work

Monochrome and me

I was asked by a good client of mine to have a look at a set of black and white photographs that a new photographer had shot for them. They quite liked them but couldn’t see why they weren’t enthused by them because they fitted the brief. My answer was that if they had been in colour they’d have been seriously dull but that in black and white they were elevated to mediocre because black and white has impact. I tried to find the words to say that for monochrome to work really well you needed the light to contribute to the finished picture in an even more compelling way than it has to for good colour images. That wasn’t to say that great light doesn’t make for great colour pictures – far from it – but by this time my explanation was foundering and I was starting to sound less than coherent. At that point I cut my losses and simply said “to sum up, the light isn’t very interesting and without colour all you have is light and shade”. Wow… nailed it right at the end!

I drove home thinking about my own long and chequered history with shooting black and white: from the first frames I ever shot as a young kid through the exercises in light and shade, focal length and depth of field and movement that I did as a student to the hundreds of rolls I shot as an emerging professional photographer I have never been all that pleased with my ability to consistently shoot interesting black and white images  – ones that I didn’t privately think would look better in colour.

  • Photographic heresy alert – I’m a better photographer in colour and so are 90% of my fellow photographers.
  • Photographic jealousy alert – I envy those who can just “see” in terms of black, white and shades of grey
  • Photographic honesty alert – I have decided to do something about it, 27+ years into my professional career

Thinking long and hard about monochrome and me has been an interesting experience. I’ve found myself examining the way images look through the viewfinder and asking whether the picture I’m about to take relies on colour, light, both or neither. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a clipboard or a mental checklist to hand – it’s just a momentary thought that pops up a few times on each job. I’m definitely making progress. I’ve been shooting a lot of events during the Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival over the last three weeks and on more than one occasion I knew that some of my pictures were destined to be monochrome, better in black and white.

©Neil Turner, September 2013. The vesry first frame I shot during the Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival 2013 - a man reading the programme a few minutes before it all started.

©Neil Turner, September 2013. The very first frame I shot during the Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival 2013 – a man reading the programme a few minutes before it all started.

©Neil Turner, October 2013. Mark Kermode playing bass with The Dodge Brothers at the Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival

©Neil Turner, October 2013. Mark Kermode playing bass with The Dodge Brothers at the Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival

©Neil Turner, September 2013. Violinist Jack Maguire warming up in his makeshift dressing room

©Neil Turner, September 2013. Violinist Jack Maguire warming up in his makeshift dressing room

It isn’t that I’ve never shot anything good in black and white it’s just that most of the time I wasn’t ‘seeing’ without colour. The market for black and white isn’t huge right now anyway and I haven’t had to develop myself in that direction. The funny thing is that it is the explosion of social media and sites like Instagram and EyeEm that have made me experiment more and, more importantly, it has been my love affair with the Fujifilm X20 that has pushed me into shooting pictures that bear little resemblance to the suff that I do for work – often monochrome fits that bill rather well.

Monochrome and Me… it’s been a long and weird relationship. I like to think that it is maturing nicely and that it is now entering something of a golden era. There’s still no money in it but that isn’t really the point.

©Neil Turner, September 2013. Pensioners walking out of the Pleasure Gardens, Bournemouth

©Neil Turner, September 2013. Pensioners walking out of the Pleasure Gardens, Bournemouth

Cool watchmakers
©Neil Turner, July 2013. Alex Brown and Ian Elliott of Elliott Brown.

©Neil Turner, July 2013. Alex Brown and Ian Elliott of Elliott Brown.

I promised to share new work as and when I could and to add a bit of technical detail whilst doing so. This two person portrait shot on a sweltering July day in Dorset for a leading UK business magazine is a great example of the kind of picture I get asked to shoot. The story was a simple one about a new business partnership designing, making and selling very high class mens’ watches.

There was a limited amount of time for the interview, the pictures and a short video grab and so when I got my slot the two subjects, the reporter and the Picture Editor all jumped into my car and we headed about three quarters of a mile from the company offices to shoot on some open heathland because the style of picture I was being asked for needed an expanse of deep blue sky. We couldn’t shoot at the offices because there just too many tall building around and I had to rely on some local knowledge to find the right spot.

