photography

Photographic education… again…

Here I am again writing about photographic education. Every time I’ve started down this road it has been entirely due to one or more conversations that I’ve had with someone unhappy about the way the system is working out for them. This morning I spoke to three students who have ended up on the wrong course. I may come back and write about them another day but the main outcome of those conversations has been to make me think about a wider question.

When you speak to professional photographers about photographic education in the United Kingdom you are very likely to hear tales of second year undergraduates who don’t know what an f-stop is and third years who haven’t had any training in digital workflow. On the face of it, that sounds absolutely indefensible. It doesn’t, however, tell the whole story.

Thousands of eighteen and nineteen year olds go off to university every September to study English and thousands more go to study History. Does anyone bemoan the lack of jobs for writers and historians? Do working authors and working historians complain loudly about the lack of training that these young people are getting in the technicalities of doing their jobs? No. The truth about photographic education is that not all courses are there to train people to be photographers.

A sizeable number of courses are designed to teach photography as more of an academic subject – learning for learning’s sake and mind expansion rather than training for a career behind the camera.

This kind of learning is still a relatively new concept for photography. Our colleagues who are engaged in fine art, the history of art and even fashion are further down the road towards embedding the study of their subject into the world of academe and photography needs to catch up.

I have no doubt that lecturers engaged in teaching photography as an academic pursuit know what they are doing and know what, when and how they are teaching it. The thing that I am a lot less sure about is whether all of the students enrolled on those courses realise that they are pursuing an academic study. In fact, I am convinced that a surprisingly large number don’t realise that until they are well into the first year and that many don’t really wake up and smell the coffee until they are even further into their studies.So as far as I can see we have two separate but parallel problems here:

  • A lack of realisation from the profession that not all photographic courses are there to train photographers.
  • A problem for students who don’t understand that not all photographic courses are there to train photographers.

What should we do? Two parallel problems with a single solution: Better PR. Photographic education needs better PR. Looking towards schools, colleges, parents, students, the public and the profession all courses – especially the academic ones – need to make it clear who they are and what they are doing.

Photography should be studied as an academic subject; its cultural presence and power is worthy of research and study. Its history and even its technology are topics equally as valid as others that are understood and accepted as legitimate subjects in a way that photography is struggling to be.

Photography is also a vocation and courses that set out to train students for a career behind the lens need to make it clear that that is their goal and set about doing it to a standard that the industry requires and the students deserve.

We need two distinctly different approaches to photographic education and we need the courses following each route to be confident, open and clear about what they are doing. Courses that attempt to steer a course between the two and produce graduates who haven’t had a proper academic workout or whose technical knowledge and creative talents haven’t been optimised and refined are failing everyone. Let’s get behind photographic education and let’s help to get the courses to get their PR right.

Fearne Cotton – The contact sheet, October 2004.

Back in 2004 Fearne Cotton was enjoying a very rapid rise in her profile and her career was really taking off. The TES Magazine had done an interview with her for their “My Best Teacher” feature and I was sent to a studio in west London to shoot a portrait to go with it.

©Neil Turner/TSL. October 2004, London.

It turned out that it was a hire studio where she had been shot for a BBC magazine earlier in the day and they were (rightly) less than happy about another photographer coming in and piggy-backing onto another shoot. In the end we reached a deal where I shot using all of my own lights in the main studio and in the dressing room as long as I was in and out in twenty-five minutes. I think that the shoot in the studio was over in less than ten minutes and the whole job was completed in fifteen. Fearne had had a long day and the weather outside was dreadful. Neither of us wanted to prolong the job and, even at an early age, she was such a good professional that it was a very successful shoot.

These portraits were shot using a Canon EOS1D camera with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses and lit using a single Lumedyne Signature series flash kit with a 24×32 inch Chimera soft box. The job was shot in the days when I was happy to shoot JPEGs straight out of the camera.

Neil Innes in his pond…

From the days when he provided musical accompaniment to the Monty Python team and had his own hysterically funny television show I had always been a Neil Innes fan. Being called Neil myself I guess that I have always paid special attention to other Neils anyway but Mr Innes didn’t need any of that.

©Neil Turner/TSL. August 1999, Suffolk.

When I got the call to go and shoot his portrait I was delighted – even if the person on the picture desk had no idea of who and what he was. His home, at the time, was in Suffolk and when I arrived he greeted me as if it was him who was getting to meet a long standing hero. We had coffee, talked about all sorts of stuff and when we finally got around to shooting portraits he simply asked me “do you want funny or not funny?” I answered that a bit of each would be cool and we started with some simple head shots.

