Philippa Gregory – the contact sheet

© Neil Turner/TSL. Philippa Gregory, October 2004

I haven’t done one of these contact sheets for a long time and I thought that this set was an interesting example. I submitted this set of sixteen pictures and they are all landscape in orientation. That’s because the slot they were shot for was across two pages and always a squarish landscape image. As I said in the previous post, the whole thing was done in ten minutes on a dull Autumn (fall) day in Hyde Park. That time included setting up and breaking down the Lumedyne light and chatting to the subject. Note that she is clutching her novel in the opening frame. I find that it’s always a good idea to do that if their publicist insists so that you can then go on to get the pictures that will actually get used.

People in the news bringing back memories

©Neil Turner/TSL. Hilary Mantel, January 2007.

I seem to have a very strong memory for where, when and why I photographed people in the past. When names come up in the news I often think “ah yeah I shot them at such and such a place”. Hilary Mantel, double Booker Prize winning author has been in the news a lot this week. She gave a lecture where she commented on the Duchess of Cambridge and in comparing her to the late Princess Diana (the Mother-in-Law she never knew) called her “precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture.” The lecture was long and talked of many things but the reactions against Hilary Mantel’s views were both harsh and often mistaken.

This made me wonder if my view of the situation and the criticism is in any way tainted by having met her, by having admired her books and by actually listening to what she said when I watched the extended highlights of the lecture on YouTube. Of course I cannot really be sure but my memory of meeting Ms Mantel is pretty strong. I can remember her apartment and I can remember her hospitality. I can remember her reluctance to have her picture taken and having spent a lot of time chatting before ever getting a camera out of its bag. I can even remember getting to the location with a lot of time to spare and I can even remember the chat that I had with a chap walking his dog along the street where I parked up and waited in the chilly January air.

Without having much to say, I thought that I’d share my favourite frame from the job. It was shot in colour like the rest of the set but I felt the need to convert it to black and white and submitted two versions to the Picture Editor. I wasn’t surprised when they ran it in colour but I have a very strong memory of being mightily disappointed.

For the many techies who read my blog, it was shot on a Canon EOS1D MkII with a Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS lens at 1/250th of a second at f4.5 on 100 ISO. It was lit with a Lumedyne flash with a shoot-through translucent white umbrella deliberately set up to lose as much of the ambient light as possible.

The Copyright Fight

It’s not very often that something comes up that threatens your livelihood in quite such a stark way as the current piece of legislation going through the UK Parliament. My colleague Eddie Mulholland says it far better than I could so please follow this link, read what he has to say and let your MP know that they need to remove the copyright clauses from the bill before our industry is damaged (again).

The Copyright Fight.

A quick update…

Here I am on another morning train to London Waterloo from Bournemouth and tomorrow marks my fourth Monday morning working at London 2012. Training, preparations, more training and extra preparations would sum up what we have been up to so far. The Main Press Centre on the Olympic Park was the first area to open officially and we have had a few photographers passing through already.

The scale of the operation is impressive and the amount of planning that has gone into getting to this stage is staggering. I’m already excited about the next two and a half months and the nearer we get to the action starting, I can only imagine that the excitement will keep growing.

I’m glad that I decided to get involved…

Three months off from the day job.

It’s Monday morning and I’m sitting on the 06:25 train from Bournemouth to Waterloo for the first of many such trips over the next three months. I have decided to put the ‘day job’ aside and I’ve accepted a contract working in the Main Press Centre at the 2012 London Olympic Games.

When I’ve told people, the mixture of reactions has been very amusing. Ranging from the most common “how exciting!” via a liberal sprinkling of “are you mad?” to the rather predictable “can you get me some tickets?” The answers are, in turn: “I hope so”, “ask me in September” and “NO!”

Like most press photographers, I greeted the news that London was going to host the 2012 Olympics with a mixture of anticipation, horror and fascination. What would it mean for non-sports specialists like me? Would it mean anything beyond endless building works and some even-heavier-than-normal traffic? Until March of this year my only contact with the Games was to photograph a group of children whose school is right next to the Stratford campus in the Spring of 2008. Beyond that, I was expecting to have next to nothing to do with the biggest event to come to the capital in many years.

So what exactly will I be doing for the next 13 weeks? My job title says “Team Leader, Photographers Workroom, Main Press Centre” which is a posh way of saying that I will be there setting up and helping to run the vast work area at the main Olympic site set aside for visiting sports and press photographers. Customer service with a smile and a lot of empathy for the needs and deadlines of the 1800 or so accredited photographers that will be passing through the Olympic and Paralympic Games between now and the middle of September.