The location was far from perfect because I would have liked a decent amount of shade to put my two subjects in. That wasn’t going to be easy and so I had the reporter holding a large black reflector aloft to give me some artificial shade. There was only the slightest breeze but that was enough to force me into something of a ‘plan B’ which was to move into the shade of some tall bushes about fifty yards away. The downside of this was to lose the unbroken blue sky from behind my subjects (you can see some scrubby heath behind them in the bottom of the frame) but it did allow me to balance the flash (single Elinchrom Ranger Quadra with a 32″ x 24″ soft box) with the sky without the subjects being in direct sunshine themselves. Free from his reflector holding duties, the reporter was happy to hold onto the lighting stand to make sure that it didn’t blow over. No matter how light the breeze, soft boxes act like sails!

I have described shooting from the shade a couple of times before and the basic principle is an easy one: the subject is in deep shade and only lit by the flash whereas the rest of the scene is metered normally and the skill comes from balancing the two halves of the exposure. In practice on a bright and sunny day this almost always means the ambient exposure is going to be 1/200th of a second on 200 ISO at somewhere between f16 and f22. All you then need to do is to get enough power out of your flash to balance that. This sometimes means that you have to lose your light modifier (soft box/umbrella etc) if you don’t have a lot of power and almost always means moving the flash quite close to the subject if you want to keep the light modifier in place. Compromise… I’ve used that word once or twice before too. The camera was a Canon EOS5D MkII and the lens was a Canon 24-70 f2.8L.

The two guys in the photograph make some very cool watches. It’s a new business by the name of Elliott Brown and their first collection goes on sale about now.

©Neil Turner, July 2103

©Neil Turner, July 2103

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.

Smash Up!

The caption that goes with these photos simply says “Badminton England takes to the streets to celebrate ‘Smash Up!’ a new way to play in schools, featuring music and text message breaks.” The client , Badminton England, asked me to go along and get a range of stills at a video shoot which would be the basis for a campaign to promote “Smash Up!” The idea was simple: take a few of the best young badminton players in the country to a skate park in east London and get them to hang out, play a few rallies and generally have fun.

This presents a couple of challenges that a lot of working photographers would be familiar with:

  • Fitting shooting stills around a video crew who have limited time and a lot to do
  • Taking pictures that can be used for promotional materials and not just interesting and creative ones

Experience really helps here but so do people skills and it took me a few minutes to work out who was who and what my best options were. There were a lot of skateboarders and BMX riders at the park and they were dressed much the same as the very young video crew. The folks from Badminton England were a bit easier to spot and my plan quickly evolved into one of keeping out of the way when they were shooting the wider video shots and then to get stuck back into the general image grabbing when the video guys were reviewing their work or setting up their next shots.

Very near the beginning of the morning they were shooting some sequences with two of the young badminton stars and three cameras and so I needed to be out of the way. Next to the skatepark is a railway arch with some decent graffiti and so I went with one of the other players and a BMX rider with my lights to see what we could get.

©Neil Turner, August 2013. Young badminton champion and BMX rider in the railway arches.

©Neil Turner, August 2013. Young badminton champion and BMX rider in the railway arches.

And this is one of the frames selected by Badmiton England to be released with the video. Reasonably simply lit with a 24″ x32″ soft box on an Elinchrom Ranger Quadra from the right hand side of the picture, the player stands as if she is about to receive a serve whilst the BMX rider who was lit by a second Elinchrom Ranger Quadra with no diffusion messed around in the background. We shot versions of this with both of them in action but this was the better shot for the purposes of publicity. There was almost no ambient light in the tunnel and so the whole shot is lit by the the two flash heads (running from a single pack). The camera was a Canon EOS5D MkII with a 16-35 f2.8L lens at 1/125th of a second f9 on 200 ISO.

© Neil Turner, August 2013. Rally taking place next to the skatepark bowl.

© Neil Turner, August 2013. Rally taking place next to the skatepark bowl.

Most of the morning was spent shooting action as it happened – either staged by the video crew or as it really happened. It was a case of hanging around with three cameras each with a different lens (16-35, 24-70 and 70-200 f2.8L series Canon lenses) and making pictures. The whole shoot was around two hours and I sent the client just over 90 pictures – 70 of which were these grabbed shots and the other 20+ were staged and lit images.

