Lake District, December 2011. ©Neil Turner
The motto of Christmas 2011… and post No.50!
Wordsworth fun picture, December 2011
photographer
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
©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.
Folio photo #05: CEO portrait with tungsten light, August 2006
©Neil Turner/TSL, August 2006
In 2006 Ian Smith was the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Oracle the software company based in the City of London. This business portrait was actually taken for the Times higher Education Supplement who were running a piece about Oracle’s connections with the education industry. The portrait itself was shot in under two minutes but I had set up with a ‘stand-in’ who posed for some test pictures for fifteen minutes before Mr Smith was available.
The really interesting thing about this portrait is that it was shot with deliberately mixed lighting: tungsten gelled flash on the subject and daylight behind with the camera on a custom white balance which was only concerned with the flash. I use this set of pictures a lot when I am teaching my location lighting seminars.
Waiting for the light, June 2011
There’s good light, there’s bad light and there is the right light. Sometimes the right light isn’t the good light and so on and so on…
Beautiful pool of light in the Jubilee Place shopping mall at Canary Wharf. © Neil Turner
One day earlier this year I was waiting for the right light to shoot a picture of crowded shopping mall when the ‘good light’ turned up. I took a picture that the client had no use for but it amused me and kept me interested. Pools of ambient light in just the right place happen on the right day, in the right place at the right time – if the weather is right. The rest of the time, if your patience isn’t good enough or the parking meter is running out you have to shoot with whatever is there or provide your own light.
I have enough patience to get the shot that the client asked for and I had enough spare time to wait for someone to walk through this shot. I have twenty variations on it with sixteen different people walking through but I like the way that this man looks.
Some 11 year old thoughts on lens selection…
Choosing the right lens for the job – written in 2000 for http://www.DPReview.com and it still pretty much stands up today – which cannot be said for everything that I thought that I knew when I’d only been in the profession for 14 years!
There are two ways that you can choose which of your lenses to stick on the camera:
- You can say “there’s my subject and here I am, let’s see which focal length on my zoom works best”. Sometimes at sports matches and political events you have your position and that is that, or…
- You could say “I want the effect that my experience tells me a 28mm lens will give me so I’ll select that focal length and move to the right position to make that happen”.
Either of these could be a valid option and, in many cases, the first is decided for you by circumstance. Most news photographers use zoom lenses because it makes sense to have fewer lenses when you are never quite sure what kind of work you will be doing on any given day.
Personally, I use a combination of both approaches. If a position forces me to choose a certain lens then I’m with option 1. Given complete freedom to shoot what I want I’d go with 2. More often than not I’ll go with, say a 24-70mm lens intending to shoot at the 24mm end and get in a position to shoot that way. I will shoot several frames and then start to move around, zoom in and out and shoot a variety of similar images, each with subtle differences. I try to make a point of shooting with just about every focal length available to me on every job. Sometimes I am right about lenses first time but often I’m not. What had seemed like an obvious task for the 28mm ends up being a spectacular 200mm shot and vice-versa but the result is that you often end up with images that are just that bit better.
I nearly always shoot on location so I cannot preplan every detail. Going equipped with a range of lenses is vital. Your choice of lens will depend on so many questions running through your mind. How is this image going to be used? Big, small, upright, horizontal, front page? Double page, back page, website, magazine or newspaper? Is it going to have copy running over it? Will it have more than one usage?
If I cannot answer any or all of those questions, then I’ll shoot every variation I can. Shall I start with a long lens, if it’s a portrait then being further away may relax the subject and I’ll get in with the wide when they are more comfortable. Background, what’s behind them? Can I use a change of lens get rid of a poor background?
Answering self-set questions and making compromises is the key to news photography. Choosing the right lenses helps to reduce the number of technical compromises that you are forced to take, giving you more time to make the creative compromises that you want to make.
