For well over two years I have been carrying out assignments for various institutions within the worldwide Anglican Communion. I have blogged before about a couple of the eventsand trips but mostly I have been carrying out the work quietly and very much enjoying it. I’ve lost count of the plane journeys taken, countries visited and extraordinary people that I have worked with and met but it was a simple service earlier this month that might just be the one that remains in my memory for the longest.
Back in February 2018 I concluded that I had failed to develop a decent workflow for the iPad or iPhone and that if I had the time I’d come back and continue with the quest. Since then I’ve occasionally used versions of my previous workflow and have dabbled with new options as they have come to my attention. Some six and a half years later I bring good news if you shoot with Canon and don’t mind paying for useful applications on subscription.
With the help of Canon and Adobe I think that I have now got a usable and developing workflow for importing, editing, captioning and transmitting images from my iPhone. All of this is currently only possible on my phone because my iPad is a bit out of date and cannot load one of the key applications. Apple announced a new version of the iPad Mini this week which prompted me to post this update.
Let’s talk about what has changed to make me so positive about what’s now possible:
Every photographer and every artist you will ever meet has opinions about composition. A mere thirty-eight years into my career and some forty-six years after picking up a decent camera for the first time I have some too.
The other day I was involved in a very interesting conversation that was partly triggered by the recent portrait of King Charles III by Jonathan Yeo. The man that I had photographed and with whom I was chatting had a wonderful knowledge of painted and photographic portraits going back hundreds of years and we discussed what used to be included in portraits for symbolic reasons and what we now exclude from them for aesthetic ones. I’m sure that it has been around for years and has been claimed by many others but I came up with a phrase that sums up my approach to composing my work…
Less is more… until it isn’t.
In almost all creative pursuits end results that appear to be simple have an elegance and a beauty that appeals to most people without them necessarily knowing (or caring) why. To create something complex that has impact takes a very different and very real skill.
I’ve called this post “that brief” because I will never forget an email that came to me from a regular client who simply gave me a name, address, date and time and the words “go do your thing”. That was pretty flattering – they trusted me and were comfortable with how I had worked for them before. I’ll never forget that brief but most of the time I think that I’d prefer a bit more to go on.
Every photograph that I have ever taken was dictated by things that can be controlled and things that can’t. The client’s brief is something that should be able to be negotiated and should always be realistic. In the “contact” section on my main website I say the following:
Commissioning a professional photographer can be a daunting business. My philosophy has always been to make it as painless and as uncomplicated as possible. I believe that this is best achieved by a proper dialogue between photographer and client. We both want the same thing – a set of pictures that achieve and even exceed their purpose. In my experience, the better defined that purpose is, the easier it is to get the photographs that the client needs.
When this was shot this was my favourite type of catchlight. The shoot through translucent umbrella partnered with an oblong light panel to reflect a bit of light back in. I have changed my mind a hundred times since then.
“What is your favourite light modifier?” A question from a photographer who has followed my blogs over the last twenty-plus years got me thinking. Spoiler alert – I probably don’t have a favourite but I do have a few that I use all of the time.
First things first, let’s define “light modifier”. As part of their explanation of modifier Wikipedia describes it as the following:
Tools or accessories employed in photography and videography to shape, control, or direct light emitted from a light source. These modifiers serve to alter the quality, direction, and intensity of light, thereby enabling photographers and videographers to achieve specific effects or moods in their images. Light modifiers come in various categories and types, each with its own unique characteristics and applications.
Seems simple enough but when you start to examine those different categories and types life can get pretty confusing. Thinking about it I realised just how many different soft boxes, umbrellas, reflectors, dishes and domes I own. In fact, the inventory doesn’t even end there because there are so many sub-sets and shapes that it could all get the tiniest bit confusing for me if I hadn’t used each and every one of them so often over the last forty or so years. The fact that I have sold a few here and there and thrown and given so many more just adds to my knowledge of what does and doesn’t work for me and the work that I do – which in itself changes over time.
Not the original note to self but I have added it to a lens wrap for old time’s sake
A few days ago I was at an event in Manchester run by Canon UK. While I was chatting with one of the many talented young photographers that they had invited I remembered something about my early career that I am pretty sure helped me more than I could have known at the time.
In the later 1980s and early 1990s I had a light grey Domke F1X camera bag. I loved that bag and I loved working from it. I also loved that every time I lifted the top flap there were two words written there with a marker pen:
Juxtapose
Exaggerate
They were written there because the legendary photographer Terence Donovan gave a talk at my college in either 1985 or 1986. When asked by one of my classmates about taking better pictures, he explained that by juxtaposing our subjects with backgrounds, secondary subjects and other compositional elements we could give our pictures a depth that told stories more effectively. By exaggerating things such as light, angles, perspective or even the contents of our images we could, again, tell those stories in different and possibly better ways. I scribbled down those two words in my almost brand new Filofax, underlining both multiple times.
A little over five years ago I bought a new compact camera. I like compact cameras and I’ve never been a great lover of using my phone as my walk-about medium for taking pictures. Spoiler alert: I prefer the control that you have with a camera rather than having to jump through hoops to get the same from a mobile. I wrote about the compact on this blog and it was a Canon Powershot G7X MkII. To save you from reading that post (unless you want to) my main conclusion was:
The bottom line is that this is a truly capable, highly affordable and genuinely compact compact digital camera. A while ago I wrote that using a different compact camera just made me smile and I’m starting to develop a grin when using this new one too. That’s a good sign and I’m pretty sure that it will lead to some pictures that will make me smile too.
Glenda Jackson, Labour Party Prospective Parliamentary Candidate. 25 September 1991. Photo: Neil Turner
On the day that an image library licensed one of my historic pictures for just a little under $6 to a well known publisher for use in print and on-line in perpetuity I have been thinking about the value of photography.
We all take pictures on our phones on a daily basis. It’s easy, it’s somewhere between cheap and free and because of that very few of us truly value many pictures. We all have sentimental and meaningful photographs that we have taken and those that have been shot of and with us but do they even have a monetary value? Rarely.
The ability of pictures to influence and even directly alter our mood or play with our aesthetic sensibilities and emotional states is inarguable. It should be those things that make the images that we produce, view and consume on an industrial scale that that give them their true value. I’ve made a living, a pretty decent living, for almost thirty-seven years from photography and I have been lucky enough to find clients (and an employer) who largely understand what the right pictures are actually worth. I’ve been commissioned to shoot many interesting, funny, sad, dramatic, terrifying and downright mundane things and I hope that it is my ability to produce the most eye-catching, informative and memorable images from them that has a real value.
Neil Turner Photographer 