Earlier this year, Doug was due to give a week-long seminar on documentary photography in the US. I couldn’t attend. I would dearly have liked to. I hope the opportunity presents itself again in different circumstances.

Even though I wasn’t able to go, I did learn something from the seminar – or, more accurately, from the promotional material about it on the web, which contained a photograph. Maybe there were more, but one photograph sticks in my my mind and taught me something. Ironically, I can’t recall exactly what the photograph was of, merely that it was of a thing rather than of a person. It taught me that documentary photographs don’t have to include human beings.

Wedding photographers will cry en masse that they have known this for years. After all, the average wedding album is laden with detail shots of the shoes, the bouquet, the rings, the table placings and so on.

Yet I don’t think that a photograph of a detail is the equivalent of storytelling – the point of documentary photography. Let me explain.

If you photograph the shoes, for instance, what is the story? Obviously, they are important to the bride. But that isn’t the story. A more useful question would be, “Why are they important to the bride?” The answer to that question is a story.

That said, there may be a story in the shoes. An example could be their intricate nature that hints at an artisan manufacturer. Yet rarely is that expressed in a detail shot of the shoes. Generally, the shoe shot in a wedding album is little more than a statement.

I suppose what I’m getting at is the difference between setting the scene (a factual detail shot) and establishing a rich narrative (a story-infused detail shot).

So while a record of the shoes may be a valid component of the story of a wedding day, I have come to feel that the narrative of an object should be more than merely, “Here it is”.

Here’s an example.

The veil. (c) Roger Overall 2011

Why do I think that this is a narrative detail shot? I think it tells you a lot of story about the veil. It tells you how long it is by placing it in a context. It also tells you about its texture and transparency. Together, both of those things suggest why the bride chose it.

As you can tell, I’ve started to view detail photographs very differently. All because of a single image in on a promotional website. I have to marvel at how much more I’d have learned if I had actually had the chance to sit at Doug’s knee for a week to learn.

(c) Roger Overall 2010

There was a time when my camera bag weighed more than my daughter. In fact, filled to the brim with my gear, it probably still does.

As I get older, my body gets increasingly less tolerant of heavy equipment. I’m looking to lighten the load.

Nowhere does this apply more than the lighting gear that comes with shooting corporate assignments that have a portrait element to them. I used to bring studio lights. Then, with the help of the Strobist movement, I managed to pair that down to small flashguns. But there was still quite a bit to carry, which was inconvenient when traveling overseas on assignments in particular.

So, I stopped bringing flashguns – a move that coincided with my increasing interest in documentary photography.

Hit the play button below to find out what light I use these days and how it benefits my clients. (Takes about 10 seconds for the audio to start once you press start – my bad).

Single light source and reflector. (c) Roger Overall 2010

Single light source - the big bank of windows on the left. (c) Roger Overall 2010

I’ve also had a request for a longer post about shooting documentary work for corporates based on this assignment, and that will follow soon, most likely in the form of a permanent article called called “The Art of Documentary Corporate Photography” to accompany the articles on wedding photography.

Meanwhile, hit the play button or the link below the photograph to hear its story.

(c) Roger Overall 2010

Actually, I should qualify that by saying that it surprises me that good companies still aren’t opening their doors. It isn’t at all surprising that bad companies don’t want to do that. After all, they have something to hide. They are better off keeping you out. We might realize just how bad they really are.

Here are some photographs from a shoot I did in London very recently for A Bilbrough & Co, the managers of The London Club, a marine mutual insurance fund. They are one of my favourite clients. Firstly, they’ve been very loyal to me – this is the fifth year that I’ve photographed for the company’s annual report. Secondly, they are genuinely nice people to work with. The fact that employees stay on with the firm for an average of 25 years speaks volumes.

What is also revealing is that these pictures were taken on one of the most important days in the company’s calendar, when the committee members meet to discuss current claims. These are high-pressure days when claims worth million of dollars are dealt with by some very significant people in the shipping industry.

Tell me, do these photographs suggest to you a company that manages itself and its members insurance needs well, or one that is stressed by the day and the decisions that need to be made?

(c) Roger Overall

(c) Roger Overall 2010

(c) Roger Overall 2010

(c) Roger Overall 2010

(c) Roger Overall 2010

(c) Roger Overall 2010

(c) Roger Overall 2010

(c) Roger Overall 2010

(c) Roger Overall

(c) Roger Overall 2010

I’m sure you’d agree that this is a good company. One that handles itself, its staff and its work professionally and in a healthy environment. The pictures tell me that internal communication is excellent and the staff are energetic. It’s the kind of company I’d like to do business with. Fortunately, I do.

