photojournalism

Cleaning glass
©Neil Turner, August 2013, Bournemouth.

©Neil Turner, August 2013, Bournemouth.

I was looking through a few pictures from this summer this morning when I decided to post this picture just because I liked it. The young man in the photograph is a nephew who has just started his own window cleaning business in the Bournemouth area using filtered water and a long pole instead of ladders, squeegees and chamois leathers. I hope that it takes off and I hope that he gets around to putting this on his website. It was taken with my Fujifilm X20 when I was working at the kitchen table on some pictures that I needed to get to a client and the X20 was the camera that I had to hand.

One thought this morning led, as they inevitably do, to another when I read a posting on a Facebook group by a photographer who has never cleaned their own lenses or their own digital camera chips. Cleaning lenses is too easy to go to the bother of driving to a service centre and parting with money. Obviously if you are at a major sporting event and Canon or Nikon are there you’d be a fool to not take up their offers of free cleaning and checks but beyond that you should learn to do it yourself. I say that as someone who never uses filters on a day-to-day basis as protection and as someone whose home is over 100 miles way from the nearest Canon approved service centre. I also say it as someone who used to be a staff photographer based in London with an employer who picked up the tab for pretty much everything and got quite lazy there for a while! I tend to use the Eclipse solution designed for camera chips along with either a very old quality cotton handkerchief or a soft cloth designed for spectacles. Once I’ve done the glass I usually give the outside of the lens a quick wipe down too – there’s no sense in having dirty gear.

Cleaning camera chips is a whole other matter. Getting it done professionally every once-in-a-while makes sense but at up to £50 + VAT per camera I don’t want to get my chips cleaned as often as I want to get my windows at home done. Of course the “self-cleaning” mechanisms built into today’s cameras really help. In the past it was common to get sizeable amounts of dust on the chip which needed to be removed. These days most of the loose stuff goes away with one or two cycles of the built-in cleaning option. Much of the rest can be loosened or removed using a decent air blower (the rubber bulb type) and if all else fails you can buy the right chemicals and sensor swabs to do a thorough job. If I get an offer of a free clean or I’m having a camera serviced then I always get the chip cleaned too. Canon build in a small sticky strip to catch and keep the dust shaken loose by the piezo-electric motors that do the automatic cleaning every time you turn the camera on and off. The service centre replaces that strip when you take your kit in for an overhaul or repair and it is useful to bear in mind that the strip is only truly effective if a) you have the camera with the baseplate pointing to the ground when the cleaning is in progress and b) the strip gets changed regularly.

Because of the distance I live away from the major repair and service centres I find myself cleaning camera chips using the Eclipse solution every couple of months. It definitely has an effect because I then have to re-calibrate the white balance shifts on the cameras. The end result is that I save a bit of money, a lot of time travelling to and from the service centre and an awful lot of time in post-production not having to remove dust spots. When I travel for work I always take some cleaning kit. I was in India a few years ago now and the dust in my ‘weather sealed’ EOS1D MkII cameras had to be removed on an almost daily basis. I’d hate to think how bad it would have been after a week there without having the kit to do my own cleaning.

It doesn’t have to stop with lenses and chips either. Laptop screens, computer monitors and keyboards are all easy to keep looking their best if you take ten minutes to do so. I used to throw my Domke F-series camera bags into the washing machine (which is how my beautiful grey F1X ended up salmon pink thanks to a stray pair of red socks) and these days I get the vacuum cleaner into my camera bags a couple of times a year.

Five years of freelancing

cutoutsIt’s quite hard to believe that I’m celebrating five years of freelancing this week. I hinted at it when I wrote about anniversaries a couple of weeks ago and I thought that it might be a good time to think about how things have gone and how things are going.

The first thing that comes to mind is that I still adore being a photographer. I hope that anyone who has read any of my blog posts since 1999 would have worked that out for themselves but I wanted to get that in first just in case anyone is in any doubt.

The second thing is that the timing of my move into self-employment couldn’t possibly have been worse: the economic meltdown in much of the developed world was pretty much at its zenith in September 2008 and I’m pretty sure that life would have been considerably easier had I left the staff job a couple of years earlier. That’s life.

Thirdly I want to mention the way that our industry works. Every photographer, picture editor and buyer of photography will tell you about a golden era. I really think that no such thing actually existed. That’s not quite right; I think that the invention of photography spurred a “silver” era which is still in progress and that there may have been a few golden spikes in that time. The industry has been in a constant state of change for well over a hundred years and it will continue to react to social and technological changes as long as the need for imagery exists.

