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Old wrecks

Hackney's abandoned cars. Click for larger image. © D Tyler 2000.

Whilst searching for some ancient scans last week I popped an old, un-labeled CD into my computer and I found a series of images that I'd almost entirely forgotten: images I'd made soon after moving to Hackney focusing on wrecks of cars. When I first lived in Hackney, back at the turn of the century, one of the area's most characteristic features was it's wealth of abandoned cars. At the time you had to pay to have cars scrapped and so many were left on side roads to slowly fall apart or become magnets for more unwanted scrap. These cars, and those stolen and then torched by joyriders, kept the area looking edgy and deprived even as the first wave of neo-yuppies (like me) moved in, carrying with us the seeds of gentrification. Hackney is very different now, in some ways. There are fewer abandoned cars and more fixed-wheel bikes, fewer empty shops and more deli's, it's less edgy and deprived perhaps but still referencing edgy and deprived, ironically and with retro flair. Nevertheless for a big part of the population the last ten years evolution has meant nothing more than a greater range of things to feel excluded from. Hackney's underprivileged youth have yet to reap the benefits of the hipster influx and the two groups are suspicious if not hostile towards each other. The abandoned wrecks are off the streets now, but have they really gone away?

I might well never have remembered these images without accidentally finding them, which is a shame, not because I think they are particularly good, but because ten years on they form a historical record and serve as a reminder that photographing the ephemera of daily life can ground your recollections in interesting ways.

 

Flipping Ming, for real...

Ming Campbell on St. Andrews beach © D Tyler 2006

In the run-up to the Lib-Dem's leadership vote in 2006 I was asked to shoot some portraits of Menzies "Ming" Campbell that could be used to loosen his elder statesman image and show him in a more relaxed, informal mood. We did the shoot in-between his constituency duties in St. Andrews one cold morning in January and among the images that worked best was this shot of him walking on the beach. I've used the portrait in my portfolio on-and-off. I like the drama and the light and the fact that he's a well know figure shown in an unexpected context, not in a suit stalking the corridors of westminster. When I took the picture he was walking and I was keeping pace backwards while shooting with a Leica and a 35mm lens. It wasn't bright and I needed a fast shutter to avoid blurring from the movement so manually focusing at f2 or f2.8 meant a few of the shots were soft on his eyes but this one is pin-sharp, you can even see a tear forming from the bitterly cold wind.

I don't know whether the images were ever used by Ming's campaign, though he did win the election to leader. As far as I know they didn't appear in any media at the time so it was nice to have a request last week from the New Statesman magazine to use the image, I guess either Ming or the image or both have aged well.

As you can see the image got flipped to fit the page. It certainly wouldn't have worked in this layout un-flipped, his face would be in the gutter and the balance of the page would be way off. Sometimes you wonder why images get flipped, even resent it, but I have no complaints about this. It's interesting how we still recognize a face in mirror-image, I doubt more than a handful of people would notice the difference, if any. Interestingly Ming himself would be less likely than most to realize he's been flipped since we all recognize our mirror image more readily than a straight picture. I read once that it's good practice to show clients their portraits in mirror-image for approval for exactly this reason, does anyone do this I wonder?

Anyway, I think after 5 1/2 years "Ming on the beach" now holds my record for the longest gap between commission and first publication.

Glamour and the retouch

Marlene Dietrich by George Hurrell 1931.

With time to kill between jobs last week I went to the National Portrait Gallery to see the BP portrait award and also the Glamour of the Gods, which is a selection of photographs from the Kobal collection of hollywood portraits from the 1920's onwards. There's something wonderfully ethereal about photographs from this era, they have an almost powdery softness that always makes me think of a moth's wing. It's not just the soft-focus I don't think, it's the quality of light and the printing too. The new prints in the show, made from old negs, look immediately different, still gauzy but not so tactile. Photographers at this time were using magnificently massive cameras and alongside the portraits there are some fascinating pictures of the photographers in action.