© Neil Turner. August 2013. Messing about at the end of the shoot.

© Neil Turner. August 2013. Messing about at the end of the shoot.

As fun shoots go, this was right up there. A client happy for me to shoot what I wanted and a video crew who understood that we both had a job to do under interesting conditions and with a very strict time limit. The campaign goes live very soon and I hope that badminton gets the boost in young players that it deserves.

images 34,59 or 78

Charity PR portrait
©Neil Turner, July 2013. The Victoria Education Centre & Sports College

©Neil Turner, July 2013. The Victoria Education Centre & Sports College

Back in July I was commissioned by Livability to go to the Victoria Education Centre & Sports College to shoot a range of pictures for their in-house publications, websites and PR work. I’d worked on news events a couple of times with the charity before but this was the first time I was shooting this kind of job for them. The afternoon started in the horticulture department where a team of professionals and volunteers works with students and clients growing a range of plants for use around the college and for sale to visitors and the public.

The young man in this picture volunteered himself for this picture and he chose which of the several hundred plants he wanted to be photographed with which made my job rather easy. I found this railing in the woods behind the greenhouses and poly-tunnels (where the work gets done) for the portrait. I chose it because I liked the way that the light was coming through the mass of green foliage, because the rail was sturdy and a great height and because I could see the scope for lighting the foreground in balance with the lovely ambient light in the background.

The photograph that you see here is completely ‘as shot’ with no cropping, no white balance adjustments and only a very simple tweak of the shadows in Adobe Camera RAW from the Canon CR2 files from an EOS5D MkII.

I knew that I wanted to shoot with a relatively shallow depth of field so that the background was sufficiently blurred. I was able to get back a decent distance and so I decided to shoot on my 70-200 f2.8L IS Canon lens and to light the subject with my Elinchrom Ranger Quadra with a shoot-through white 100cm umbrella. Once I had everything set up:

  • The flash was just under two metres away from the subject
  • About 30 degrees from the axis of the lens and ten degrees above his eye-line
  • A quick Custom white balance using the Lastolite EzyBalance grey card
  • It quickly became obvious that shooting at f2.8 or even f4 wasn’t really going to work – I wanted to have the whole plant in focus as well as my subject and then have the whole background as far out of focus as possible.
  • I shot a few test frames and looked at them on the LCD screen before opting for a third of a stop wider than f8 (f7.1 according to the EXIF data) and a balancing shutter speed of 1/80th on 200 ISO.

This gave me the lighting balance that I wanted and the depth of field was as good a compromise as I could get. These shoots are always a mass of compromises and that’s one of the biggest lessons that I try to teach when doing seminars and workshops.

I often get asked about the time it takes to shoot these kinds of pictures and the answer in this case was from the moment I unzipped the bag with the light stands in to shooting the first meaningful frame was just over four minutes. I then had another three minutes before other people were demanding the subject’s attention and it took a final three minutes to pack the kit away again – a nice round ten minutes from start to finish. That’s nowhere near being a record but it was comfortable for me and the subject and it really helps that the client liked the results.

Back when I first started to use portable lighting in this way I used to have a Lumedyne head already on a stand in a sling bag with a pack already connected and used a simple umbrella with Pocket Wizard triggers. I used to boast that my kit was not only lightweight but well planned and that I could be ready to shoot in under forty-five seconds from the time I touched the zip on the bag. When I did seminars and talks I’d even get people to time me getting the kit out and regularly beat forty-seconds. These days I’m a bit slower and I carry a bit more kit (I’m also a fair bit older by the way) and so a three minute set-up and break-down time is pretty good (three and a half minutes if there’s a softbox involved). It means that even if your subject is watching you, they don’t really get the chance to get bored waiting.

The rest of the day was fun and the other highlights were the students playing Boccia (a sport that I hadn’t encountered before last year’s Paralympics), one young woman showing off her excellent art and spending time with younger students and their rather docile rabbits.

Social media … is it working yet?

