Saving an author’s life

This is not a claim to any act of great heroism, it’s not even a particularly accurate heading but I’ve been wanting to tell more ‘stories behind the pictures’ for quite a while and I’ve decided to give them all pretty eye-catching headlines. This portrait of the author Philippa Gregory has a story behind it that I have enjoyed telling many times over the years since I took it in 2004.

©Neil Turner/TSL. Philippa Gergory, October 2004.

I was shooting a lot of portraits of authors and academics at the time and I was given the job of meeting Philippa Gregory who had just written “The Other Boleyn Girl” and shooting her portrait to accompany an  interview in one of the magazines that I worked for. No problem, run of the mill? Well… yes and no. The location that I was given was rapidly becoming an issue.

Let me explain: in the three or four years leading up to this particular job I had been sent to shoot three portraits of authors at a particular hotel in central London favoured by one or two publishers as a place for them to stay if they needed a hotel or as a great place to hire a private room for interviews and photography when they were on the publicity trail promoting new books. Once again, pretty run of the mill stuff. Except. Except the three previous subjects that I had shot at this particular venue had all died within a few months of having their picture taken by me. I’m not superstitious. I live at No13 and I couldn’t care less about black cats crossing my path. I have a healthy respect for ladders and I try to avoid blindly walking under them – that’s a mixture of common sense and the fact that my Father once dropped some turpentine on me when he was painting our house when I was about six or seven years old. Superstitious I am not but I did have a 100% record of people that I photographed at this hotel being dead pretty shortly after having their picture taken.

This presented me with a few issues.

1. I didn’t know how well I would be able to put the idea of another ex-author on my hands when shooting if I decided to ignore what was rapidly becoming a curse.
2. If I wanted to go elsewhere, how was I going to explain that idea in mid-October to the author and her publicist?
3. Where else could I go and how far should I be away from the hotel to avoid worrying?
4. What would the reporter who was doing the interview think?

Driving to the location I decided to try my best to get the subject away from the hotel. Hyde Park was only a couple of hundred yards away and  it shouldn’t be too tough to get her to cross four lanes of fast moving traffic in heels just to have her picture taken under the trees. Well, I arrived nice and early and I spoke to the publicist about atmosphere and about getting a picture that nobody else was going to get. I laid on what little charm I have and we agreed that a short walk (using the underpass rather than running across the road) was going to be OK. I got in before the interview, Philippa Gregory seemed happy to get some fresh air and we had ten productive minutes under some trees shooting a pleasant set of portraits. I even delivered her safely back to the hotel-of-doom in time for the interviewer to do her bit.

Now I’m not claiming to have actually saved the author’s life as such. I don’t even believe in curses or even in extended coincidence and the real truth is that all three of the authors that died were in their late 80s and 90s when I took their pictures. I was telling this story to an author’s agent the other day and she asked me what I would do if I was sent back to the same hotel to photograph an elderly author who was, for argument’s sake, wheelchair bound and it was a day when it was bitterly cold? Tough question…

For those amongst you who always want to know about gear and settings:

• Canon EOS1D MkII with a 70-200 f2.8L IS lens at 145mm 
• 1/22nd of a second at f5.6 on 100 ISO
• Lumedyne Signature Series flash kit with 32″x24″ Chimera Softbox

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.

On test: Vanguard Heralder 38 camera bag

When somebody offers me the chance to try out a new camera bag that is winning awards all over the place, I normally jump at that chance. An email from the people behind the Vanguard range of bags arrived in my inbox a few weeks ago and the Heralder 38 arrived at my home shortly afterwards. I have tried so many rucksack bags and been disappointed with the compromises that you have to make in order to get portability and so I keep coming back to shoulder bags – despite the best advice of people who know about back pain.

The Vanguard Heralder 38 camera kit + laptop shoulder bag.

Lets put this bag into some sort of context: I have used a Lowe Pro Stealth 650 as my main “carry everything” shoulder bag for many years now and I am used to it, quite like it and would buy the same again to replace it if Lowe Pro hadn’t done what they seem to love doing – which is to take a perfectly good design and “improve” it. The old Stealth 650 that I have is a good bag but the new Stealth 650 is really annoying!

