions about almost every aspect of the way that the new Westminster Kingsway College would function. This particular meeting was about the logo. My task was to get a whole series of black and white images (even if they were shot on a digital camera in colour) that could be used through a multiple page article about the merger once it was complete.

Moving around the room as quietly as possible, using no flash and getting a set of pictures that represented the meeting was my goal and it was actually a fairly tense meeting, which made my job all the more difficult. In the end I left the meeting before I was asked to. It was only a matter of time before I got the “tap on the shoulder” anyway and I thought that I wasn’t going to get anything very different and a voluntary departure would be a good move.

The magazine actually ran nine pictures across three pages in the end and I was very keen to repeat the exercise. Sadly, it didn’t really happen in the same way again for many years.

Techie stuff: Kodak/Canon DCS520 cameras with Canon 17-35 f2.8, 28-70 f2.8 and 70-200 f2.8L lenses at 640 ISO and colour converted to black and white using the Kodak DCS Acquire software.

Seaside towns beginning with ‘B’…

I was born in Bournemouth, went to school in Bournemouth and I live there most of the time. I am, as they say, a Bawmuff Boy. There are a couple of other major seaside towns that also begin with ‘B’. Brighton is 94 miles along the coast and I have shot at least twice as many commissions there than in my home town in the last 25 years. Blackpool, on the other hand, is a long way from either Bournemouth or London and somewhere that I have only ever been sent to for party political conferences. Because of the distance I’ve never seen the place as it should be seen – without an overload of grey men in grey suits.

©Neil Turner/TSL. Brighton, July 1995 - a view that no longer exists.

I really like Brighton – it is a photogenic place and it seems to be a really media-savvy sort of town too. On one occasion in the summer of 1995 I was even sent there to shoot stock images of the place to accompany general articles about the town (now a city I believe) and about the county of East Sussex. It was the first in a series of similar days when the diary was empty and I went to Cambridge, Oxford, Birmingham, Bristol and Norwich during that summer. It’s not very often you get quite such relaxed brief but it was actually quite a challenge – generic images in three hours and away again. Cambridge and Oxford were a lot easier but Brighton was the one I’d choose to do again. If I were given a free hand it would have to be Blackpool though. Every time I see it on TV I think to myself “so many pictures to be taken…”

©Neil Turner/TSL. Brighton, July 1995

©Neil Turner/TSL. Brighton, July 1995. Timeless...

Ahmet Zappa – the “contact sheet”

Ahmet Zappa is the son of legendary rocker Frank Zappa and is an author who has written books for children. A resident of Los Angeles, he was photographed at the offices of his publishers, Penguin Books on The Strand in London. I was there at the same time as one other photographer and we played this weird “your go, my go” dance shooting portraits in turn in different parts of the beautiful building. He was more than happy to clown around – his PR team were less sure until we showed them what the pictures looked like on the LCD screens, at which point they became very happy indeed!

©Neil Turner/TSL. London, August 2006.

The magazine went for frame 032 but I have always preferred 027. It has been in and out of my folio over the last three years and I think that it will get another outing soon.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses. Some available light but mostly with a Lumedyne Signature series flash and a 24″ x 32″ Chimera soft box. There is also quite a bit of ambient light in the pictures.

The man who wrote “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”

Everyone who has ever read books to very young children should have seen “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”. It’s an absolute classic and, back in 1999 I had five minutes to shoot a portrait of Eric Carle, the American writer and illustrator who created it at a London Hotel. I should have had longer but I was badly late because I’d been given the wrong address but he was charming, patient and his PR people were relaxed as well. At the time, he was 70 years old and the book was coming out as a 30th anniversary edition.

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 1999, London.

As soon as I got there, I set up my Lumedyne battery powered light with a simple shoot-through umbrella and started to work.  The author was sat in a high backed chair and I decided to work around where he was already sitting – he looked relaxed and I was still in “full apology mode”.

Although this was nearly 13 years ago I can still remember a random throughout that came into my head “if I were casting someone to be Santa Claus, it would be this guy”. From then onwards all I could see was a really nice bloke with a twinkle in his eye that children would adore. The fact that he must have illuminated millions of childhoods was certainly in my mind and we shot some very nice pictures very quickly.

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 1999, London.

This set of eight pictures is all that remains from the shoot. Back in 1999 storage was still expensive and the company policy was to use Zip discs (remember them?). My laptop had a zip drive and I put the wider edit onto the “official” zip disc and kept the tight edit on another disc for my own records. The official disc with the Kodak RAW files was lost somewhere in the mists of time and we didn’t discover that it was gone until we started to upload the entire back catalogue into a managed and backed-up library a couple of years later. You learn from your mistakes.

I like the simple and innocent tight composition of frame 004 and I love the expression of frame 007. I have read his books to young members of the family ever since and I try really hard to do so with the same twinkle in my eye that the author had.

This was still the early days of digital and I was using a Kodak DCS520 (Canon D2000) with Canon 17-35, 28-70 and 70-200 f2.8 lenses. At 200 ISO, with good light and if you didn’t need to use the pictures too large the quality of the files was actually very good indeed.