According to most of the Dublin advertising agencies I visited in January and February this year, documentary photography, however appealing, won’t work in advertising campaigns in Ireland. The advertisers are just too traditional.

They are not alone in this belief.

It was recently repeated to me by the marketing manager for an international parcel company.

I gave examples of campaigns abroad, most notably one for Emirates Airlines I’d heard about in a podcast interview with the photographer involved: Doug Menuez, a photographer I greatly admire. Not only that, Doug recently launched an agency to market his documentary work to the advertising sector – in response to demand for the kind of photography he provides.

It didn’t help. Ireland isn’t ready was the message.

Really?

In the seat pocket in front of me on flight EI 183 from London to Dublin yesterday evening was a copy of Aer Lingus’ in-flight magazine Cara.

Here’s a photograph of the full-page advert on one of the early pages in the magazine.

Vodafone ad in April/May 2010 issue of Cara

Now, I’m not for a minute suggesting that this is a purely documentary photograph. However, you cannot deny the photojournalistic aesthetic of the picture. You can tell the people on the shoot went to great lengths to get the right feel. London bus and some fellow in a high-viz jacket in the background. It all adds the the sense of reality.

By the way, if this is a genuine documentary photograph and you know the backstory, I’d love for you to share it here.

Back to the point I’m trying to make. Real equals honest, which is something we don’t often equate with advertising. At least, not in Ireland. Because, the agencies say, Irish companies can’t grasp the concept.

While Vodafone isn’t quite there yet (and I’ve no doubt a skilled street photographer could have produced a real documentary moment), it is a step in a direction that interests me greatly. After all, I’d love to shoot a documentary advertising campaign.

Compare Vodafone’s effort to this one by Bank of Ireland on the next facing page of the current issue of Cara.

Bank of Ireland advert in the April/May 2010 issue of Cara

Oh dear.

This is the worst of both worlds: a posed image that is so heavily staged it reeks of insincerity. In fact, I have a niggling suspicion it is a stock image, most likely American, to which the credit card in the girl’s had has been added in post-production. A tell-tale sign is that the card she is holding is the same as the larger one in the bottom left of the ad, right down to the name: Mr J Brennan of VBC Ltd. I have to say that Mr Brennan is a fine looking woman.

Of course, that could be JB in the background there on the phone.

The photograph doesn’t ring true, which undermines the advertisement. It doesn’t inspire. It doesn’t make me want one of these cards, even though I bank with Bank of Ireland and fly Aer Lingus regularly. A great documentary image taken in a real office would have been so much more powerful. Ironically, I spent yesterday shooting documentary photographs in a London office.

Even better, why not a photograph of people enjoying one of the Aer Lingus Gold Circle Lounges the card gives you access to?

Perfect material for a great documentary photograph.

Temporary accommodation specialist Allspace were putting in one of their largest units at Cork airport for a helicopter company. Problem was, the unit was too big to get through the nearest access gate, and overhead cables meant that lifting it over the fence into place was out of the question.

That meant using an alternative gate.

On the other side of the airport.

Except there wasn’t a road as such from the alternative gate to where the unit needed to go.

There was a nice, straight, broad strip of perfectly good concrete they could use. It even had lights up either side to guide them. Of course, they’d have to make sure nobody else needed it – you know, for landing aeroplanes on or anything. So, the operation had to be done so early in the morning even Ryanair doesn’t fly.

In the end, we didn’t get the shot we’d hoped for. Airport security is such these days that I wasn’t able to shoot from a vehicle driving alongside or ahead of the convoy going up the runway. Everyone had to stay tightly single file. And I certainly wasn’t allowed to park out on the runway and wait for the convoy to pass.

In the end, I decided to wait for the convoy at the helicopter company site. It allowed me to get a shot that was at least suggestive of the airport environment.

Allspace delivering a Portakabin Titan unit at Cork International Airport. (c) Roger Overall 2010

Allspace delivering a Portakabin Titan unit at Cork International Airport. (c) Roger Overall 2010

Final preparations are made to the site where the unit will be placed. Cork airport's new terminal in the background. (c) Roger Overall 2010

The large unit wasn’t due to be lifted into place until a few hours later, after the arrival of two smaller modules. While not part of the assignment, I decided to get photographs of the final lift as well, to soften the disappointment of not getting the runway shot.

