styles

Brutal architecture and portraits

I have an admission to make… I love shooting portraits on cloudy days around concrete buildings with urban skylines. There, I’ve said it. As a photographer I find brutal architecture and grey winter days both challenging and creatively stimulating. Combine the two and you have a blank canvas for interesting images – as long as you have a cooperative subject.

©Neil Turner, February 2009

This portrait is of an academic working at a central London research and teaching institute. The building is a classic modern brutal concrete one and I have shot pictures there dozens of times over the years. I have never managed to get access to the roof before and I have always imagined that it would be a great place to shoot, with decent views of the surrounding skyline.

It was a windy and dark February day and so I wanted to find a spot out of the wind. The roof features a couple of large concrete towers which contain lift machinery and other services and the southerly one has a short walkway running through it. On a sunny day this would be perfect shade in which to place your subject. On this day it was equally perfect shelter from the wind and probable rain. There are also railings which are perfect for attaching lighting stands to so that they don’t blow away.

The picture above wasn’t the first that I shot. I had tried quite a few angles to get the London skyline in but the wind forced a retreat into the covered walkway. I decided that being out of the wind gave me the chance to shoot with a 24″ x 36″ (60cm x 90cm) Chimera soft box on my Lumedyne flash head. The softbox is old and has both the inner and outer diffusers permanently sewn in and I wanted to make use of it’s softness so I placed it as close to the subject as possible. In this frame it is about three feet (90cm) from his face off at about a 45 degree angle to the left of the camera with the bottom of the softbox about level with his chin.

I always try to start with an available light reading for the sky which came out at about 1/250th of a second at f5.6 on 200 ISO. I wanted the sky to be darker and so I decided to shoot at f8 instead. This meant that I had to adjust the power output on the flash to give me the aperture that I wanted and that meant 1/4 power (50 watt/seconds). The first test shot told me that I needed some separation between his hair and the dirty grey concrete and so I set a second flash (Vivitar 285 HV) on a stand directly behind him on 1/16th power to give him a fairly aggressive hair/rim light. This isn’t a technique that I use very often but in this case it made the difference between a muddy image and one with some real edge. The combination of the big soft light and the hard hair light gives the portrait a particular mood which compliments the sky and the architecture.

Like many of the techniques that I use, this one needs to be used sparingly so that it has maximum effect when it does get used.

There are, apparently, two types of news photographers…

News photography isn’t a huge industry. It employs a few thousand people here in the UK and it’s amazing how many of those know each other, or at least know of each other. That having been said, it’s also amazing that so few people can be divided into so many small pockets. Sports photographers, news photographers, local newspaper photographers and features photographers all come to mind as sub-divisions of the business. Whilst talking to a couple of colleagues the other day I was made aware of another division. A division that you seem to fall on one side or the other of according to the way you see and shoot pictures.

John Redwood MP – back in the day. ©Neil Turner, January 1994

Apparently I’m a “light and shader” whilst my two colleagues referred to themselves as “tight and brights”. They told me that the division here in the UK was broadly along the lines of tabloid versus broadsheet, mass market versus serious. This explanation was both amusing and, in a lot of ways, pleasing. I like to think of myself as a more serious photographer – one whose use of light and shade is central to their style but I was a bit worried that they seemed to be writing off what they do at the same time.

Make no mistake, these are two top class photographers, each with a staff job on one of the two biggest selling newspapers in the country. They provide their picture editors with the right images day in and day out that satisfy the constraints of the designs and the tastes of the readers. Both are also intelligent and articulate journalists and so I did start to wonder whether they were just taking the mickey out of me – implying that I take myself and my work too serioiusly.

The chances are that it is a little of everything. I suspect that they and the other tight and brighters like to differentiate themselves from the mainstream and I also suspect that they envy the small amount of extra creative freedom that the light and shaders seem to get. It also makes you realise how hard the job of wire service and agency photographers must be – satisfying two very distinct markets at the same time and having to have an eye for different types of images on the same job.

