photographer

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

Chicken or egg? Workflow or mess…

Which came first… the Chicken or the egg, digital imaging or workflow?

One of the rather brilliant side effects of teaching is that you had to look very long and hard at your own practice to make sure that it will stand up to the examination of younger and more eager minds. I have taught workflow on and off for a few years now and I have come to the conclusion that all photographers should get theirs checked every once in a while to make sure that they haven’t fallen into the bad habits trap.

It doesn’t take much time and going through what you do and why you do it with an experienced teacher of these things is a great idea. I have also discovered how useful having a go at a proper edit of someone else’s pictures can be. Photographers are rarely their own best editors and it is a brilliant exercise to do an edit of a job where you give no attention to including pictures just because were hard to take or to pictures that you really like but don’t help tell the story. Captioning should also be part of that exercise because we all make assumptions when we do our IPTC that a disinterested party wouldn’t make. All in all, I thoroughly recommend these exercises to you.

In a rather tongue-in-cheek reference to the Alcoholics Anonymous “Twelve Step Plan” to beat addiction, I developed the photographers 12 step plan to get a good, dependable and repeatable workflow. It doesn’t matter that you can cut twelve steps down to seven or eight if you need to work fast and it really doesn’t matter that step twelve was “relax and put your feet up” anyway. What actually matters is that you have a tried and tested way of getting your valuable pictures from the camera to the client and back them up without making silly mistakes that cost you time, image quality and (worst of all) money.

For years I have been “quoting” the Hippocratic oath that Doctors and other medical folks take when they take up their calling. I have put “quoting” in inverted commas because it turns out that the phrase I have always used isn’t part of the oath at all – it’s just a line from a film!

Anyway I’ve been saying this; “First, do no harm”. It works for medicine and it certainly works for photographer workflows because the idea is that you never damage the original file – always working on a copy. Of course, with Jpegs that have had anything more than very light compression applied that means that you have already sacrificed some quality – but I don’t want to go down the whole RAW Vs Jpeg road again.

At some point in the future I will publish an updated version of the photographer’s 12 step plan with a step-by-step explanation of how my own workflow works but for now I wanted to just outline it. Remember that this can be edited down so that you have fewer steps if needs be:

  1. INGEST/IMPORT – get the images and any supporting files from the camera into the computer. Applications designed to ingest or import files look inside folders and sub-­folders on the memory card in a way that you might not be able to do by simply copying files from the card yourself. It’s important to note that this is one of the easier steps to cut out if you are in a real hurry.
  2. FIRST EDIT – make an initial selection of the images that you are interested in. At this stage you can dispense with very badly exposed frames, pictures where the focus has been missed, where important people have their eyes closed or pictures that are just not very good.
  3. COPY – move a copy of the selected images to a new folder.
  4. RENAME – give the selected pictures a new name. Some clients will have a formula that they want you to follow but otherwise try using a simple word identifier, followed by a six‐digit date and then a sequence number. All good software has the ability to batch rename and sequentially number files. A set of portraits of Tony Blair shot on the 3rd of April 2011 might be blair-­110403-­001 through to blair-­110403-­204. The exact formula that you pick isn’t as important as having one that works for you. The filenames that the camera assigns are not good enough and not unique enough for professional use.
  5. CAPTION – using the IPTC metadata fields to add information about what is in the picture, when and where it was taken and by whom it was taken. This is the best way to insure that your pictures can be found again – all image archiving and storage systems work with metadata.
  6. SECOND EDIT – narrowing the selection of images down to those that will make it into the final edit or the selection that will be delivered to the client.
  7. CONVERT – taking the RAW images from the final edit, making adjustment to colour, exposure, brightness, contrast etc using a RAW converter and then saving the toned images to the required file format.
  8. RETOUCH – opening the images into Adobe Photoshop or a similar application to remove dust spots, make subtle (but ethical) changes that cannot be made in the RAW converter, which, these days, are very few.
  9. SAVE – the final stage before sending to the client is to save the edit in the format that the client requires either JPEG or TIFF are most likely.
  10. DELIVER – most images these days are delivered using the internet. FTP is the most efficient but you may also be asked to email pictures, create web galleries, upload to third party viewing sites or simply burn everything to a disc and put them in the post.
  11. ARCHIVE – make sure that you back up copies of everything that you may need again. External hard drives, cloud storage systems and op?cal discs are the most common options. Multiple back ups are the best way to avoid losing your images due to the ageing of materials or the failure of drives.
  12. RELAX – that’s the end of the process!

The day after a bad day at the pool

When we first went digital back in 1998 there were a lot of lessons that we had to learn for ourselves. There hadn’t been much work done by others and there were a lot of mistakes that we made and learned from. One of the worst things to happen to me wasn’t until June of 2006 – long after we all arrogantly thought that we had learned what there was to learn.

I went to shoot some pictures at a swimming event and the atmosphere was loaded with what smelled like chlorine. My cameras had got steamed up quickly and took a while to de-mist and I thought nothing of it, shot the event on a pair of Canon EOS1D MkII cameras and edited my pictures as normal. Nothing wrong… so far. The next day I went to shoot portraits of a young student who had been shortlisted for a writing award – totally run-of-the-mill. The job went well, the pictures looked great on the back of the cameras but when I imported the files from the first camera into the computer I went as white as a sheet.

Dirt on the chip was a common problem, the odd bit of dust that showed up when you stopped the lens down but nothing had prepared me for the amount of spots that were on these pictures.

