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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.

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?

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.

 

 

Alter Egos

Quite a lot of my commissioned work is basically location portraiture and I often feel like I get stuck in a rut doing more or less the same thing every time. When you only have a few minutes, minimal kit, no previous sense of the location, no assistant and a fairly rigid page-space to fill it's tempting to simply do what you know will work and hard to take risks. I've been feeling for a while that I needed an opportunity to experiment and so I decided to do a series of portraits of my own choosing, unfettered by the demands of publications and the paralyzing fear of screwing up.

So it was that a couple of weekends ago I drove out to the Welsh borders to photograph a group doing Live Action Role-Play (LARP). I'd done a reportage feature story on LARPing many years ago when I was with KATZ pictures (the feature sold once, in Greece) but later I'd thought that it might have been more interesting to photograph more inside the role-play rather than from the sidelines, poking fun at all the juxtapositions and silliness. The idea of photographing the players "in character" seemed like it would both provide a wealth of portraits and say something more interesting about the way people create alter egos in different situations. I found a few groups online and was hugely lucky that the Legion of Dreams agreed to let me come along to one of their big weekend events. Legion of Dreams are one of the longest established LARP groups in the country and they have an awesome site at their disposal for their events, comprising woodland, miniature canyons, caves and a replica iron age settlement. For me it was the perfect combination of subjects and locations.

I took with me the kit that I usually use for location portraits: a Canon 5Dmkii, 35mm 1.4, 85mm 1.8, 580EX speedlight, STE2 TTL transmitter, a lastolite stand and brolly outfit for the speedlight and a 1m lastolite reflector. I brought a few more bits and pieces but I was keen to see what I could do with a fairly limited and very portable outfit. The kit above fits into a couple of small bags and I've put it all on a bike many times, the brolly outfit has been an invaluable tool for quick lighting inside and out in combination with the TTL transmitter. I scoped out locations and subjects on the Friday evening and did 16 separate shoots on Saturday, trying to vary the feel of each portrait according to the character I was photographing. A couple of times I did find myself falling into familiar set-ups but I also tried out some new ideas, combining ambient, flash and reflected light to add drama without it looking completely artificial. I unexpectedly enjoyed the results from using bare flash, without modifying it with a shoot-through brolly as I usually do. If nothing else I've gained confidence enough to use the flash to model as well as just light the subject.

Since the LARP shoot I've decided to invest in a two-head Bowens travelpack kit and I expect I'll be posting more about my experiences in location lighting before long. In the meantime here are some more images from the shoot:

You can see the rest here.

Separate ways

Dominick Tyler

I've recently left the documentography collective where I'd been a member for a little over three years. The decision was mine and it was made after a good deal of consideration and with great regret but I'm sure it's the right thing to do. Hopefully the friendship I've enjoyed with the other members of the group will not been affected by my departure.

I have gained a huge amount from my time with documentography, professionally and personally, and I think the group's potential is unlimited. I'm looking forward to finding inspiration in their work for many years to come.