Anyway, back to the review: The way that I test things is to use them in my everyday work and so the amount of testing depends entirely on what I’m up to at any given time. The last couple of weeks have been relatively quiet but I have had enough days out with this bag to have made a lot of important decisions about it. From my own experience of reading reviews, I know that a lot of people skip straight to the end and because of that there will be a “conclusions” section at the bottom.

Most people want their camera bags to be smaller than they need to be, to weigh less than the total of everything that they want to jam in, have super-easy access, look great and to be a joy to carry for several hours. I guess that’s why nobody has ever found the perfect bag. It’s impossible to make that bag on a commercial level because we all have subtly different needs and so the word compromise rears it’s head AGAIN!

What can you get in the bag?

If this bag is going to become my everyday carry everything bag then it needs to swallow my standard amount of kit: Two Canon EOS5D MkII bodies, 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses, two 580exII flash units and all of the bits, pieces and accessories that go to support that kit in the field. I also need to put either a 15.4″ Apple MacBook Pro or an 11″ MacBook Air plus gadgets in from time to time. The good news is that everything fits in and the bonus is that I can just fit the 70-200 standing up with its lens hood in place (I hate having to remove and reverse hoods every time you put a lens away).

The Heralder 38 showing how my standard kit is laid out when loaded into it.

The bag itself doesn’t have too many pockets and hiding places for anything other than relatively small or flat items such as pens (x3), memory cards (x4) notebooks, passes and business cards. What it does have is a removable pouch which holds a couple of spare batteries for the camera, a couple of spare sets of AAs for the flash units and an electronic release for the camera. Because of this pouch and the excellent use of space within the main compartment of the bag the Heralder 38 passes this test rather comfortably – even with a laptop and related accessories on board.

Ease of Access

That less than perfect clip…

Shoulder bags are nearly always nicer to work from that rucksacks or rolling cases. I prefer my bags to have a simple method of closing them whilst working and a more secure method for securing the contents when I am simply travelling. The combination of a zip around the whole lid and a single snap-shut clip on this bag meets that requirement too. I suspect that the designers of this model have looked at the old LowePro Stealth bags and decided that they were on to something before designing their own similar solution.

It’s at this point that I found my first ‘issue’ with the Heralder 38. I like to be able to close the bag in work mode one handed. Every Domke and LowePro I have ever owned has the ability to do this in common and the Vanguard looks as if this wouldn’t be a problem either. So far I have struggled like mad with the plastic snap-shut clip fitted to this bag and I cannot work out why. I cannot seem to line it up as easily as the more square ones on my LowePro or on the Think Tank roller that now carries my lights everywhere. I’m still trying to master this clip and failing.

Beyond that niggle, getting kit in and out of the bag whilst moving is as easy as it has ever been on a bag that I’ve used. If they could source a less trendy looking clip I’d be well on the way to proclaiming this bag a massive success.

Carrying the bag

This is where the Heralder 38 comes into its own. Somehow they have made this a superbly comfortable bag to carry. The strap is excellent and the shape of the back of the bag means that it sits on my hip incredibly well. Vanguard have gone some of the way to fooling me into thinking that I am carrying less dead weight than I actually am and that is a huge advantage for this bag when comparing it to the other bags of a similar size that I have owned and/or tried out. Put simply, this is an easy bag to carry – possibly the easiest I’ve ever used.

Extra features

All bags these days come with clips and straps that allow you to attach tripods, monopods and other large and unwieldy accessories. To be honest I never want to be in a position to have to do that and so the bits an pieces that came with this bag that allowed me to do that were removed (where possible) and put into a cupboard.

The bag features lots of handy labels…

What the bag does have (in common with my old LowePro) is a rain cover tucked away in the back of the bag that can be fitted to keep the contents drier than would otherwise be the case. We are in the middle of a spell of beautiful weather here in the south of England and so I haven’t had a chance to test the rain cover yet but I can tell you that it is fast to fit and easy to pack away again. The great news is that it is detachable too – which is a big tick from me. I have had other bags where the rain cover is permanently attached – which means that when it stops rainy you have to leave it out to dry or pack it away wet.