So how has the last five years actually been for me? Ups and downs, feast and famine, peaks and troughs are all phrases that readily come to mind. One week I might work one day and the next I have four or even five days work. Sometimes it’s all editorial and others it’s all corporate. I’ve calculated that I’ve made 88% of my income taking pictures and the other 12% either writing about photography, teaching it or doing some consultancy work. I’ve learned the importance of having a portfolio ready to go and I have recently spent a lot of time getting my online presence to work smarter for me.

I suspect that none of the above is new to you and that none of it comes as a surprise. To be honest, I am pretty content with my new life and the only things I actually miss about being a staff photographer are:

  • I now have to buy my own car and camera gear
  • I have to do my own paperwork
  • I’m no longer an integral part of a big team.

The variety of assignments has been great, the travel has been interesting and getting to spend a lot more time at home has been wonderful. My hair has lightened to an even lighter grey but that is probably more to do with age than stress and I now have to wear glasses a bit more often than I did but that’s probably due to my age as well.

I’m not the only one who has made the move from staff to freelance and I’m certainly not the only one who did so due to newspapers and magazines reorganising and doing away with staffers. There was a discussion a few days ago about the pros and cons of being freelance and the general consensus was that it suits some people more than it suits others. I miss the team, I miss shooting every single day and I’d love to have someone there to buy me some new gear but apart from that I’m looking forward with child-like excitement about what comes next.

Neil Turner Photographer, the Facebook page

Having a gutter mentality

OK so it’s a deliberately eye-catching headline and, unfortunately, this blog post is about composing photographs for use in newspapers and magazines rather than anything X-rated. In publishing the ‘gutter’ is the fold or join between the two pages across a spread. It might be pages two and three, four and five or any other combination through thirty-four and thirty-five to the end of the publication. As photographers we have to handle those spreads carefully because there is always a chance that a badly composed or laid out picture can lose a lot of its impact through an important detail disappearing into the gutter. Experienced photographers and thinking photographers always go out of their way to give designers as much flexibility as possible to use their pictures across a spread without losing those important details.

How the pictures look

Here is an example of an image and how it was used. It’s not the greatest picture that I have ever taken but it is a very good example for the purposes of teaching – something I’ve used this picture for many times. You can see where the gutter lies – halfway through and that there is a single column of text on either side of the cropped picture. The designer could easily have laid the page out with two columns of text in white on the darker background or two columns on either the left or right of the spread – they had plenty of choice. That, to a large extent, is because the photograph was shot with design in mind.

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Space on either side of the image with interesting but unimportant detail makes this an ideal editorial photograph in terms of composition. It could even have been cropped to a single page vertical if the layout hd called for the. Arguably it would have been a shame, but that’s the way it sometimes goes. You’ll also notice that the designer has taken advantage of a large dark area within the image to run a headline. Purist photographers hate having their work used (and they’d argue abused) in this way but I am happy for it to happen as long as it doesn’t trample the important details that I have mentioned previously. Put simply, shooting pictures more loosely than you might otherwise do nearly always gives designers more options.

When I’m teaching editing and workflow to other photographers I often see them cropping their images to perfection. The fact that those crops rarely coincide with the shape of the page and the fact that even if they did coincide things often change is something that I spend a lot of time talking about. The only times you get to crop your images exactly how you want to see them are in a) your self-published book and b) your portfolio. Photographers that want to get used over and over again by the same clients provide options and that means a range of pictures many of which have a strong element of flexibility about them.

I absolutely love shooting for editorial clients. I also love working for corporate clients who like to use images in an editorial way. That means that I have to think about what the designers and sub-editors might want to do with my pictures every time I have the viewfinder to my eye. When I was first starting out that was one of the steeper learning curves – easily as tough as correctly exposing transparency film and focusing manual lenses. Twenty seven years on, it has become second nature.

The Press Photographer’s Year

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I always have a look at who has won various competitions and I’m always interested to see what the judges go for. Most competitions leave me a little cold but The Press Photographer’s Year is different. Well thought out categories, independently judged (I have to say that, I’ve been on the Jury twice myself) and backed by The BPPA I have always been part jealous and part proud of the winners. Jealous because I never seem to win anything and proud because I can call most of the winners my colleagues and friends

Press photography has a tough time in the UK. It’s undervalued by the publishers and misunderstood by a lot of the public. This year’s batch of winning and selected images will go on show at The Royal National Theatre next Saturday the 6th of July for seven weeks where it will be seen by a huge number of people who wouldn’t necessarily go to a photography exhibition. Please take some time to look at the winners’ slide show on The PPY website and please try to make some time to go to the exhibition and see for yourself just how good the work that these guys produce on a daily basis is.