In the end, the client was thrilled, prompting the local director to email me: “…those images are outstanding – better than anything I’ve ever seen in all my years of Allspace and Portakabin”.

Makes it worth getting up early for, no?

This man is lifting an entire Portakabin unit with only one hand ... All right, he isn't. There's somebody else on the other side helping him. (c) Roger Overall 2010

(c) Roger Overall 2010

]]> http://www.rogeroverall.net/blog/photographs/earlier-still/feed/ 3 http://www.rogeroverall.net/blog/business/the-power-of-you/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-power-of-you http://www.rogeroverall.net/blog/business/the-power-of-you/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 02:10:23 +0000 Roger Overall http://www.rogeroverall.net/blog/?p=588 Continue reading →]]> A whole new year starts tomorrow, an unwritten slate upon which we can write a better life.

I’m about to come over all philosophical. Just a little warning. You can bail now, by going here: Exit This Post.

For those of you still here, the point I want to make is this: while it’s great to be looking ahead with ambitions, we can only stand tomorrow on the foundations we built in the past. If the foundations are feeble, the future will likely be equally weak. So the best way to sort out the future is to sort out the present.

Nothing new in any of that, but for me personally it’s become a guiding light for me in the past 12 months.

It’s been very liberating.

And scary. Because, you know, I’m solely responsible for where I am. I can’t blame anyone else. It’s all me. (And between the two of us: he can be a bit of a dunce at times).

There is an upside. A biggie. If it’s all me, then I have the power to change things. I can affect an outcome, give direction to a situation, meet a challenge and turn it into an opportunity.

I’m starting to think that too few photographers realize this.

For instance, go to any wedding fair here in Cork and you will hear constant bitching from some of the exhibiting photographers about how many other photographers have stands. The worst offenders are three photographers from the same company who complain the loudest, oblivious to the inflationary aspect of their own number.

It’s crazy. The more photographers in the hall, the better. How much easier is it to stand out if there are lots of people offering the same service? If you are truly different and have defined your USPs, you will rise above everyone. It will be plain to see.

What is really going on is that the photographers who complain the loudest haven’t in the past made the decisions that would have made them unique to the market today.

In the last 12 months, I’ve come to understand, through personal insight but also through the generous input of others, what I’m good at and what I truly love doing.

My utter conviction of the value of documentary photography shapes everything I do in the business now.

That is what I have taken from 2009, and it will help me going forward in 2010.

You won’t be surprise then that the last picture on this blog this year is a documentary one.

It’s a photograph of my two greatest sources of inspiration. I am very lucky to have them both in my life. I love them dearly. My wife and my daughter.

Have a great 2010, everyone.

My daughter is one of the funniest people I know. A couple of nights ago, she almost made us wet ourselves with a new look she had developed. It came out of nothing as we were all watching TV together. (c) Roger Overall 2009

Not just because I could stand to lose a few pounds, enjoy bacon and drink beer, but because I sometimes do silly things. Not intentionally. They just creep up on me in moments of mental fog.

Take this year’s entry for the Professional Photographer of the Year Awards here in Ireland. A lot of time and effort goes into qualifying photographs, from which a final panel of four pictures is chosen and entered into a particular category. It’s a process that takes six months. So you’d have to be some kind of numnutz to put in all the hard graft only to slip up on a basic mistake at the end. You’d have to be a real Homer.

That would be me.

Having pulled together a strong panel of commercial photographs, one I thought might just catch the judges’ eyes this year because it hung together so well, I discovered that one of the pictures had a big flaw. A super-sized honker of a fault, big enough for me to decide it would ruin the chances of the entire panel.

So what happened? How did a sub-standard image get entered into the preliminary qualifying judgings in the first place?

Long story short – the IPPA uses an online submission system (which, by the way, is terrific) and I uploaded the wrong version of the image. I should have realized sooner – like when the photograph received a much lower score than I anticipated during the judging. At the time, I put the score down to a lapse of sanity among the judges – something regularly commented upon by photographers. Now I can see they were right and my sloppiness has come home to roost.

Doh!

The final national judging doesn’t allow any room for error. When we get to this stage of the awards process, the stakes are high and only the best work will do. A minor imperfection in a photograph (or indeed a whopper) can undermine the chances of an entire panel, regardless of how good the other three are. So out went the commercial panel and a valuable lesson learned. Entering awards is an exacting process better undertaken by Lisa than Homer.

I’ll still go for the single image award in the commercial category, but that doesn’t have the same cachet. Portfolios is where it is at.