A little over two years ago I wrote a blog post about social networking where I asked largely rhetorical questions about whether there was a point to it, which platforms were the right ones and whether or not it made any difference. About three weeks ago I wrote on Twitter that I’d spent half a day integrating my social media – getting my Tweets to show up on LinkedIn and getting my photos posted on EyeEm to show up on Facebook and then getting every single platform to react to one another when I wanted them to. Not only did I set all of that up on the desktop and laptop computers but I also did it on the iPad and the iPhone. Boy, am I ever integrated now!

This morning I added a post on a LinkedIn group about explaining to reluctant businesses why they should be using social media:

“The simplest way to explain it to the doubters is to point to the utter stupidity of NOT using social media in the world in which we currently live. You didn’t need it ten years ago and theres’ a chance it might be past it’s best in ten years time but right here, right now it is the method chosen by a massive proportion of the population for making choices, doing research and engaging with business.”

So… is social media working yet? You wouldn’t expect me to give a clear and unequivocal answer to a direct question that I posed myself would you? Of course not – except there is an answer that I have given a few times when talking about this:

“It isn’t not working”.

How do I explain that? I’d be worried if social media was having a negative effect on my business and career but I have been really careful to avoid the stupidity of posting banal, overly-personal or critical observations on any platform unless they were going to have a positive effect – which is almost never. On a few closed Facebook groups I might be a little less guarded and in private messages I might use the odd bit of cussing but on the whole my social media profiles have been kept clean. That has meant very little controversy, relatively few spikes in activity and a lower profile than I might have gained had I been happy to upset a number of people. That’s all OK but why would I imply that all wasn’t well with social media? Well, the hours spent plugging away haven’t been directly rewarded with more business and it would be hard to quantify the actual benefits of getting out there in the worlds of social media. So in the two years since I first blogged about this I have got a lot better at doing it, gained a few jobs here and there and generally promoted myself positively. I’m going to keep on doing it because I genuinely believe that to avoid social media is a very bad thing.

The irony is that this blog is the one thing that I want people to see, read and interact with. That’s my strategy and that’s why I wanted to get the integration going – the other platforms are there to boost the blog and the blog is there to raise my profile. Whether or not that circle is vicious or virtuous is something only others can decide upon.

©Neil Turner, May 2013. First seen on EyeEm - there are so many ways to promote your business these days!

©Neil Turner, May 2013. First seen on EyeEm – there are so many ways to promote your business these days!

Anniversaries
©TSL. July 2004. Nine years ago this week Canon delivered my first EOS1D MkII. I shot for the first time with it on a job where staff were using acupuncture in a Sussex school to help boys with their behaviour.

©TSL. July 2004. Nine years ago this week Canon delivered my first EOS1D MkII. I shot for the first time with it on a job where staff were using acupuncture in a Sussex school to help boys with their behaviour.

I woke up this morning to the headline news that it was Nelson Mandela’s 95th birthday. It is also my next-door-neighbour’s 50th birthday and my nephew’s partner is having her birthday celebration this evening as well. I started to think about things that had happened on (or near) this day over time in my life and I came up with a few:

  • 18th July 2012: I was working as a member of the Photo Operations team at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games. I have written before about just how exciting, tiring, inspiring and memorable it was but with the first anniversary athletics event about to happen those memories are coming back as strongly as ever.
  • 18th July 2011: I was coming to the end of the very first cycle of the NCTJ Photojournalism course that I help to teach at Up To Speed in Bournemouth whilst shooting a wide range of both editorial and corporate commissions. That was also an exciting time but for very different reasons.
  • 18th July 2010: I was shooting mostly corporate photography and things were starting to go quiet for the summer months. Really quiet as it turned out.
  • 18th July 2008: I was still employed as a staff photographer at TSL and I spent the day shooting a lovely set of pictures at a school in Hertfordshire that had spent a small fortune making their new building and the grounds as environmentally friendly as possible. I was still unaware that two weeks later I’d be called into a meeting with the Editor and the HR Director to be told that they were making me redundant.
  • 18th July 2003: I had been using my Canon ESO1D cameras for over a year and I was in love. The CRW file format was something of a revaluation and I really enjoyed using it.
  • 18th July 1999: http://www.dg28.com had just been born – I started to publish samples of my work and a few bits of technique advice on my own website for the first time.
  • 18th July 1997: I was starting to experiment with borrowed and rented digital cameras before getting my own DCS520 in late October 1998.
  • 18th July 1995: A month previously I got my own scanner (Kodak RFS2035) and Mac laptop (Powerbook 160c) with Photoshop (v2.5) and began the long journey to digitisation
  • 18th July 1994: Having become a staff photographer at The Times Supplements in January 1994 I had just swapped from shooting with Nikon F4s to Canon EOS1n cameras.
  • 18th July 1993: Life was fun, fast and decidedly unpredictable. One day I would be shooting for a newspaper and the next it was a glossy magazine. On the third day it might be a PR job and you could lay money down that every week would be different from the last. I was shooting with a mixture of Nikon F4, F801 and FM2 cameras as well as having Leica M6s. Some days it would be black and white and some days it would be colour transparency. Some days I’d be using lights and others required nothing more than a fast lens.
  • 18th July 1983: I was working for Jessops when they only had five shops, offered great deals and great service and everyone knew the Jessop family. I was using Olympus OM1n cameras at the time and had acquired an awesome 35mm f2 Zuiko lens.