No doubt there are other divisions between photographers. I can think of a few other ways of dividing us up: I once heard one of my photographic heroes talking about the “that will do gang” – referring to an attitude amongst some professionals whereby they will do enough to satisfy their brief without going the extra yards let alone the extra mile in order to produce the best work possible that he contended was what made doing the job so satisfying and what made hime rush to get out of bed almost every working day.

I know what he means. I found myself getting excited about shooting an interesting portrait a week or so ago – excited enough that it would be slightly uncool to admit it. I love taking pictures and I love to make use of light and shade. I’ve got to shoot some tight and bright images later this week and I will think of my two tabloid colleagues when I do.

The last refuge of the desperate photographer

Originally posted in January 2009, this piece is one of the ‘new’ technique pieces that I published around that time.

The use of the silhouette as a deliberate ploy in photography was once branded as “the last refuge of the desperate photographer” – a label that I have always contested. I have used the technique many times when I have not been allowed to identify the subject of the picture (usually children or vulnerable adults whose identity needs to be concealed) but I also use it when there is a need for an image with real impact. Creating a silhouette with flash isn’t difficult, using the technique sparingly can be.

Once you have made the decision to try a silhouette using flash, there are a few basics that you need to consider:

  • The subject must have little or no available light on them
  • You must have a background that can be lit easily
  • If the background has important detail you need enough depth of field to keep both subject and background sharp
  • The subject to be silhouetted should be in sharp focus and have a distinct outline

Once the basics are in place, then there are creative decisions to be made such as composition, placement of flash. This first example is of a member of my family who spends time at the gym so that he can show the world his physique. We were chatting one day and he said that he wanted something striking for the top of his Facebook page. I showed him a couple of ideas using silhouettes and we shot this…

©Neil Turner, October 2008

I was shooting with a Canon EOS1D MkII and a Canon 24-70 f2.8L lens. I wasn’t able to move myself around too much without shifting furniture and would have preferred to be shooting nearer the telephoto end of the range to deliberately remove any clutter. As it was, the lens was at 34mm (add the 1.3x factor and you get a 44.2 full frame equivalent field of view) and I cropped the image to the “letterbox” shape.

In this case I used the subject himself to mask the flash which was a Canon 550ex speedlight triggered in manual mode by a Canon ST-E2 transmitter. The first few frames had the background (a wall in my dining room) pretty evenly lit, which was a bit boring. The background is unimportant in this image and so the depth of field doesn’t matter too much. The exposure was 1/90th of a second at f13 on 200 ISO. I don’t recall why the exposure was 1/90th instead of 1/250th to utterly eliminate any available light but in a normal situation I would have gone for 1/250th.

I have some grid attachments for my Lumedyne flash heads and so I taped one of those over the flash to give me more of a circular pool of light. I aimed the flash slightly upwards so that I achieved the effect that you see above. It’s a very simple image that works for the intended purpose very well.

The second example is from a story I shot for a magazine about two brothers who work together at a school in London. I had shot hundreds of images of the buildings and a lot of portraits of the elder brother who is the boss. I had a lot of more conventional portraits of the two of them together as well so I decided to try this two person silhouette which shows the special cladding used throughout the central core of the building.

©Neil Turner, September 2008

The cladding itself has a yellow colour and so I decided to place a Lumedyne flash unit directly behind the seat that they were sitting on. It was very close to the wall, which give far steeper fall off of the light and a more dramatic outline. I find that the best place to focus for a silhouette is on the edge of the subject rather than the normal eye or face. I was shooting with a 16-35 f2.8L lens on a Canon EOS1D MkII at the wide end of the scale and the exposure here was 1/250th at f9.5. The flash was dialed down to 1/8th power and at that aperture I had easily enough depth of field to get the brothers both sharp and to have easily enough detail in the background.

Magazines seem to like this kind of image if they have a spread to fill or they want something a bit different for the contents page. You don’t always have to use flash to create silhouettes but the conditions required in nature to get a good one aren’t easy to arrange! Low level winter sunshine here in the UK is good and of course dusk and dawn without cloud cover anywhere in the world are great. I have also used illuminated signs and billboards when they are bright enough but for the sheer degree of simplicity and control, these flash-lit examples are hard to beat.