The bag comes with a very stylish luggage tag and an elasticated end pocket that fits a small bottle of water rather well. As someone who carries his bag on the left shoulder, the elasticated pocket is on the wrong end but that’s just a small niggle and not a deal-breaker!

Looks and construction

I guess that when you design a camera bag you have two choices: you either go down the “it’s a camera bag so it should look like one” route or go the other way and design something that looks like a normal holdall. This bag is squarely in the former camp – to the extent that it would be hard to imagine that it was anything else. The black water resistant materials are of a great quality and the plastic base appears to be pretty tough. The orange colour of the interior may be off-putting for some people and I’d prefer something 18% grey myself (like my old LowePro) but it has the advantage of being very visible from a distance and being the colours of The BPPA.

The quality of the stitching and the fabrics tells me that this bag should last a long time. If they put a better snap-shut clip on the bag I think that they will have the whole construction sorted.

Conclusions

This is a very good bag. It is OK to look at, swallows a lot of kit and is easy to work out of. It appears to be well made and the biggest selling point for me is that it is supremely comfortable to carry. The number of distributors for these bags seems to be growing and a quick search of the internet found the best price is as low as £124.98 at Amazon- which is good value for money as far as I’m concerned.

The Vanguard Heralder 38 in use.

So far I only have one real niggle: the snap-shut clip. Beyond that, for the first couple of days I thought that a couple of external pouches would be useful for when I have a few extra bits but I suspect that would alter the superb balance and usability of the bag rather than enhance it.

So that leads me to the big question: “Is this the best bag in its class that I have ever used?” The answer is very close… for portability and comfort of carrying the answer is a big yes. For ease of working is a marginal “no” BUT the bag that I would say beats this one has been modified by LowePro and the new version isn’t as pro’ friendly as the old one and so, if you needed to buy a shoulder bag to carry a decent amount of kit along with a laptop, I don’t know of anything that would beat the Vanguard Heralder 38. I haven’t found the camera bag equivalent of the holy grail yet but there is every chance that it is just a myth anyway.

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!

The best lens for portraits?

On a photographers’ forum last week there was a lot of discussion about the best lens for portraits. Can of worms opened. Mac vs PC or Nikon vs Canon style debate well and truly started.

I have written before about portrait lenses and I won’t bore you with repeating my previous post (if you missed it, catch up here) except to say that when people ask this question they normally mean headshots or mug shots where the subjects head and shoulders will fill most of the frame.

©Neil Turner, February 2012. Bournemouth.

This portrait of a local artist was shot using an 85mm f1.8 Canon lens wide open but what lens should you use for this kind of picture. The debate will rage and answers anywhere between 85mm and 135mm (all measured on full-frame cameras) will be given, supported, doubted and even ridiculed. Most arguments that don’t get broad agreement also don’t have a simple answer. Sure there’s something lovely about the feel of a portrait shot on an 85 but what about the degree to which you have to invade the subject’s ‘personal space’ to get the composition? What about those 85mm lenses where the close focus isn’t good enough to get that bit tighter still? With a 135mm lens the personal space issues largely go away and the close focus issues almost always go away too – but is the effect as nice? Can you ever include something of the environment in those pictures? Would you even want to?

The actual answer (as always) is that it depends on you, your technique and your own taste in pictures. A few weeks ago I was looking back at some corporate headshots that I had shot and I had to tell another photographer on the other side of the world how I had shot them so that he could replicate them so that when his pictures and my pictures were printed on the same page nobody (hopefully) could tell that two photographers were involved. One of the things I needed to give him was the focal length of the lens used so I got the pictures, went through the EXIF data and noted it all down. I had used a 70-200 f2.8L lens and so the actual focal length was between 120mm and 130mm.