Mercifully, I didn’t have all my eggs in one basket. In fact, out of the three panels I intended to enter, the commercial one was the weakest. I also have panels lined up for the the pictorial/travel and the reportage wedding categories.  The latter is by far my strongest suit. The problem here was reducing a dozen very strong photographs down to a quartet. Artistically, I’ve had a great year, producing my best work yet. Anne and I spent a good bit of time this afternoon discussing various picture combinations for the final panel. We’ll know in February, when the winners are announced, whether we chose the right one.

A grab shot of the layouts we came up with for the 2010 IPPA/RSA Photographer of the Year Awards this afternoon. Only later in the day did I discover the flawed photograph in the Advertising/Commercial panel (c) Roger Overall 2009

That’s because I’m an idiot.

Well, not entirely, but the answer had been staring me in the face since mid-2004. That’s five years that it was right there in front of me and I didn’t see it.

Why the blindness?

It’s easy to say that life got in the way and I got distracted. Keeping a business afloat and paying a mortgage can easily divert you from your true course if you let it. I did.

That isn’t the real reason, though. The real reason is that it has taken until now for me to realize fully what it is I want to do with my photography. Without that direction, it’s impossible to say what a dream referral is. Even if you’ve already had one, done the work, and told everyone how great the assignment was.

But now I have my compass point, so it’s easy to recognize the assignment for what it was. A dream assignment.

It was a dream for a couple of reasons. Exotic travel (Suriname and Guyana), a frightening number of inoculations (breaks the ice at parties), an interesting and tricky subject (bauxite shipping through the jungle), a very appreciative client (JP Knight), a reasonable pay day, and total creative freedom. That last one is the key. Creative freedom allowed me to shoot in a very documentary way. I didn’t know it at the time, but documentary is my passion. I love photographing people living their lives – be it their working lives or their private lives. Now that I do know that, it’s easy to look back on the assignment and see it for what it really was.

All of which means that at BNI meetings I can now articulate what a dream referral is for me. That’s just as well. I haven’t chased work like it since, so I have some catching up to do.

I’ve posted some of the photographs from the shoot with JP Knight below, with some commentary on each one.

Bauxite in Suriname is mined in the coastal jungles and shipped to a refinery near Parimaribo. This photograph shows how narrow the Cottica river gets and the skill it takes to push empty and full barges to the mine and back. The ability of the master to get two huge barges and the tug pushing them around some tight bends was incredible. The wheelhouse is elevated high above the tree line to maximize visibility. Mind you, they don't stop at night, using powerful spotlights like the one on the left to see the trees (c) Roger Overall 2004

A barge pushing two empty barges passes one with full loads on either the Cottica or the Commewijne river in Suriname - I forget which as they merge at one point before joining the Suriname river. Like the previous photograph this is notable for me because it was one of the last I took for a commercial assignment on film. Fuji Astia 100, if you're interested. (c) Roger Overall 2004

Bauxite being loaded at the mine in Suriname. I liked the gesture of the hands, which is almost celebrating the delivery of the wet bauxite as if it were manna from heaven. (c) Roger Overall 2004

Dusk on the Commewijne river in Suriname. I had hoped for something more dramatic as the sun was setting. Again, another photograph shot on film. (c) Roger Overall 2004

And then the sun set - (c) Roger Overall 2004

In Guyana, the bauxite is shipped in a dry state to a loading station on the coast where it is transferred to a drybulk carrier that takes it to a refinery overseas. (c) Roger Overall 2004

A bauxite barge on the Berbice river in Guyana. Quite a story to this picture. It was taken the day after we were supposed to go up river to the mine by speedboat. However, the boat almost tipped over and I nearly lost all my camera gear. We did, in fact, lose JP Knight's local MD over the side. Consequently, we decided it was too dangerous to continue, so the next day we hitched a ride on a small plane that picked us up by the side of the road next to a sugar cane field near New Amsterdam. Seriously, I'm not kidding. As we flew south, we saw one of JP Knigtht's barges and I managed to get this shot that shows the expanse of the river as it approaches the sea. I'll never forget the plane ride. There were drafts coming from places in the fuselage that had nothing to do with the air conditioning, which wasn't working anyway. Just sayin'. (c) Roger Overall 2004

A geared drybulker loads bauxite into its holds from JP Knight barges moored alongside. The master of one of JP Knight's tugs looks on. People who know me know that I have a bit of an attraction to reflections. I'm just hard-wired that way. (c) Roger Overall 2004