story

The joy of cataloguing…

Whilst watching television a few days ago there was an interview with James Corden the actor. They had a couple of pictures of him as a younger man and he talked about working with Alan Bennett on The History Boys. That triggered a thought: I’m sure that I photographed the two of them together when they were doing an interview about the play and the film.

©Neil Turner/TSL. October 2006, London

I have always catalogued my pictures and so I decided to put my IPTC skills to the test and search my system using the two words ‘Corden’ and ‘Bennett’. My archive is currently run using Phase One Media Pro (the software that produces the lovely contact sheets used on this blog) and so I opened the catalogue window, typed in the two words and waited. I waited for less than two seconds for the first thumbnail to pop up and probably less that five for the search to be completed. I could see four JPEGs and four Canon CR2 files – that’s pretty efficient. The catalogue told me that the JPEGs were on a mounted drive and that the RAW files were on an external drive that wasn’t mounted. One double click later I had opened the chosen JPEG in Photoshop and resized it.

Metadata is magic when it works. It works best when you, as the photographer, are a bit anal about adding captions and keywords to every single picture that you save. I have been pretty anal about captions for as long as I can remember – even adding tiny typed labels to the mounts on 35mm slides and stickers on the backs of prints. It’s easy if you can add them in batches and there’s plenty of software options out there to handle the task. My chosen application for adding metadata is Photo Mechanic – I love it to bits!

So there we go. Mission accomplished. I tried to find a fairly random image and I found it in seconds. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to be able do that?

Choice adviser – the “contact sheet”

This is another contact sheet that doesn’t quite fit in with my previous postings. The lady in the portraits is a “Choice Adviser” whose job it is to work with children and their parents to help them choose which secondary schools are best for them and to help them make their applications to their chosen schools. Part of her job is to hold workshops and the pictures were taken outside the most beautiful of the buildings where she does those workshops.

©Neil Turner/TSL. December 2006, Kent.

The portraits were done quite late in the afternoon on a cold and miserable December day back in 2006. I chose to shoot with quite a lot of light and there were two Lumedyne packs and heads used on most of these images balancing the flash with the ambient light. My brief was just to shoot nice portraits and I had no idea what kind of shape or even where in the newspaper they would go and so I had to give the Picture Editor as much choice as I could.

I wouldn’t normally choose to shoot someone in a black coat against a black door but on this occasion I really like the effect. For my money, making good portraits with people who are shy and who are unused to being photographed on cold, damp December days is a lot tougher than working with celebrities.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 85 f1.2L lenses. Mixture of available light with two Lumedyne Signature series flashes, a small soft box and a 70cm shoot through umbrella.

Darts legend teaches mathematics… using a dartboard

©Neil Turner/TSL. June 2008, Kent.

Bobby George is a showman. He drives a flash car, he wears more rings than I could lift and he has made a nice life for himself playing professional darts. He went to Langley Park School for Boys in Beckenham , Kent in June 2008 to talk to GCSE maths students about how much he has gained from good mental arithmetic. He kept an audience of teenaged boys, most of whom weren’t even born when his career was at its height, engaged and even managed to get most of them to realise that maths, probability and mental agility were actually ‘quite cool’.

Merger talks – the “contact sheet”

Until now all of the ‘contact sheets’ that I have blogged have been from portrait assignments. Whilst looking back through some old pictures that haven’t seen the light of day in many years I came across this set of images. I was commissioned to do a sort of ‘fly-on-the-wall’ coverage of a Board meeting of the combined Westminster and Kingsway College governors.

©Neil Turner/TSL. July 2000, London.

The idea was that two medium sized central London colleges were to merge and become a single large institution on multiple sites and a series of meetings like this one were taking place to make important decisions about almost every aspect of the way that the new Westminster Kingsway College would function. This particular meeting was about the logo. My task was to get a whole series of black and white images (even if they were shot on a digital camera in colour) that could be used through a multiple page article about the merger once it was complete.

Moving around the room as quietly as possible, using no flash and getting a set of pictures that represented the meeting was my goal and it was actually a fairly tense meeting, which made my job all the more difficult. In the end I left the meeting before I was asked to. It was only a matter of time before I got the “tap on the shoulder” anyway and I thought that I wasn’t going to get anything very different and a voluntary departure would be a good move.