Table top still life and the news photographer
Most press photographers will have lost count of the number of times they have been called into the office of the newspaper they are working for to ‘do a quick still life’. These vary from the simplest product shot to some interesting concept ideas. I thought that I’d share a few with you here:
As you can see, I sometimes go to town with them and the stories you see illustrated here are about:
- The risks of cloning and everyone looking and doing the same (rubber ducks)
- Managing your credit (cutting up credit card)
- Handling your savings (fist full of bank notes)
- The aftermath of a school fire (melted clock)
- A debate about healthy eating versus too many sweets (cauliflower and mars bar)
- Reading the fine print in a new employment contract (magnifying glass)
- Taking a chance with the school your child is going to (rolling the dice)
- The high cost of housing in certain parts of the country (Monopoly houses on the map)
The main idea is to us decent light, keep the idea simple and not be tempted to try to do too large a picture in the cramped and messy confines of the office. I deliberately added the rolling dice idea because we had some giant dice available, I had an intern to help throw them and there was a nice piece of open ground nearby on a lovely sunny day.
Studio based still life photography is a tough discipline and we still get asked to do creative stuff that should be done “properly”. It has been said that press photographers make great all-rounders because we have to think on our feet and adapt all of the time: I won’t be arguing against that one!
Define the word ‘portrait’?
The word portrait is used by photographers all over the world, but it’s meaning is a little blurred. Many use the term to describe photographs of people’s head and shoulders and others use it to refer to any old picture of a person so I want to tie down what I mean by potraiture and then talk a little bit about the subject.
©Neil Turner/TSL, June 2006
In my book a portrait is a photograph deliberately used to say something about the person in the picture. A simple ‘mug shot’ can be a portrait, but only if it says something about the subject and isn’t just an identity card style image. Even a characteristic expression is enough to turn the bland ID card photograph into a portrait. You then have a wide range of images that can legitimately be called a portrait until you get to the other extreme where a photograph of someone becomes more about an activity or a mood than about that person. Although there doesn’t have to be any interaction between the photographer and the subject for the picture to be a portrait, it really helps. I have read all sorts of nonsense about the kind of lens you have to use to make a portrait, or the kind of light that you must use. None of these things matters, a good portrait can be made using any lens and using a huge variety of lighting situations.
There are many traps in making good portraits, and I fall regularly into at least one of them, but the bottom line is that the photographer needs to free themself of as many constraints as possible in order to achieve creative results. With this in mind here are a list of do’s and don’ts that might help you to shoot good portraits – starting with my most regular failing:
- Resist the temptation to always use the same style and fit each subject into it giving you the same picture over and over with different faces in.
- Each face is different, so allow the light to help to show that. Not everyone benefits from soft lighting and good portraits are made better with thoughtful lighting.
- Don’t crowd the sitter. If you get right in someone’s face, you will put them on edge and spoil the photograph – of course if you purposefully want to make someone uncomfortable, then go ahead. A relaxed sitter makes the shot easier to get.
- Think about relating the sitter to their surroundings. One of the easiest ways of saying something about your subject is to shoot them in their own environment.
- Think about using props. Well selected items can really add to the message of the portrait- it could be an author with a copy of their book or a child with their favourite toy, be imaginative.
- Resist the tempation to always use the same focal length lens. Nothing annoys me more than to read conversations about “the ideal lens for portraiture”, it does not exist.
- Try a wide variety of compositions, portraits can be stunning if the subject occupies only a tiny percentage of the image, and can be equally strong if just their eyes fill the frame.
- There is no rule that says that ‘you must flatter your subject’ but harsh lighting and cruel angles should be kept for those situations where they are suitable.
To be effective a portrait must say more about the sitter than it does about the photographer and it must say more about the sitter than it does about what they are doing. Most great portraits have interesting but not overpowering light. If the first thing that you notice is the lighting then the photograph is not a complete success, if the first thing that you notice is the ‘nice blotchy backcloth’ then the portrait has truly failed.
