Douglas Kurn, Photographer

Today Is Tomorrow's History

Author Archives: Doug

Yin and Yang

So it goes that you can’t have success without failure. Having written recently about not making it into the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, I received an e-mail from the Association of Photographers (AOP) saying that I had been selected as a Finalist for the 32nd Annual AOP Awards. If I whooted, I would whoot, whoot at this point, but I don’t, so I won’t, but I am really rather pleased.

Judging was done on digital images and I’ve had to submit a print for the exhibition. This has been made rather easy by the AOP collaborating with The Print Space, where I uploaded my file, The Print Space print it, and they keep it for mounting.

The Awards Presentation evening takes place at The Old Truman Brewery in London on Thursday October 8th, and I guess the combination of awards evening and brewery should make for a lively affair. The exhibition of the finalists prints will open on the night and will run until the 11th October, alongside ShootLDN and as part of The Old Truman Brewery’s Photoblock, before the exhibition goes on a tour of the country. There is also a printed book of all the finalists images.

My successful image is from a recent commission from Remember Creative which I wrote about here. Thanks to all involved in pulling this together.

Taylor Wessing Woes

So that time of year arrived again when I received my annual email from the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize saying that “I am sorry to inform you that on this occasion your work has not been selected for exhibition.” Not that I think I have been singled out by Taylor Wessing – I also got rejected when the event was sponsored by Schweppes, when it was the John Kobal Portrait Prize, and even the year when there was no sponsor.

This years entry.

To be fair it’s not an easy competition to get in to – this year there were 4929 prints submitted (yes you read that right – it’s a prints only competition, which I find quite refreshing in this digital day and age) of which about 60 are selected for an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, as well as reproduced in a book. The exhibition also embarks on a national tour, so it really is quite something to be selected for.

On the other hand being rejected is now becoming the in thing due to the Portrait Salon, which is a sort of Salon Des Refusés for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize. The Portrait Salon has been running for 5 years, and showcases the best of the work that didn’t get selected. There are some really quite amazing images in the Portrait Salon by some great photographers like Julia Fullerton-Batten, Harry Borden and Kelvin Murray, so being rejected puts me in very good company!

This images won the AOP Assistants Awards in 2008, but didn't make the cut in the TWPP

This image won the AOP Assistants Awards in 2008, but didn’t make the cut in the TWPP.

It’s impossible to know what the Taylor Wessing judges are looking for (and some of them change every year) but there are definitely are some constants – twins and redheads being amongst them – and in some cases red headed twins! Also a lot of famous people seem to feature; smiling is generally omitted; and there is usually somebody naked. So planning ahead for next years prize I’m on the look out for some miserable, red headed celebrity twins who won’t mind being photographed naked!

I have been thinking about starting a new project and have decided that I am going to have a shot at putting together a body of work that will Try To Win The Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, which is a bit of a mouthful for a project title so I will call it TTWTTWPP (much catchier), and reserve the right to change the title if the lead sponsor changes in between now and the announcement of next years awards! I’ll post updates along the way with the work I am creating, but for now here’s a quick look back at some of the photos that didn’t get in.

Eric

Charles

Boy

Skerries Frosties

February 15th – Joan Griffiths

Craftsmen

As well as shooting portraits of the Cordwainers and stills of a range of shoes for a new catalogue designed by Remember Creative, I was asked by the client to take some shots emphasising the craftsmanship of the workers and the fact that each pair of shoes is hand made to order. We decided to make the images look timeless by shooting in black and white and focussing very much on the hands and tools used by each of the craftsmen. I also used available light to add an element of grittiness to the images.

The client liked them so much that they had some large canvas prints made up to decorate their entrance reception:

The full set of images can be seen here.

Remember Creative did a lovely job of the catalogue, which was delivered in time for a specific trade show, and the client has subsequently said that their new image has put them head and shoulders above the competition and, as a result, they have seen business increase significantly since the trade show.

A Surgeon’s Breakfast

Craig is a tall actor with close cropped hair who is often cast as a thug or villain due to his looks, and he is keen to expand his repertoire of characters, so we decided to take a light hearted approach to this portrait and cast him as an exhausted surgeon, who was on auto pilot, so much so that his breakfast turned in to just another operation.

I also photographed Craig another time for a different look.

Cordwainers….

… or shoemakers to most people. These guys make orthotic shoes and each pair is hand made to order. They start by making a cast of the feet and then the wearer gets to choose the style they want and can custom design them too. I was recently commissioned by Remember Creative to photograph portraits of the craftsmen involved in the process of hand making these shoes, and these are the resulting portraits.

See more portraits on my website, and I’ll shortly be adding some detail shots of the manufacturing process to the projects section of the website.

The War of the Worlds

I recently went to Horsell Common, where the Martians first landed on Earth according to the H.G. Wells novel The War Of The Worlds, which was quite brilliantly put to music by Jeff Wayne. It was a cold and frosty day, but the light was lovely and I managed to get these shots. Three of them are available as signed limited edition Giclée prints on my Print Sales website.