I was a little surprised that it was that long and so I grabbed a folder of images that I keep on my hard drive of corporate portraits to show prospective clients some examples of what I have done in the past and looked through the EXIF on those. These were pictures that, by definition, I really like and it quickly transpired that the tighter compositions were all shot between 120mm and 150mm on the 70-200. Again, quite a surprise – I had always seen myself as an 85mm lens user!

Well, one thing led to another and I decided to do a quick ‘audit’ of all of my favourite environmental portraits to see what lenses I have favoured. This was less of a shock because in the folder of 120 of my favourites the widest lens used was 16mm (on a 1.3x crop body, so we’ll call that 21mm for the purposes of this exercise) and the longest was a 300mm (on a 1.6x crop body which becomes 480mm in this context). There was a lot of bunching in the 35-45mm area and some more around the 120-150 area but the spread of focal lengths was otherwise pretty even – which pleased me greatly because it confirmed what I always say to others;

“There is no such thing as THE perfect portrait lens”.

This exercise is a bit time-consuming but it could have a lot of uses in professional photography. For example, anyone used to zooms wanting to buy a couple of prime lenses should think about going through the exercise to help them decide which ones would suit their style. Anyone wanting to know what lenses to replace as a matter of priority in these cash-strapped times could also benefit from a focal length analysis. The reverse is also true – a photographer who wants to change the way they do stuff could see what they normally shoot with and deliberately avoid those focal lengths. The possibilities are endless once you start to think and we can all do with a bit of style analysis from time to time. How we choose and use lenses has always been a preoccupation of mine and this exercise has helped me to rationalise that.

Indeed why stop there? EXIF data is amazingly useful and so you could also do an aperture comparison. My quick one revealed that I shoot a surprisingly large amount of pictures using three apertures f2.8, f8 and f22. In my sample, those three apertures accounted for over 50% of my pictures. I’m not sure what to make of it but I will work it out one day.

©Neil Turner/TSL. January 2008, London. 173mm focal length on a 1.3x crop body = 225mm

What started out as a simple answer to a simple question somehow turned into statistical analysis. Many people would say that is the exact opposite (they might even use the word antithesis) of what we, as creative people, should be doing. I have a lot of sympathy for that argument but, in a world where there are tens of thousands of great photographers vying for work, every little advantage we can eek out for ourselves and every piece of information that we have to work with could just be worth it’s weight in fluorite glass.

Adobe Photoshop CS6 Beta

Like half of the photo geeks around the world, I have downloaded and started to play with the public beta version of Adobe’s latest version of Photoshop: CS6. This is a major revision of the software in terms of the interface which looks a lot more like Lightroom than ever before and is also a lot less “freestyle” than those used to versions such as CS3 and earlier would be familiar with. We now have a fixed window rather than the floating elements of previous versions and this will take quite a bit of time for me to get used to. It isn’t that I don’t like it, it’s just that it is a change.

Screen shot of the main window

 

To be honest, my main use of Photoshop is Adobe Camera RAW. I use it to convert the RAW files that I shoot into whatever file format the job requires, fine tuning the colours, composition and various other elements as I go. At first sight Camera RAW 7 is very little changed from Camera RAW 6xx that I use every day in Photoshop CS5. At least that’s what I thought until I used it in anger on a proper edit.

Screen shot of Adobe Camera RAW 7

 

If you look closely at the main adjustments palette to the right of the window, you suddenly see what the changes are and what they will mean for every day workflow. Gone are the labels such as Recovery, Fill-light and Brightness to be replaced with a set including Highlights, Shadows and Whites. So far, they seem to perform very similar functions when used on every day files but I have only edited two sets of pictures (neither of which have been “live” jobs) and so it may well be that I have missed something. Here are the two palettes side by side:

Adobe Camera RAW adjustments palettes from CS5 (ACR6) on the left and CS6 beta (ACR7) on the right.

 

I will continue to play with CS6 and ACR7 as long as the beta phase continues and I’m sure that I will come up with plenty more observations. I only use Photoshop as an optimisation tool and I don’t do any serious retouching or image manipulation with it so don’t expect an in-depth assessment of layers, filters and content aware fill from me – there are plenty of other photo geeks out there who will be able to blog about that kind of stuff!