Clarence Sinclair Bull photographing Clarke Gable and Vivien Leigh for Gone with the Wind, 1939
by Fred Parrish

There are images shot in natural light, or mostly natural light, like Elizabeth Taylor on the beach in a publicity still for "Suddenly last Summer", but most of the images are studio shots lit with incandescent lamps. In the shot above you can see the whole lighting rig more-or-less, I think the light on a stand close to us is the main light but there may be another out of frame, above Gable and Leigh is a spot which looks like it's acting as a kick light on their hair to separate them from the background, it maybe flooding onto the dress too. The little spot by the window over Gable's shoulder might both illuminate Leigh's face and highlight his jaw, or maybe it's another kick for his hair? I can't find the images this set-up produced to check what's doing what so it's a bit of a puzzle. This style of complex, dramatic lighting was exemplified by George Hurrell, who seemed to play fearlessly with shadows, often letting his subjects eyes fall into deep darkness or retouching harsh highlights to a near-metallic shine.

Since I'm always trying to improve my lighting I thought it would be interesting to try to replicate the '50's style portrait so I made some notes at the exhibition and looked through an old George Hurrell book for ideas. I didn't want to copy any image exactly so much as to get a feel for how the lights were positioned and where the shadows fell. I don't have models at hand so I used myself which also meant using a tethered set-up with my 5D and laptop so that I could sit and shoot simultaneously. I might blog about the tethering another time, it's cool to be able to do it. I shot using a monochrome picture style from the camera's menu but without the colour filter option.

For lights I used my Bowens kit but only the modeling lamps, set on proportional output so I could adjust them. I think that power-wise the modelling lamps are about the same as 1940's photographers would have had, close up they gave easily enough light for good exposures 5-6 stops down from full power. Using constant light meant that I could monitor the shadows and highlights and move my head accordingly. I had a main light with a small diffuser out front on one side and a silver reflector bouncing back to fill the shadow. Above me and over my shoulder there was a second light at the same power as my main light which gave a characteristic edge and some key highlights on my face.

I wasn't shy of retouching, since the look of those classic portraits is very worked. Hurrell would exaggerate his highlights using a soft graphite pencil on the negative plate, giving that alabaster shine and I kept dodging until I got somewhere close. I used a skin-retouching methodology that I've mentioned before (I think), it's from Joel Grimes' website and I like it because it allows a lot of control over how much detail you want and how much smoothing you apply. I also applied a film grain using the DxO labs FilmPack plugin and duotoned the final image for a slightly warm tone. Here it is:

Help, they airbrushed my face.

It looks wierdly like my dad. Looking again at the work from the show it's also a much more conservative image than most of them. In particular I've lit my eyes with a nice bright keylight whereas some of the most iconic images in the show leave deep shadows in the eyes. This composition is woefully pedestrian by comparison too, but in my defence, my model wasn't very cooperative. Lighting-wise I think it's nearly there, the Key, Bounce and Kick set-up delivers plenty of modelling. By the way you also get that contrasting gradation on the background where the lit side of the face is against the darker side by "feathering" the edge of the light so that it falls off, this works best when you light at right-angles to the camera view.

Here are some process pics that should enlarge if you click them:

Then I spied a bottle of theatrical blood on my desk (you never know when it might come in handy) and, well, this happened:

New Facebook profile picture perhaps?

Context is the key

Photo Op: Inside the Situation Room - WWD.com.

Photo-editors react to the Pete Souza image from the night Osama bin Laden was killed.

Doing the Corporate

Earlier this year I had a great little run of commissions for Serco's Corporate Responsibility Report. The work came more or less out of the blue, I got a phone call from an art director who'd seen my work at least a year before. Initially we talked about one shoot, then two and in the end I had three in the diary. If only that happened more often. These three jobs were great, not just because it's a financial boost to work at corporate rates for a few days but because they were challenging and interesting and most significantly they made me work to produce the strongest possible images. I had great art direction from Ian Dutnall at Sunday Publishing, who gave me a brief specific enough to let me know what I was aiming for and vague enough for me to feel I could approach the shoots in a documentary style. It's nice to have a brief that says "reportage" and means it.