I’m excited – albeit in a slightly sluggish way having had to get up at 05:15. I am apprehensive too: this is a new departure for me in a career in photography that started way back in the mid 1980s. I’m genuinely looking forward to the experience and I hope, where possible, to say a few words every now and then about how things are going. If you are working at London 2012 yourself – please come and say “hello”. I expect that you’ll recognize me – I’ll be the one wearing the uniform, spinning plates, juggling press-packs and looking as if they know what they are doing.

My train is approaching London Waterloo and I’ve got to stick the laptop back into the bag for now.

Grumpy old photographers’ charter

I do a lot of seminar and teaching work these days and one of my most popular presentations is about professionalism. The talk is aimed at new entrants to the profession but it seems to go down well with photographers who have been around a while as well. I have even delivered the same talk to a group of lawyers because actually replacing the word ‘photographer’ with ‘lawyer’ brings a lot of the meaning around to the central idea that, in many ways, professionalism is the same no matter what you do for a living.

©Neil Turner. March 2009, Bournemouth Beach

The final part of the talk is a bit of a dig at myself and my peers. Those of us who have been in the job for a long time and who might just be getting a little complacent about things. I call this part of the talk “The five worst habits of those of us who should know better”:

1. Harking back to a golden age that may, or may not, have existed

It’s a simple idea really – we all look back with slightly misty eyes at the time a few years ago when things were good and before something new came along to spoil everything. Take your pick from the use of colour in newspapers, the whole move to digital, the adoption of multimedia by newspaper websites and several other developments in the industry. The truth is that when I was just starting out there were a few photographers who complained about the arrival of 35mm film and the loss of their beloved Rolleiflex cameras and even one or two who bemoaned the passing of half plate cameras and dark slides with sheet film. I reckon that every photographer has a ‘golden age’ that they look back at and that you can calculate when that was for each of us using a simple formula which compares how long the photographer has been working with when they got their first big front page and divide it all by the first major change in the industry that they went through. There never was a true golden age was there?

2. Forgetting why we came into the job in the first place

Easy to do this… most of us had a desire to tell stories, create arresting and beautiful pictures and to make the world a better place with our photography. Very few of us did it for the money, not many of us did it so that we could play with ever more expensive toys and only a tiny number came into it so that they could work unsocial hours and have to chase clients for money the whole time. If you take a step back and think about your original motivation and it isn’t there any more you really need to make your mind up about whether this is still the business that you want to be in. The older I get, the more I feel the need to shoot pictures that I want to shoot just to keep myself sane and sharp.

3. Failing to keep up with new business practices

“I’ve always done it that way, why should I change now?” is a common lament from photographers who are in trouble of getting it wrong. From the way you buy and use equipment to the way you store your archive and from the way you word your invoices to the way you put your portfolio together should be the subjects of constant review and possible change. Technology affects every single aspect of who we are and what we do and anyone who decides to stop keeping themselves up-to-date with what is happening is consigning themselves to a parallel dimension where they may get some work but where that might  be a temporary state on the road to going out of business.

4. Throwing money and effort into the latest thing

Exactly the opposite of the last problem really. Keeping abreast of developments and knowing where the market is a good idea whereas automatically jumping on every new idea, fad or fashion is not. So many new developments turn out to be ideas that don’t stand the test of time and too many of us have invested too much time and money chasing them. The worst way to do this is to assume that somebody younger and hipper than you automatically knows what to do – that, in my experience, is rarely the case. There’s always a middle-aged geek who you can ask…

5. Letting professionalism slip

Another thing that is far too easy to do. I know that I’ve done it – mainly through over-confidence. You have to remember the maxim that “professionalism is everything we do, everything we say and everything we produce” in our working lives. You can get too close to clients, you can cut corners in your workflow and you can rely too much on automated systems. This is far from a full list but it illustrates the potential pitfalls when it comes to losing our professional edge.

Being a professional photographer is a fulfilling and interesting way to make a living but we all need to remember that it is a profession and not a lucrative hobby. I’ve been wracking my brains to come up with a clever and punchy pay-off line for this blog post but I’ve struggled. I’ll just content myself with some advice: when things are feeling tough and not all all like the ‘old days’ just remember the five worst habits of those of us who should know better and if that doesn’t help… get some help!