Within ten minutes “not funny” had become boring and so he grabbed his wellingtons and stepped into a lovely ornamental Japanese style pond in the garden (I believe that his wife was a garden designer and the whole place looked great) where he proceeded to fish with a small net.

It was amusing enough to watch him but if this were a video you’d now be listening to silly squelching noises and a completely bizarre and impromptu song that made sure that I was actually unable to take pictures because of the tears of laughter streaming down my face.

Photographers often write about what a privilege it is to meet some of the people we meet and to go to some of the places we go and I absolutely agree. Every once-in-a-while you also get a little private performance from a truly talented artist that money couldn’t buy and this was one of those priceless days.

Geek stuff: Shot on a Kodak DCS520 digital camera with a Canon 28-70 f2.8L lens, available light, 1/60th of a second at f6.7 on 200ISO. Converted to black and white prior to publication in August 1999.

BMX Rider: Contact Sheet
©Neil Turner. Ringwood, Hampshire. 2011

©Neil Turner. Ringwood, Hampshire. 2011

This was a set of pictures shot on location as part of a “how to do it” technique piece for Photography Monthly magazine. The idea was simple – use flash to make something very cool from some sort of active sport. I was put in contact with the tier, Keegan Walker, through a young photographer that assists me from time to time on commercial shoots and we arranged to shoot at the skatepark near where they both live which is about ten miles from my own home.

I used a couple of Canon EOS5D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L IS lenses as well as the excellent Elinchrom Ranger Quadra flash system supplemented by a couple of Canon 580exII Speedlights with Elinchrom Skyport receivers triggering them. There were plenty of clamps, gels and light modifiers in use too – including my rather lovely modified beauty dish and the equally great Chimera 24″ x 32″ soft box.

The sky at dusk is my favourite backdrop for all kinds of shoots and the May evening sky provided us with something special to work with. Keegan is pretty good at what he does and I had to ask him several times to actually get less height from the ramps so that my pictures looked better! Two hours on a nice evening messing around and shooting pictures is a pretty good way to make a living. The unfortunate part of this particular commission was that I had to write the words that described exactly what I had done and how I had done it. One day I will get around to reproducing the whole piece for you.

Every picture teaches a lesson

©Neil Turner. Poole, Dorset. September 2008

We all know that “every picture tells a story” but how many people think that, as photographers, every picture teaches us a lesson. Grab a picture – any picture – and really look at it. What’s good about it? What could you improve if you went back and re-shot it? If it’s perfect, why is it perfect?

I spent a lot of time yesterday shooting on mixed light with no real option of lighting the scene (a busy retail mall with dozens of shops and lots of people). Looking back at the best of the shoot this morning I could see that every frame had one major feature: one thing that was the single most important part of the composition and it was obvious that I should always get the white balance right there and let the rest of the scene do what it will. I already knew this but it doesn’t hurt to look and re-affirm what you already know.

Every time you shoot pictures and every time you look at other people’s work you can learn lessons. If you don’t know how something was shot – see if the photographer will tell you.

Look for the big four factors: subject matter, composition, light and technical quality. Work out how those factors come together to create the whole. Work out if the picture still works if one or more of those factors is deficient. It’s amazing how often the most eye-catching images are not perfect in every way and it is equally interesting that some pictures that score full marks in all categories just seem boring and “too good to be true”.

Analysing your own work on a regular basis is a great way to get better. Getting together with others and discussing each others work is great too but, for my money, going over your own work on your own is a fabulous way to find your style and motivate yourself to do better and better.

Observational, interactional and ‘dictational’ photojournalism

If you believe the old saying, “there is more than one way to skin a cat” and if you want to carry that thought over into photographic journalism there is definitely more than one way to shoot a story. If you listen to some debates about photojournalism you would find that hard to believe but regular readers of my opinion pieces about photography will know that I am a big fan of the ‘black to white, left to right theory of just about everything’.

©Neil Turner. Bournemouth, Dorset. 11 minutes past 11 on the 11th of the 11th 2011

The idea goes like this: imagine a line from one side of a page to the other and that one extreme of something is placed at the left hand end of that line. Now imagine that the opposite extreme is placed at the right hand end of that line. For illustrative purposes, let’s make those two extremes black on the left and whit on the right. What have you got in between? Every tone of grey that you could imagine. You can have one smooth gradient or you can have it in steps – it really doesn’t matter but what you will have is a smooth transition from one extreme to the other. Salt to sweet. Short to tall. Narrow to wide. It really doesn’t matter.

So how does this translate to different ways of shooting photographs? We are talking about photojournalism here and so I’d like to place “observational” at the left hand end of our imaginary line and “interactional” in the middle with dictational at the other end. That’s the easy bit. What exactly are these three approaches and what else sits along our line?