The first shoot (above) was at the International Fire Training Centre in Darlington, run by Serco. I've added a set of images from that shoot to my website here. The other two were a day in the life of the London Cycle Hire scheme and a shoot with Serco's dive team at work in Devonport dockyard. All very elemental with the fire, water and, erm, pneumatic tyres is air right? I was really pleased to be given an excuse to shoot in the water again and I had a most excellent day with the dive team. We were initially scheduled to do the shoot in the Kyle of Lochalsh, which would have been glorious, but it wasn't to be. I borrowed a dry suit from one of the team and tried my best to look like a seasoned diver in front of the engineers we were working with but I don't think anybody was fooled when I managed to flip over in the water, flailed around like a cow on a lilo and had to be put right-side-up by the real diver.

On the line

The Guardian Weekend commissioned a series of portraits of people who work on the phone for a feature by Nicky Woolf. I shot the images over Christmas and it was just published last month. They asked for medium format, and film, which was nice, and the images looked really good in print. They haven't reproduced quite so well online but at least it means I can link to the article. Kaz (above) works on a phone-sex line from her home in Birmingham and Quentin (below) works for Great Guns, a tele-marketing company near Cambridge. I also photographed an NHS Direct nurse, a charity fund-raiser and a 999 operator. I'll put the set up on my website in due course.

I decided to light all the portraits so that I could isolate the subjects a bit when they surrounded by office clutter. Hopefully the images have a slightly posed feel because of this and that helps move them away from what could have looked more reportage than portrait, that and the square format. For most of the shots I used a Bowens mono-head with a brolly, but for the 999 operator I had less time and less space so I used a speedlight on the same stand with the same brolly. It's amazing how close to a studio light you can get with a speedlight. I think the secret is to use a radio trigger that's NOT TTL capable and set the flash output manually. That way you have to think about the speedlight like a studio flash and you can balance the light more accurately. Of course this works best when you can be close to your subject and so can the flash.

There was another shoot in the series but that was in India and for understandable reasons The Guardian got someone based there to do the job. Olivier Culmann shot a beautiful image of a call-centre technician in New Delhi that opened the piece. I was a little disappointed to miss out on the opening spread but I can see why his shot was chosen. It's also introduced me to his work, which is worth checking out, I especially like his "TV viewers" series.

Like a lot of the people who commented on the feature via the Guardian website I do get annoyed by cold-callers. Though I do quite like claiming to be my own greiving relative or an investigating officer from interpol or a hard-of-hearing conspiracy theorist.

Streets apart

Back in March I was commissioned by the Telegraph's 'Create' department, which works on advertorial projects, to shoot some images in India and Scotland for the International Day of Street Children. The event is supported by Aviva and organized by the Consortium for Street Children and the Telegraph's role was to produce content for web and print leading up the the event to raise awareness of the day and the work of the Consortium's partner NGOs running projects in the field.

There were a lot of people at the initial meeting and my first thought was that this could become a classic case of being pulled in too many directions but it didn't work out like that. There were concerns about how to apply child protection and informed consent policies developed mainly for the UK to the situations we were likely to find in India but these were addressed. My brief was distilled down to: Get the strongest images you can - always a good motivator.

In Delhi we met Deepchand, one of the city's estimated 100,000 street children. He and his gang became the focus of a lot of my work and the writer, Gill Martin, did brilliant work interviewing the kids, gently encouraging and allowing them to tell us about their lives. We had barely enough time to scratch the surface so it's lucky we found some children we could spend some time with and get to know, rather than shooting from the hip and never getting beyond the generalities.

To photograph Deepchand and his friends I had to walk barely 200m from the hotel where we were staying. In those 200 meters I went from a luxurious bedroom to a patch of earth under a tree, from clean sheets to an old mail sack. The contrast was uncomfortable of course, it should be, and infuriating, and deeply unjust.

I went to find the group early one morning so that I could photograph their work 'rag-picking', looking for rubbish that could be sold to scrap merchants. After about 3 hours of trailing around the area the group met up near a tea-seller who was packing up his stall. In return for carrying his heavy pots and pans home the kids negotiated a meagre breakfast, sweet tea and a small biscuit. One of the kids passed a cup to me, happy to share what they had. We sat and ate and then carried on with the day's routine. The tea seemed symbolic, these kids have absolutely nothing and yet they worked to buy me tea.