So, congratulations to Adrian Dennis of AFP, Jack Hill of The Times and all of the other winners and thank you to Diageo for supporting this great project. Maybe next year I’ll actually enter!

Ask me anything…
©Neil Turner, June 2012. Dorset.

©Neil Turner, June 2012. Dorset.

Whilst looking back through some of my most popular blog posts in the last few years a surprising number of them were written in response to questions that other photographers and students of photography have asked me. That got me thinking about posting this simple update with a very simple request/offer:

“ASK ME ANYTHING… WELL SOMETHING… ALMOST ANYTHING…”

So not exactly ANYTHING – I’m only going to answer interesting questions about photography and my own work! Please use the contact form or reply to this blog posting. You could tweet me but I might miss that given the avalanche of stuff that goes across my desk each day. I will then pick out a couple of questions and use them to write future blog posts. Great… get other people to come up with the ideas!!!

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

Editorial portraits folio

Like most photographers I’m always looking at new ways of showing my portfolio. I’ve saved the presentation version of my editorial portraits folio as a QuickTime movie and posted it here. Please let me know what you think. If you look at it without going for the full-sized version the captions are a bit small but, apart from that, I quite like it!

Headteachers or whatever you want to call them…

Almost everyone remembers their head teacher. If they don’t then they will probably remember the Principal, Headmistress, Headmaster, High Master, High Mistress, Direktor or whatever other title the person who led their schools went by. Since 1986 I have photographed hundreds of these people and I have made the journey from being a little bit scared of them through accepting them to being impressed by the work that they do and the huge difference that their being good at their job makes to children and young adults.

I decided to put together a slideshow of some of the headteacher portraits that I have done. Most of the portraits date back to my time at The Times Educational Supplement. I also made the decision to keep them anonymous – I just wanted to show how different they are yet how much they have in common. Some of the Heads featured in this selection are famous in the world of education and one or two have been made Knights or Dames for their services to education. A few have since retired but that doesn’t matter. I don’t want to suggest that the person in charge is the only reason that some schools are better than others but I have yet to visit a successful school that doesn’t have first rate leadership.

 

The constant software update dilemma

Back in the day we used to occasionally try out new chemicals and different printing papers. We used to experiment with new film stock when it hit the market and, on the whole, it was a welcome distraction from the day-to-day work. In the digital era we have to get new cameras a bit more often and we need to keep our IT current but the biggest battle and the largest dilemma is software. Because I teach a bit and because I am a complete anorak** I always have a look at new software packages as they become available.

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Keeping up to date is not cheap. Upgrades are often necessary – especially when none of the software companies make their RAW converters backwards compatible when new cameras and new lenses hit the market. The move by Adobe towards the monthly or annual subscription model is very interesting and brings into very sharp focus the real cost of having the latest software. I have written before about making the business case for buying new gear and the same formula should apply to upgrading software. Every time I talk or write about these kinds of financial decisions, the same piece of music pops into my head… Bruce Springsteen’s song “Cautious Man” where there is a line that says:

“When something caught his eye he’d measure his need
And then very carefully he’d proceed”

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This week, to misquote the wonderful Fast Show, “I are mostly been playing with Lightroom”. To be more precise I have been looking at the new Lightroom 5 beta that Adobe have made available. This comes against a background of having experimented with pretty much every version of Lightroom since it hit the shops back in 2007 and found that I wasn’t entirely sold on the application despite seeing why others love it so much. And that is a huge part of the software conundrum – there are lots of options that achieve pretty much the same end result but get there via very different routes. If, like me, you shoot RAW pictures you need to have a way of editing, captioning, renaming, converting, saving, delivering and archiving your work. This can be achieved using a single application or you can use three , four or five different ones – it really doesn’t matter as long as your workflow is repeatable, flexible, efficient and accurate.

I will write a lot more about Lightroom 5 when I have really used it properly but I have to say that it seems a lot quicker than the previous version and the interface for Adobe RAW Converter is even closer to to the version that I use in Photoshop CS6 than ever – making using Lightroom a lot easier for me. I have also realised that Adobe’s efforts to create a programme for photographers to edit their work in are bearing fruit. The time has definitely arrived when I could easily do without Photoshop altogether and run pretty much everything from Lightroom. Of course that doesn’t mean that I want to… yet.