Home Truths (1)
High time I caught up with blogging duties but thought I’d ease myself back in gently.
Now, this may sound head-bangingly obvious, but actually it isn’t when one thinks about it a bit (and I wish more photographers did, myself included some of the time.)
The fact is, it doesn’t matter how good a photographer you are but if your subject isn’t interesting or well-lit (and better both) then nothing’s going to make it a good photograph.
Absolutely nothing.
It’s not the New Yorker but, by the standards of many women’s magazines, it usually doesn’t leave you feeling as if several million brain cells have given up.
Lisa Smosarski, Editor, Stylist Magazine. (Guardian Media interview, 18 March 2012.)
Lisa Smosarski is my current publishing hero. As a guy who only buys the women’s magazines to look at the pictures (95% of which are taken by men of course) this free weekly magazine is probably the one I admire the most. Yup, and I can actually read it. I mean, what other magazine tweets live from the Booker Prize awards night?
By the way, Price: free; Circulation: 429, 124; Group Turnover: £15.5 million in 5 years.
What Do You Do When it Rains?
Well, when there’s just the two of you on a test and working for each other you simply nip across the road from the park you were shooting in and into the arms of a crowded but cosy pub.
Your model takes a look at her surroundings and then goes off to change into something that works with it (this one had a small suitcase with her), while you find the only available place to sit, order the drinks and work out what you’re going to do with what you’ve got …
In this case I had a model as laid back as she was professional, some interesting colour (but little light), a bar tab … and plenty of time on my hands. I was happy enough.
Model: Alison Lopresti; Photographer: Jonathan Posner.
Shot at The Old Bull & Bush, Hampstead, London.
Canon 5D Mk II, 35mm f1.4L
Shooting Movie with the 5D Mk II
This month I’ve briefly returned to my film and TV roots as Location Manager for Oxigeno, a big and successful Barcelona production company.
London is just one of twelve world cities that they have to shoot in a little over twenty days, cities ranging from Paris to Sao Paolo, New York to Sydney, Berlin to Shanghai. The stakes therefore are extremely high, though not least because the agency is JWT and the client about as high-profile as you can get.
Being part of all this, it’s almost impossible to describe the spine-tingling feeling when for the first time I cast my eyes on the tiny Canon 5D Mk II bolted to a Steadicam-like rig and shooting broadcast material in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. Spine-tingling because the 5D Mk II is of course the same camera that I use for my own stills work (along with probably 90% of the rest of the world’s fashion photographers.)
Okay, so I know that using the 5D Mk II for broadcast is kind of old news but this blog, after all, is about my own perspective on things. I joked with the camera-operator that in the event of equipment failure I’d simply nip home in a black cab to pick up my own 5D body while they had a cup of tea, and with a few modifications they could just carry on shooting.
As if to underline the remarkable and legendary status of this camera (think of it as the photographic equivalent of the first iPhone) a London Underground worker wandered up to our crew while we were shooting in Covent Garden. He singled me out (they always do) and with the same unmistakeable glee as my own pointed down at the diminutive camera rig lying on the ground. ”I’ve got one of those!” he almost squealed, and soon he too was launching into a paean to this technological marvel.
However, for the sake of balance (and maybe a little controversy) I’m here to tell you the 5D II isn’t all roses. I think the fiddliness of the dual-purpose top controls absolutely sucks (and to my dismay I notice it’s a design repeated in the newly-launched 5D Mk III.) I get round it by making a “Quick Menu” of all the essential controls on the rear display, but even then I still harbour persistent pangs of longing for the best-designed and best-handling camera ever made, the Olympus OM-2.
On Wednesday I also learned from Oxigeno’s camera-operator about another of the 5D II’s “failings”, although admittedly he was struggling a bit to find any. Up on Waterloo Bridge he mentioned that when a red London bus wiped across frame there was some type of lag that gave it a kind of rhomboid appearance as it went by.
I’m just relieved that doesn’t happen when I’m shooting my fashion models.
Why I’m Inspired by the Journal of Medical Microbiology
Recently, my Canadian upstairs neighbour, studying Immunology at the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead, dumped around a hundred medical journals into the recycling.
The same day, I took a deep breath and finally faced up to the fact that, for me, buying all the fashion magazines wasn’t some kind of fluffy frivolity but actually the exact equivalent of Marcus’s research material. Sure, I tend to buy them from time to time, but not religiously.
Somehow, it’s still not that easy, though. It was an almost agonising decision.
Wading through 200 pages of eyeliner adverts and tips on acheiving longer-lasting orgasms (if only) before reaching the fashion editorial pages can take some doing for a guy interested in the latest lenses from Canon or whether Manchester United are going to change their back four for Saturday’s match (or, indeed, whether Klara Smetanova’s ever going to give up porn and go back to fashion modelling, where she came from.)
But the fact is that Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Vanity Fair (and all the others) are my textbooks, my sources of photographic inspiration, my technical manuals and, occasionally, a fillip to my optimism (see my rant here.)
However, a year’s supply of just these four magazines comes to £191 if you buy them at the newsagent’s. Thankfully, by subscribing directly I’ve managed to get that down to £68.
And if you think even that’s a lot then it’s still way better than the Journal of Medical Biology. An annual subscription to that august journal? Just $1525.00.
Natural flair and good taste can be encouraged, but style has to be in your bones. It has all to do with a true sophistication, not an affected one.