Scotland was always going to be very different but as in India we were surprised by the eloquence of the kids we met. I had much less to shoot and was more restricted but I'm still really pleased with the images and very grateful to those who helped us with access and those who agreed to be photographed.

The coverage is running in the Telegraph over the next few days and online.

William Trevitt for the Indy

Another Indy portrait: ballet dancer turned film-maker William Trevitt. This was a case of trying to find something in the location to exploit, stairs again. I think I'm loosing interest in the firing squad portrait where the subject is put up against the wall and shot and maybe that's why I'm making some slightly more contrived images. At some point I'll gather them all up and take stock, try to work out if it works. But job-to-job I don't feel like I have the luxury of over-thinking and that's probably just as well. So this image is obviously all in the angles. I started off with a set of him sat in a chair at the very top of the same flight of steps and it was one from that set-up that was used. The chair and stairs seemed gently enigmatic, slightly weird and had a kind of strength but the angles, I thought, worked better. Trevitt, as you might expect from a former principal at the Royal Ballet, was very easy to direct, in fact it was tempting to go for something much more extreme, but I think this image has subtle physicality and grace.

Geoff Dyer for the Indy

 

Geoff Dyer is a polymath-author, who has cast his clear-eyed gaze over a variety of subjects including photography. His book "The Ongoing Moment" traces themes through the history of photographs, making connections that re-map familiar photographs and photographers onto an eclectic and illuminating topography. Dyer's view of photography is like a parallel, personal version of an "orthodox" history of photography, I found it more readable and resonant than those other histories too.

Given his knowledge about, and enthusiasm for photography I was more nervous than usual about the shoot. I might have been trying a bit too hard in retrospect, I rarely light this dramatically but the white wall bounced light to fill-in nicely and the eyes are nice. This is a crop from the original, which has more of the shadows from the banister spindles and the ambient orange light at the top. I doubt I'll have been added to new editions of the book on the basis of this but hopefully not excluded either.

My home, my studio

Some jobs are bigger than others. Some jobs require weeks of thorough research and preparation, complicated logistics and extra personnel, intrepid travel and exotic hardships. Other jobs require you to take a picture of your own fridge in your own kitchen and can be accomplished in slippers.

Last Thursday morning I got a call from Nick Hall at the Saturday Independent Magazine, a regular and beloved client, to ask if I was free that afternoon for a shoot. I'm used to getting short notice on Indy jobs and can almost always fit them in but since I was scanning a small pile of films for another job I was doubtful.

"Would it be close?" I asked.
"Very, if you have a fridge."

The brief was to shoot a graphic image to accompany an article about parents' drinking and the concept was to spell out "mother's little helper" in magnetic letters. Like most households with young children we have enough magnetic letters to spell out the entire lyrics of "supercalifragilisticexpialidotious" so that was no problem. Clearing space on the fridge was more challenging...

I shot and sent a low-res for approval and after some tweaking, to allow space for text and balance we got the final image you can see above. I lit it with a brolly, close-up to get some diffused shadows, and reflected back into the dark bit on the left to brighten it a bit. Done, dusted, nice double-page spread to open the article.

The next day I was even more pushed for time since my wife and I were going away for the weekend, leaving the kids with my mum and dad for the first time since number 2 was born, but when Nick called again and dangled a possible cover shot I couldn't really say no, especially as it was the fridge again. This shot didn't get used, which is a shame since it would have been my littlest's first time in print as a hand model, but you can see the result below.

I had to flip the image to make it work for a cover and then selectively flip the text on the drawing back to normal. This was a mockup from the designer using a low-res version:

The final file was sent five minutes before we had to leave for the station and apparently all was well. Anyway we were already half way to the train when Nick called asking could I reshoot a slightly different version? I made a quick calculation of the fallout from screwing-up our first break without kids in living memory and decided that I really couldn't, this time. So I missed out on a cover but my wife is still talking to me.