Observational photography can be defined as a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ approach where the photographer is an almost ghost like figure who tries to have little or no impact on the situation and their subject matter. Some types of street photography where the photographer tries their best to remain unseen and unnoticed are classic examples of observational photography. Some would argue that a lot of sports photography fits these criteria too – after all, the cameras are there but nobody is changing their behaviour for them for 90% of the event. By definition observational photojournalists don’t seek any meaningful contact with their subjects whilst they are shooting and most would eschew contact once they have finished taking the pictures either.

Good photojournalism is nearly always accompanied by good and accurate captioning – which is easy if you are photographing a Manchester United game or the Olympic 100 metres final because the participants have names and/or numbers on their kit and they are all famous athletes. If you are taking pictures of people running from an approaching storm then you would like to know who they are and where they are heading but the only way to find that out is to ask. I can remember a number of occasions where I’ve shot lovely street photos whose value as works of curiosity is pretty high but whose value as a piece of photojournalism is a lot lower because I didn’t have the details of the people in the pictures. When I was young and keen I regularly followed people and plucked up the courage to get their name. These days I tend not to shoot the picture if having no details for the caption devalues the image.

So that’s observational photojournalism dealt with. What about it’s interactional cousin? This is where I’m happiest. Shooting pictures with the full knowledge and either permission or acquiesence of my subjects in ways that allow me to interact with them whilst maintaining the integrity of the pictures is, for me, the gold standard. You can tell stories, relay passions and miseries and generally get under the skin of people. Interesting people. By interacting with your subject the nature of your pictures changes and they will have a lot more of you and a lot more of your subjects soul in them.

Back to that pesky scale… you have observation at one end and interaction in the middle and dozens of shades of whatever you would call it in between. Then there’s the final form of getting the pictures: dictational – where you tell your subjects what you want them to do and then shoot it but I’d find it hard to label that as photojournalism at all. I’ve put it there on our scale miles away from observation and a fair distance from interaction too.

Let’s say that observation is the black on our scale and ‘dictatorial’ is white. What colour is interaction? 18% grey of course! (photographer joke – if you don’t get it, I apologise)

Folio photo #15: Thoughtful businessman, London, April 2008

©Neil Turner/TSL. London, April 2008

This portrait of Swedish businessman Anders Hultin was taken during an interview for The Times Educational Supplement. He worked for a Swedish company Kunskapsskolan who were working in the UK and are hoping to take control of two Academies in the London Borough of Richmond-Upon-Thames.

The interview took place in a small office in west London and, although his English was first class, he took time to consider the answer to each question allowing me to get a great range of thoughtful expressions from just about every angle. I chose this profile frame because I liked the blue background and its simplicity. All of the other angles had complex and intrusive backdrops which I used a range of lighting styles to hide. The available light was very good for a short period and so this is one of a dozen pictures taken without flash.

When I chose this picture for my portfolio it was one of three business style portraits that all had strong blue backgrounds. I like to pace the pictures in my folio and by having a small group of images with a theme it seems to give them more strength and help with the pacing of the selection.

Geek stuff: The whole shoot was done with two Canon EOS1D MkII cameras and my trusty set of three L series Canon zooms: 16-35 f2.8, 24-70 f2.8 and 70-200 f2.8.

Portrait: Marsha Hunt, London, 2005

©Neil Turner/TSL, October 2005. London

Marsha Hunt is an actress, writer and model who shot to fame in 1969 when she was appearing in the musical “Hair”. She has a child with Mick Jagger and was famously photographed naked by Lord Lichfield. In the early part of the new century she had breast cancer and had a mastectomy. Her treatment became a documentary and she was photographed once more by Lord Lichfield. This set of pictures were taken for a feature in the TES Friday Magazine about her life and her memories of her own education at the London home of a close friend of hers.

This portrait was a lesson in letting the subject run the show. Marsha was lovely, as was our host. They were very old friends and chatted most of the way through the session. The wonderful thing was that she knew exactly when and how to look at me and at the camera. Models are good at this and actors, for my money, are better. It would seem that when someone has been successful as both an actor and a model they are better still. Some people are ultimately very comfortable in front of the camera and Marsha Hunt is in the top few percent of them. The shoot lasted a lot longer than it needed to – we chatted about all sorts of things and drank some rather good coffee too. It was a good day.

Geek stuff: In common with just about every other picture shot by me at the time, I was using a pair of Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L IS lenses. The lighting was Lumedyne Signature series packs and heads mixed with a fair amount of ambient light.