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Johnny Ball portrait – the “contact sheet”

Johnny Ball was always on television when I was growing up. He was a wonderful performer who gave a very human face to science and mathematics and made some otherwise difficult and dull concepts a lot easier and a lot more fun. These days he seems to be better known as Zoe Ball’s Dad.

©Neil Turner/TSL. January 2008, Berkshire

In much the same way that the Vic Reeves set was shot this final edit of 18 images that were submitted are all landscape. The TES magazine had a set layout by this time for these interviews with interesting and famous people about their time at school. The shoot took place in the back garden of Mr Ball’s house in and around various structures that he himself had designed and built. It was one of the most relaxed shoots that I did for the magazine and, although I was only there for half an hour, I think we got a really good variety of images from it.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses. Lumedyne Signature series flash and a 23″x24″ Chimera soft box.

Michael Rosen portrait – the “contact sheet”

This set of portraits was shot in a London park and the graffiti covered walls were the exterior of a closed outdoor swimming pool.

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 2004, London

Several of the portraits in my portfolio were shot for the same “My Best Teacher” feature in the TES “Friday Magazine” when I was working at the newspaper. For quite a while the format was fixed and so every single frame was shot as a landscape and every photographed used was selected because it coped with the gutter or split across a double page spread.

I submitted a selection of fifteen to the Picture Editor but, quite frankly, there were about sixty pictures that could have made the cut because Michael was such a brilliant subject and such an easy person to work with. This job was featured a few days ago as one of my Folio Photos and you can read a little more there. The whole job was shot on two lenses and two cameras. The bodies were both 4.7 Mp Canon EOS1Ds and the three lenses were 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L IS. I also used a Canon 1.4x Extender on some frames and they were either available light or used a Lumedyne Signature series flash kit with a Chimera soft box.

Case studies on my website

When I went freelance again I decided to add a few case studies on my website so that prospective clients could see the kind of work that I do in greeter detail than they could on my folio pages. It’s going to be time to post some new ones soon and the first to be retired will be the oldest one: a case study about a mews feature shot for the TES in Finland.

The Brief:

Go go to Helsinki for two days with a reporter and try to establish why the Finnish education system consistently comes top of the European leagues for pupil achievement by interviewing various politicians, educators and educationalists and by visiting as many schools and institutions as we could.

Delivery:

This assignment was shot whilst I was a staff photographer working for the TES and my brief was to shoot some pictures to accompany this major feature but also to gather as much stock imagery for future stories relating to Finland and Scandinavia as possible. The final edit was over 200 images and was delivered in stages during and immediately after the trip.

See the rest here

Folio photo #13: Michael Rosen, London, 2004

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 2004, London

Michael Rosen is a poet, author, broadcaster and all round brilliant bloke. I spent a good hour shooting a whole range of pictures of him at a park near his home in East London. I have photographed him about five times in total and it is always a joy to spend time with him. I have also been interviewed by him for his BBC Radio 4 programme about words and etymology. We did a special about photographer slang. This set of pictures is ripe for a future “contact sheet” too.

Geek moment: Canon EOS1D with Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS lens.

Having an eye for detail

The choice between taking the same photograph as everyone else and standing back and getting something different becomes a matter of survival when you work on a weekly newspaper and the other five photographers around you will be publishing the next morning. Even if that weren’t the dilemma of every photo-call I go to, I like to think that as a photographer I am an individual. It’s a pretty useful mindset to sign up to, no matter how much or little photography you do.

Photo: NEIL TURNER. ©TSL. 04/09/2000. TES news.

This photograph of an elephant’s eye is a classic example of taking a mental step back from the herd and shooting something different. It is also an advertisement for having more than one camera with different lenses on. There were five other photographers at the job. The story was about this young Indian elephant who paints pictures, and about how he was being used to launch an environmental art competition for schoolchildren. We were all trying to make the same picture of the elephant, three kids, some paint and an easel. The composition was looking messy, and there were just too many elements in it. We all had 16-35 lenses on and were getting nowhere. I was getting nowhere faster than the other five who would all go to press that night leaving me with two more days during which the story could easily get scrapped without a strong image. My second camera had my 70-200 on it and I grabbed it, zoomed in and the picture almost took itself. Strong, arresting, different and wide open for headline writers to do their thing. Just about every base covered. I shot some of a paint brush in the elephant’s trunk too, but this was the picture chosen.