On Trend With Smileyness
Maybe it was because I’d already mentioned to Alison a recent Vogue cover (see here), or maybe it was because when we first met up I’d happened to confess my weakness for happy-looking models, but when it came to shooting last week I certainly couldn’t have wished for a more spontaneous (or engaging) look.
Granted, this still isn’t what the majority of fashion photography is about - and with good reason - but when you have a model like Alison Lopresti who displays such genuine warmth and happiness it’s very hard not to want to shoot her like that.
Feeling a little guilty at all this un-fashiony lightheartedness I then asked Alison to take on a sulky Victoria Beckham-like demeanour. Unfortunately she managed it with such instant (and scary) effectiveness that suddenly it was my turn to laugh.
Anyway, it seems that this terrific model has the full range; we’ll do some serious stuff another time.
Canon 5D MkII, 85mm f1.2L
Shot in Golders Hill Park, London
Uggie will do anything for a sausage.
(I guess I will too, in my way … .)
Michael Hazanavicius, Director, The Artist
‘Mediocre to Rubbish’ - My New Folder
Normally, I like to insert a nice picture or two into all my blog posts, if only to break up the text and make them easier to read. Sorry, but today this is all you get.
Before I go any further, let’s get one thing out of the way. There may be many people who feel my own work fits perfectly into this category. I hope not, but it’s possible. The difference is that this post is about photographers who have been commissioned, edited, published and, presumably, paid a lot of money. Alas, these things are yet to happen in my case.
Oh, now I suppose you think it’s a case of sour grapes, but please, bear with me.
I buy all the fashion magazines and every month religiously fillet them for all the fashion photography that I admire, the work that I would have given my right arm to have taken myself, the work that keeps me inspired - that indeed keeps reminding me why it is that I want to do what I do. I carefully cut out these photographs with a steel rule and Stanley knife and insert them into the transparent pages of a display book. These books I call my Look Books, and I’m currently up to Volume 17.
Whenever I feel a bit glum, or even despondent (not often) I just flick through one of my Lookbooks and I’m up and running again. Why? Because this is what I’m aspiring to: that I’m going to be doing work as good as this.
Now, obviously I don’t like everything I see, or else I’d be into over a thousand volumes by now, for sure. Some things just aren’t my style, some things I admire but just don’t understand and some things I just shrug at and move on.
But maybe 10% of the time I come across published work that is just so ordinary, or even poor, that I’m at a total loss to understand how it got there, got through all the multiple stages and people involved from shoot to print.
So I started up this folder. So far there are three things in it:
(i) A fashion editorial from Marie Claire, normally a magazine that can be relied upon to provide some of the best fashion photography in the business (see a previous post of mine), but this time throwing up something that might just have passed muster in the first-term submission of an eager photography student (and then got marked 6/10.)
(ii) A double-page advert for Russell & Bromley - competent, for sure, but is this really the best they can do? And here, I promise you, I can already do better.
(iii) A full-page portrait of Bryan Ferry in The Times Magazine. Out of focus, but not in a deliberate, fashionable or interesting way. Just, poorly, out of focus. This is the picture that you reject as soon as you’ve downloaded it from your shoot. The client will never get near it or you’d surely never work again.
And yet …
As I tore these pictures out (they don’t deserve the steel-rule treatment) I suddenly realised that, just as much as my precious 17 volumes of Look Books, this tawdry little folder is going to be maybe even a bigger inspiration to me. It makes me feel like I’m David Bailey or Richard Avedon already. In fact, it’s making me laugh. And if ever I needed a spur to greatness as a photographer, this surely is going to be it.
London Fashion Week - Anna Popovich Makes a Wow
My first runway - and what a way to start. I met Anna a little while back, having been impressed with her designs and, more particularly, feeling that my style of photography would suit them very well. She invited me over to her studio in Hackney and I’m pleased to say we got on very well.
A personal invitation to her London Fashion Week event followed - and this is some of the material I got. In addition, I was keen to grab something extra after the runway itself and I’ll save those surprising pictures for an upcoming post.
I think the quality of Anna’s designs speaks for itself so here’s something about the photography.
If my wife is the Canon 5D Mk II, my mistress, quite definitely, is the Panasonic Lumix G1. I jumped on it when it was first launched in late 2008 and I’ve never looked back. Sure, it has a 4/3 sensor (ie small) and sure, its controls are way too softly damped but in terms of size and quality this tiny interchangeable-lens camera is the one to beat, not least for its astonishing lens (Panasonic soon realised their “mistake” and replaced it with a way more inferior one; in my view the existing lens is worth twice as much as the camera.)
So why did I take it to the show, and not the 5D Mk II?
Well, for one, the lens, though slow, is stabilised. And here was the gamble: do I take an f1.2 unstabilised optic or a stabilised f5.6 one ( a difference of 5-6 stops by my reckoning)?
I think the gamble paid off. The next pictures I post from this event will show me handholding at 1/10 second - almost unthinkable. Noise? Yes, of course from such a relatively small sensor. But to shoot at 1000 ISO and still be able to crop in, as the majority of pictures here are …
Sometimes less can be more. Well, not more, exactly, but at least fit for purpose and better than I have any right to expect.
Anna Popovich A/W 2012/2013 Collection, 20 February, 2012. Shot at The Vault, London SE1.
Photographer: Jonathan Posner
Panasonic Lumix G1, 14-45mm (28-90 equiv.) f3.5-5.6