The magazine actually ran nine pictures across three pages in the end and I was very keen to repeat the exercise. Sadly, it didn’t really happen in the same way again for many years.

Techie stuff: Kodak/Canon DCS520 cameras with Canon 17-35 f2.8, 28-70 f2.8 and 70-200 f2.8L lenses at 640 ISO and colour converted to black and white using the Kodak DCS Acquire software.

Ahmet Zappa – the “contact sheet”

Ahmet Zappa is the son of legendary rocker Frank Zappa and is an author who has written books for children. A resident of Los Angeles, he was photographed at the offices of his publishers, Penguin Books on The Strand in London. I was there at the same time as one other photographer and we played this weird “your go, my go” dance shooting portraits in turn in different parts of the beautiful building. He was more than happy to clown around – his PR team were less sure until we showed them what the pictures looked like on the LCD screens, at which point they became very happy indeed!

©Neil Turner/TSL. London, August 2006.

The magazine went for frame 032 but I have always preferred 027. It has been in and out of my folio over the last three years and I think that it will get another outing soon.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses. Some available light but mostly with a Lumedyne Signature series flash and a 24″ x 32″ Chimera soft box. There is also quite a bit of ambient light in the pictures.

Folio photo #14: Children on a bug hunt, south London, May 1999

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 1999, south London

This picture from a story about children from a local primary school going on a “bug hunt” in Nunhead Cemetery was shot for a special supplement to the TES about the environment. The outdoor lesson was led by Richard ‘Bugman’ Jones, a professional entomologist who undertook a residency at the school. Like a lot of my favourite pictures it doesn’t tell the whole story but it is a ‘moment’ that hopefully makes you want to know more.

I had switched to shooting most of my work digitally the previous year but the Picture Editor working on this section was still keen that we shoot pictures for these glossy extra sections on transparency film. I think that this was the last commission that I ever shot using a Leica M6. The wider shots were definitely on the Leica but I also shot some longer lens pictures using a Canon EOS5 and a fixed 85mm f.18 lens

Geek moment: Leica M6 with 35mm f2 Summicron and Fuji RDP100 transparency film.

William Atkinson portrait – the “contact sheet”

When I took these pictures in May 2008 it was only a month before William Atkinson was Knighted in the Queen’s birthday honours list. He had been the Head Teacher at The Phoenix High School in west London since 1995. I shot these portraits on the school’s “farm” which had been an unused area of land which has been brought into use as a community resource and outdoor classroom.

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 2008, London

His CV is long and distinguished and he is an impressive man. Shooting his portrait took patience because he had quite a bit to say about quite a few topics and, like so many head teachers I have photographed, he was constantly watching what was going on around us. This wasn’t the first time I had photographed him – I first shot pictures at Phoenix when he first arrived back in 1995 and the lovely thing was that he still had a copy of that magazine cover on his wall.

I shot 92 frames on this job and submitted a tight edit of 11 having previously trimmed the selection down to 18. Looking back through a lot of the portraits that I did between 2000 and 2008 it is amazing how often 18 was the number of frames that I kept. There has to be an explanation but I am afraid that I cannot think of 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.

Professor Paul Black portrait – the “contact sheet”

When I shot these portraits for the Times Educational Supplement in 2008, Paul Black was Emeritus Professor of Science Education at King’s College London. He started his career as a physicist before teaching physics and then moving into the world of educational research. He wrote a policy document for the then Conservative Government in 1988 and was widely regarded as one of the country’s leading experts on all form of assessment.

©Neil Turner/TSL. April 2008, London

The photographs were taken in his office at King’s College and he was a wonderful humble man. Like a lot of people who have never really been the subject of media attention he was bemused, amused and slightly confused by the process of having his portrait taken. I very much enjoyed taking his picture – partly because he was such a nice man and partly because I was using a Canon 85mm f1.2L lens for the very first time.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 85 f1.2L lenses. Mostly available light but some with Lumedyne Signature series flash and a 70cm shoot through umbrella.