When an image is competing for space on a newspaper page it has to stand out. The enlightened editors at our papers allow images to arouse the reader’s interest and don’t insist that photographs tell the whole story all of the time. This approach works on every level, from the family album through e-mailed postcards to published images. Getting in close works.

See also: MINDSET FOR NEWS PHOTOGRAPHERS

Possibly the oddest picture I ever took…

©Neil Turner/TSL | London | January 2006

The story was simple: we were doing an anonymous interview with a man who needed to remain unidentifiable for legal reasons and we had to shoot a picture of him at a time and a place that wouldn’t give his identity away. It seemed to be important that it was actually him in the picture and that became obvious when I had to shoot a proper portrait at the same time just in case the court case was decided and we needed a proper picture of him to go with a future follow-up article. Still with me?

The reporter arranged that I meet the subject at a London tube station and to get around the problems of finding someone whose name you don’t know and who you don’t have a picture of I always describe myself and what I’m likely to be carrying and wearing because a) I’m probably going to be there first and b) I’m probably going to be easier to spot (being big and carrying a lot of kit).

The venue turned out to be quite close to where he works and we decided that if any of his colleagues happened to spot us the cover story was that we were doing a fashion vox-pop on what the well-dressed office worker was wearing that season. The cloak and dagger details just kept multiplying.

I decided to go with a silhouette (you can read my thoughts on them here) and just for good measure I added an extra twist with a bit of motion blur too. The result was quite striking if bafflingly anonymous!

The technique is pretty simple. It was a dull winter’s morning in the city and we found a under cover area. I used a Lumedyne flash kit to light the brick pillar and silhouetted the subject against it. Without the flash, he would still have been a shadowy outline but so would the pillar and the picture would have been pointless.

The light that was coming from either side of the pillar was OK but it wasn’t plentiful and so I decided to give it a bit of movement blur by zooming the lens whilst the shutter was open. I ended up with an exposure of 1/8th of a second at f13 on 200 ISO using a Canon EOS1D MkII with a Canon 16-35 f2.8L lens triggering the flash with a pair of Pocket Wizards. Zooming during an exposure as relatively short as 1/8th of a second means that you have to have quite a few attempts to get it right and it also pays to tell the subject what you are doing if you don’t want them to think that you are a lunatic!

In the end I was very happy with this genuinely odd picture. I had arrived at the assignment with almost no idea what I was going to do and pretty much made it up as I went along. That’s why I love my job…

Vic Reeves portrait – the “contact sheet”

No sooner had I posted the folio photo of comedian Vic Reeves than I received an email asking to see more of the set. I have all of my work from that period backed up and catalogued and so it was really easy to lay my cursor on them. How to display them was less obvious. WordPress has plenty of gallery and slide show options but I wanted something a bit more “old school”  something like a contact sheet.

©Neil Turner/TSL | May 2006

The final edit of 18 images that were submitted. This job was slightly unusual for me because there are no upright images – everything was landscape because the magazine double page had already been laid out with the copy written, headline in place and the designer was just waiting for my pictures to be slotted in and sent to the plate makers. I have always had a soft spot for frame 004 but the page went with a slight crop of 015. I actually shot about 80 frames on the job but I’m afraid that even I don’t keep everything.

If this page gets some “likes” and positive comments I will see if I can find the time to do a few more things in a similar vein.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses. Lumedyne Signature series flash and a 23″x24″ Chimera soft box.

Fun picture: stray apostrophes, London.

When the news broke that UK booksellers Waterstone’s were going to drop the apostrophe from their logo to “make things simpler” the story was greeted with a mix of horror, outrage and cynicism. I was part of the cynical camp: what better way to get your company on the news than to pull a stunt like that? Leak a story that you might be about to do something and then sit back and watch it go viral and, more importantly, go viral amongst the very people who would be your core market. It was either brilliant, fortunate or (the least likely in my view) a genuine story.

©Neil Turner/TSL | London | October 2003

I was reminded of the last time that I was involved in a “stray apostrophe” outrage story. Back in 2003, yet another report on the use of punctuation in grammar singled out signs and posters for special criticism and so I was asked to go and find some examples. For a city reputed to have “thousands” of examples I struggled and it wasn’t until I was in the second hour of driving around looking that I finally found this gem on a secondhand video, DVD and CD shop near King’s Cross. The shop was on a one way system with almost no chance of stopping and very little parking nearby but I was desperate and so I went around again, found a parking meter and shot some pictures of the sign. The cafe next door was also the perfect place to have a quick coffee and send my pictures. Job done.