My career has (so far) failed to stand still for more than a couple of years. Technology changes, my employment status changes and I change. All of that adds up to excitement and that triggers a feeling of keeping it fresh. My style constantly evolves and the client base also evolves. A lot of my colleagues spend a lot of time bemoaning the disappearance of the ‘good old days’ and I am also prone to a bit of nostalgia but we are where we are and just under five years ago I wrote this line:

“It’s an exciting time to be a photographer with new challenges being presented every month and I am on record as saying that I am a very lucky man to be doing what I do.”

Today I’m shooting a nice mixture of editorial and corporate work as well as doing some teaching, writing and consultancy. I spend a lot more time on the beach and I’m constantly looking forward to the next exciting development… whatever that turns out to be!

Some answers to your questions

A couple of weeks ago I invited people to ask me questions about anything. The idea was to generate some ideas for blog posts because some of the best ones that I have written in the past have been initiated by good questions. I have kept a couple of the most inspiring back for longer answers (and let the questioners know) and I thought that I’d give some answers to some of the other questions now. So, in no particular order, here goes:

Q: Do you do one-to-one training with other photographers and would you be happy to do that in my hometown of Oxford?

A: Yes I do and yes I’d be happy travel if the travel costs were covered. It doesn’t come particularly cheaply but I hope that people who book training with me get an awful lot out of a session. Anyone who has read my blog lately will know that we did a new small group workshop at Up To Speed in Bournemouth a couple of weeks ago. It was a wonderful day with five great people attending the session. You can get in touch with me if you are interested in one-to-one or small group sessions and we can take it from there.

Q: How has you move from London affected your work? Have you tried to hide it from London clients? Do you get any sense that you are looked down upon at all by London-based clients, or have you found benefits in being an out of town photographer?

A: I have always had a home in Dorset, even when I was working as a staff photographer in London. In that respect nothing has changed – I still have bases in both London and Bournemouth. What is different is that I have tried very hard to change the balance of the work that I do so that I can spend a lot more time at home in Bournemouth. My clients all know that I have two bases and one or two have definitely chosen not to pick up the phone for simple jobs that they perceive would involve me popping up to London for a quick portrait or a one hour PR job. The truth is that the vast majority of my photographic work comes from London clients and a big percentage of that is still in London. That’s absolutely fine: I stay up in town as and when I need to. On balance the work that comes from London is better paid, more interesting and more plentiful. The photographic market down here is a lot smaller and there is a relatively large number of photographers chasing that small pool of work. There are one or two photographers down here that will work for stupidly low fees and I am not about to get into a race to the bottom with them. All of that adds-up to the status quo where I am working all over the country for mostly London or overseas clients and less than 5% of my work is locally sourced. The benefits of living down here are self-evident: it’s a lovely place, I was born here and have lots of family and friends here. When I’m not shooting I am able to do the other stuff (like blogging) at home. The drawbacks are all about perception and I spend a lot of time on the phone trying to change negative perceptions.

Q: Best portable light modifier for location work (for the Quadras)? I’m toying with the idea of getting a Rotalux Deep Octa (100cm I think it would be) as an upgrade to my current brolley, grid or small Easybox softbox, and wondered what you have found to be the ‘best’ portable light modifier for your Quadras?