I had to wait and wait for the light to change – suddenly a beam of light shone out across the common. I had to act fast – the chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one he said, But Still They Come….

Horsell Common 2

Horsell Common 4

Horsell Common

Horsell Common 3

Zeiss Touit, to who? To me!

I was recently contacted by Zeiss Lenses, and asked if I would like to test their Touit range of lenses. Now I own some Zeiss lenses but had never heard of the Touit range, and a bit of research led me to the Zeiss product page, and I realised that I didn’t have a suitable camera. Luckily Zeiss did and a shiny aluminium case complete with two bodies and six lenses duly arrived! Why six lenses when there are only three in the Touit range? Well, Zeiss had sent me the Sony NEX-7 and the Fuji X Pro-1, which are different mounts so there were three E mount and three X mount lenses.

Both of these cameras are mirror less compact cameras with APS-C sensors. The Sony has a quite impressive 24MP chip, whilst the Fuji has a very capable 16MP chip using Fuji’s unique X-Trans sensor technology.Both of these cameras are small and lightweight and very easy to carry around, so when Zeiss said I could photograph anything apart from people portraits and night shots, I decided to just take the cameras with me everywhere and photograph things because I could!

Now I have to come clean here – I found the Sony NEX-7 to be possibly one of the most pointless cameras I have ever used. The camera doesn’t have a cable release facility, has no easy way of syncing flash to it (because of it’s unique flash hotshoe, which prevents the use of Pocket Wizards, and none of my hotshot PC adapters would fit it either) and the autofocus speed is rubbish. If you leave the camera in AF mode it continually hunts to try and be somewhere near in focus when you want to take a picture, which is very disconcerting, and putting it in manual mode allows you to use a button on the back to autofocus but it is painfully slow. If you use manual focus the image in the viewfinder enlarges so you can easily see what you are focussed on, which is its saving grace. The complete lack of cable release I just don’t understand. There’s a 24MP sensor so at some point you are going to want to put it on a tripod and take some more considered shots.

The Fuji X Pro-1, on the other hand, I found to be an absolute joy to use. It uses an old fashioned manual screw in cable release (I had to dust mine off), has a sensible hotshot that takes Pocket Wizards and normal PC cable adapters, and it’s AF performance is very good. I should add that this was using the latest firmware for both the camera (3.20) and the Touit lenses. Apparently early versions of the firmware were not so good but the upgrade is free and easy to do. The lenses have an aperture ring, and the shutter speed and exposure compensation are accessed via dials on the top. Very retro but very lovely!

Now I keep mentioning autofocus, and in what is a first for Zeiss, the Touit lenses are all autofocus, and I have to say they performed admirably. The following two shots were taken pretty quickly and the Af grabbed focus in both cases with no problem at all.

X-Pro1_Touit 1.8-32

The Touit lenses were quite different to my other Zeiss lenses, and were of a plastic construction, but yet they still felt quite solid and the aperture ring and focus ring movements had that lovely Zeiss feel to them. Zeiss are obviously keen to emphasise the quality of construction as can be seen in this Apple style video.

Overall I found them to perform admirably and I have put some images here on Flickr. I will be adding more images over time.

You can read the Zeiss blog post about my time with the Touits. It’s been translated back and forth between English and German so may not be quite as fluid as it might have been…

Casper The Friendly Ghost

I was recently commissioned to take some portraits of staff working for a leading healthcare company to help with their latest recruitment drive. The portraits were of real staff in some of their hospitals, and were taken as though the staff were being observed during their working day, to show what a great place it is to work.
The Chef was convinced he would look like Casper The Friendly Ghost in the photos, due to being dressed all in white and spending most of his time in the kitchen!

You can see more of the shots on my website.

Close To Home

As you may be aware I moved last year to Chertsey, which has been in the news a lot lately due to the flooding caused by the River Thames. My house is far enough away from the Thames to have escaped the flooding that has caused, although we also have the River Bourne and River Abbey much closer to us that have both flooded too. Again we have so far remained just out of reach. As it is something (I hope) we won’t see again I took the opportunity to create some images. Most of these were taken between the peaks of flooding, but it gives you an idea of what Mother Nature is capable of.

Free Prae Park

Overflowing Drain

Dumpsey Meadow as seen from Chertsey Meads

Rain Stops Play

Urban Soldier

Another of my actor projects saw us in Peckham working with Michael who took on the role of an Urban Soldier, living on the woods and heading in to the city to fight the powers of evil.

It was a horribly cold and wet night, but Michael was a true professional and stood there in a t-shirt looking like you wouldn’t mess with him, although as Michael put it himself “a black guy, at night, in Peckham, with a gun, is kinda asking for trouble”! Luckily none came and we managed to get these fab shots.

Special thanks to my assistants Oli and Tim for braving the elements and for wading through the mud keeping the lights covered from the rain.

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