A small part of the frame before spotting. ©Neil Turner/TSL, June 2006

Thousands of small, circular bright spots in the same place on every single frame. I was swearing, sweating and worrying in equal measure as I put the memory card from the second camera into the card reader. If they were as bad, this job was going to take weeks to edit and retouch. Massive relief… the second camera hadn’t suffered from the same fate. The tighter pictures shot on the longer lens all had the spots whilst the wider pictures shot with a wider lens had none of them. The bonus was that some frames on the spot-free camera were also shot on a longer lens so I had a few spot-free tight portraits too. The panic was almost over but it was clear that at least two or three of the heavily spotted pictures should be in the edit so I spent most of that evening and night painstakingly getting rid of the spots. One-by-one.

The same image after a lot of work getting rid of the spots. ©Neil Turner/TSL, June 2006

After a thorough clean by FIXATION UK the camera was as good as new. The spots were crystallised chlorine and quite why they were only on one of my two cameras used on the bad day at the pool I will never know. People have theorised about having taken the lens off of one and not the other, damaged weather seals, some sort of coating on the chip of one camera that either attracted or repelled the crystals – who knows?

The morals of this story are these:

  • Shooting with two cameras is always a good idea
  • Using a professional to clean problem dirt off of the chip is a great idea
  • Shooting with some wide and some long lens images on both cameras is a good idea too
  • Be careful when taking lenses on and off in unclean environments
  • Retouching spots is a right royal P.I.T.A

That camera went on to give great service for two more years and was sold on having been cleaned and serviced. These days I use a pair of 5D MkII bodies which don’t have the same environmental seals as the 1D series. If I were a rich man, I’d want to own the new 1DX when it comes out!

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.

Mindset – small word, big concept for news photographers

©Neil Turner/TSL, March 2004

Written in 2002, this opinion piece still holds very true nearly ten years later…

What’s the difference between a photographer who takes pictures for fun, another who struggles as a professional and one who is on top of their game? The answer, well there are many but the top of my list is….mindset

It’s a pretty innocuous word, but it makes a massive difference. As I sit here writing this I’m trying to formulate some thoughts ahead of a talk to a group of postgraduate news photographers. Snappy titles are always a good start – according to the “Lecturing for Dummies” handbook so “Mindset” it is.

Next step – arresting opening sentence. That will have to wait until I have better formulated my ideas, but my handbook tells me that if you get people’s attention at the beginning you have won fifty percent of the battle and if you don’t you will waste a lot of time getting it back. Well, that’s a bit like writing and (spot the cheasy link) an awful lot like being a news photographer.

The narrative that runs through a well shot photo story or a well written essay is remarkably similar. I have been trying to find a way of telling eager “news photographers in the making” that the message is more important than the way it is delivered and I have decided that it’s worth keeping the writing analogy going.   Nobody denies that poetry is literature and everyone has respect for well written short stories. Good authors are comfortable with their medium, they structure their work and use words economically. Good photographers mirror this. The common thread is mindset; shaping what you have into what you want it to be. I’m not saying that you pre-judge an issue, but rather that you should edit before you shoot, as you shoot and after you shoot to tailor your pictures to a particular format.

If you are working towards an exhibition you work one way – adopting the right mindset, and if you are shooting a single image story you work a completely different way.  And then there are the differences between making and taking photographs, between being a welcome guest wherever you are or an unwanted intruder. News photography is a very broad church, with room for many ways of working and a lot of photographers find it very difficult to switch between the various sub-genres. It can be done.  The temptation for photographers new to journalism to assume that only great long complicated narratives qualify as news photography is understandable. It is also one hundred and eighty degrees out. The thought that it takes real skill to tell a story in a single picture is a difficult concept to master but the greatest story-tellers know that less can often be a whole lot more.

It’s all in the mind.  If you have a month to shoot a spread you can afford a few days (let’s say three to make the comparison easy) to acclimatise. If you have an hour to shoot a single image story and you take the same percentage of the job time to settle in, you’ve only got six minutes. You know what the score is, so you adopt the right approach before you start.  News photography, when it’s stripped down, is a really simple idea. You take pictures and you make pictures that tell stories. You can use photographs to spell out what you want to say, you can use them to intrigue the viewer or you can use them to infer things.

Good journalism often uses words, but it uses photographs just as often. If the photographer is thinking straight and can concentrate on the end product, good photography becomes great news photography.

Final step – the clever conclusion. I would advise anyone coming into the profession to read some good poetry and a few good novels, to work out how they were structured and to try adapting the simplicity of poetry to their photography. Why? The answer is all too simple, photography is all about creativity and it’s all about mastering the technical aspects but most of all it’s about a state of mind – a mental process – mindset.

Wordsworth fun picture, December 2011

Lake District, December 2011. ©Neil Turner

The motto of Christmas 2011… and post No.50!

Folio photo #06: 10 Downing Street, November 2001.

©Neil Turner/TSL November 2001

Children from a Leicestershire nursery school try to hand in their petition against closure to No.10 Downing Street.

This was a very ordinary story about yet another petition being handed in at No.10 which became extraordinary when the Police Officer on duty allowed the two children to try to knock on the door and then stood back and laughed as they kept trying.

It was a very cute moment on a day where the world’s media were not watching and the reflection of the officer in the shiny black door makes this a favourite picture of mine. They never reached the door knocker and so the officer eventually helped them out by knocking it for them.

…and we’re off
20120101-200818.jpg

©Neil Turner, March 2010

The sub heading of this blog is “me writing about photography because I want to” and that’s the truth. Post number 47 and it’s the start of month two.

2012 is underway and I’m planning to do quite a lot of blogging as the year goes by. I’m going to talk about education, press photography, photojournalism, light, technology, workflow, software, cameras and just about anything else that I come across in the day job.

If you read the blog and come up with any questions for me please let me have them. In the mean time, let’s hope that 2012 serves us all well.