A: Quantify best… For me, it’s all about the compromise between quality of light and ease/speed of use. I have a huge soft spot for the Chimera ProII soft box that I’ve owned for well over ten years. It’s a 32″ x 24″ rectangular box with an inner diffuser that fits onto the Quadra via the Elinchrom soft box adapter and a suitable speed ring. I can assemble and attach it in under a minute (30 seconds if I’m on form) and it rotates on the speed ring allowing either portrait or landscape orientation. I also use a shoot through translucent umbrella. Many years ago I acquired a Lastolite umbrella box which is as quick as an umbrella to put up, almost as cheap as an umbrella and yet give a really nice even efficient light in the way that a soft box does. It has been in and out of my bag over the years as I get bored with doing things the same old way but I recently started to use it again and it finally broke. I have ordered a new one and when it comes I expect to get back to using the umbrella box for a while. I think that the important thing here is to have options and to know when and where to use each of them. I never, for example, use the translucent umbrella outdoors – too much loss of light. The Rotalux deep boxes are great but they are expensive and relatively cumbersome. I have never owned one but I’d like to.

Q: Hello. I own a 5D mark1, 24-105, 430ex2. I work with ambient light & tripod mostly because I’m scared of flash. This is OK for landscapes/architecture etc but not for people shots in low light. I have tried E-TTL in P & Green mode but am always disappointed. Would you have safe manual settings you could share with me for low light people shots?

A: Shooting people in low light requires quite a lot of practice to get great results and shooting direct flash whilst keeping the flash unit in the hot shoe will make getting better results really hard. The ‘secret’ to great flash photography is how you modify the light – bouncing it off of walls, reflectors or almost any surface that will direct the light onto the subject from a pleasing angle is what makes the picture. Shooting modes are a secondary issue. I know people who use E-TTL and some of the auto modes who get great results because they know how to bounce or modify the light. You should experiment with bouncing and you shouldn’t be afraid to try a wide range of surfaces. I wrote about how to approach bouncing a few months ago and that is a good starting point. As far as settings go, you need to think about how much power you have in your flash (not that much) and so you need to use apertures like f4 or f5.6 to conserve the flash power. If you are new to shooting in manual modes you might consider using aperture priority and deliberately setting the ambient exposure at -1 or -2 stops. Alternatively you can set everything manually and use the screen on the back of the camera to judge whether the exposure is a good balance or not. Introducing flash as a secondary light source is scary and you need to take some baby steps. Changing absolutely everything at once is a tough call because you will probably take longer to work out what works for you. If you have some money I’d suggest that you get a small light stand, a white umbrella and a either a Canon ST-E2 remote trigger or a pair of off-camera radio triggers so that you can get the flash out of the hot shoe and open up a world of creative options. After that, many of my old technique samples will make a lot more sense.

Q: The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act… How do we fight against the potential legislation this has paved the way for?

A: There are lots of things that we can all do. The first is to get into a dialogue with your Member of Parliament. Ask them to oppose the orphan works proposals as they stand and point out that the work that the Intellectual Property Office has done so far has left photographers and other creators angry and feeling as if the IPO has an agenda which doesn’t include us or our livelihoods. Your MP will almost inevitably write back quoting a generic reply from Lord Younger pointing out that the stripping of metadata is illegal (which is circumvented by so many websites terms & conditions) and that the right to attribution of your work already exists. This is a red-herring of a response and needs to be challenged if you don’t want you MP to think that they have fulfilled their obligation to you. Next, you should keep the discussion up within your professional and social circles. Don’t let the subject drift into the background. The good news is that there are plenty of people working on this as we speak. Stop43, EPUK, the NUJ, the British Photographic Council, the major agencies and The BPPA amongst others are going to meetings with people that matter and keeping up the pressure on the IPO and the legislators. The Stop 43 website is a useful one to bookmark if you want to keep up to date. Finally it is important that we all try to influence those websites (Flickr, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook etc) whose websites strip metadata to change their ways. You can avoid adding images to them or actively use their competitors who don’t strip stuff and you can try to persuade your friends to follow suit. It’s going to be a tough battle and we need as many people to join-up as possible so your efforts in helping others to get involved will be vital.

Thanks to everyone who has sent me questions so far. Please keep them coming…