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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?

Image control

    © D.Tyler 2011

I photographed Rob Brydon for the Indy Magazine a couple of weeks ago for a slot called "My secret life". It's a one page feature with a Q&A format that runs with a single portrait and is usually about a celeb who is on the PR circuit at the time, promoting a book, film, TV show or whatever. You know the sort of thing.

A fair few of my portraits over the last few years have been shot for this or similar pages in the Indy. I like the jobs because each of them is a self-contained puzzle (a bit like photography soduku but without the one solution), you have a short time and a limited space to make an interesting image of this person.

Before the Brydon job even began I received two requests, the first from Penguin Books, publishers of Brydon's upcoming book and hosts for the shoot, and another from his PR company. Penguin required a copy of my "insurance certificate" before I'd be allowed to photograph in their offices. Unusual but OK, I thought, I supposed they meant my public liability cover and sent it over. The second request was more worrying. Brydon's PR asked me to sign a "Syndication Form" that confirmed my agreement not to use the images from the shoot for anything beyond the Indy's commission without their prior permission. This was entirely new to me, but apparently it's standard practice in the US and more and more common among PR companies here. On the face of it the contract (that's what it is right?) gives the PR company control over my images. If they or the Celeb don't like them, for whatever reason, they can make sure no-one ever sees them again. And not signing means I don't do the job. There was no mention of copyright but how am I supposed to feel about a third-party vetoing sales of my work? And of course there's the not-so-subtle implication that pictures they like, flattering, on-message, brand-conforming images, will be more likely to be allowed out than anything unflattering, off-message or brand-confounding. It's not like I shoot portraits to be unflattering but I do try to respond to what I see in the subject and not what the PR wants the image to be.

The power is in the hands of the agents and the celebs and the PRs. For now they call the shots because the commodity they offer, fame, sells papers. The big agents in the US basically dictate how and what content is used in the press and this will happen in the UK too unless the press join forces and refuse to accept the conditions. It would be a wonderful thing to see, the nations media outlets refusing to trade publicity for content, interviewing someone who doesn't have something to sell and ignoring the press releases and the brand guff.

I would like to show the image I shot of Rob Brydon but It's been requested that I wait until October when the Indy plan to publish so as to coincide with the availability of his autobiography: Small man in a Book, published by Penguin 13th October, priced £20 hardback, available in all good bookshops soon.

Update Oct31st 2011: I've added the image now. Brydon wasn't that keen on this coat hanger idea, when I suggested it he said "The question is "why?"... I always cringe when I see a comedian doing something wacky in a photo." But he let me try it before we moved on to a straighter set-up. Even if it did make him cringe, I like this image. I think it fits with his Q&A in the magazine, there's even a bit where he says "I'm always happy in a pink shirt", I mean, honestly, what could be a more perfect illustration for a comment like that?

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.

Learning for the visually minded

RSA Animate – First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.

If, like me, you only really understand something when you understand it visually you will love the RSA Animate series of illustrated lectures. The one linked above is the philosopher Slavoj Žižek talking about how the new ethical consumerism perpetuates poverty and how charity in general can "demoralize and degrade". Check the RSA website for more, there is an excellent one from Mathew Taylor about 21st century enlightenment.

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.

Pavement Artifacts #1: red rubber bands

No-one who lives in London can have a good reason for buying rubber bands. Why spend money on a resource that is so freely available to even the most short-sighted urban forager. Brightly coloured to aid detection they are strewn along pavements in any and all seasons.

Once Londoners were all apocryphally aware of being, on average, never more than 10ft from a rat,we are also now aware that the rat is probably chewing on several rubber bands.

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.