Hu Jintao, President of the People's Republic of China

As many followers of my blog, Facebook and/or Twitter will know, I had a very unique assignment last week, photographing the British Prime Minister David Cameron on his recent visit to Beijing. It was one of the most interesting assignments I have ever had, mainly because of the access that I was able to get to the PM and the people that he was meeting thoughout his trip.

When I was approached to undertake this job, I assumed that that the PM would be meeting some high-ranking Chinese officials and I hoped that he would be meeting with those at the top. When I found out he would indeed be meeting the main leader in China, President Hu Jintao, my levels of anticipation were raised significantly.

Hu Jintao, is rarely seen outside of formal surroundings and images of him are much harder to come by. His security is tighter than for any other person in the country and he was recently voted by Forbes magazine as ‘the most powerful person in the world’, ahead of American President, Barack Obama. Whether you agree with that statement or not, the opportunity to photograph this man was one I did not want to pass up.

David Cameron and staff walk down the red carpet inside the Great Hall of the People

So, on the morning of Wednesday 10th November, I found myself following David Cameron and his entourage into the Great Hall of the People, as the only photographer with the group. After entering, we spent a few minutes in a holding room waiting for the signal to begin the meeting. The few minutes passed very quickly and once the signal was given, I found myself walking down the red carpet with the group (see image above), striding towards the meeting. As I shot, I had my back to the direction we were headed, walking backwards taking images of the PM. I managed to shoot about 7/8 frames before turning around and moving to the side of the group. No sooner had I done this, a giant curtain was opened before us and on the other side stood the Chinese President, Hu Jintao.

'Abstract' portrait of Hu Jintao

Having been photographing Cameron on a wide-lense (16-35mm), I quickly switch to my second body which had a 70-200mm as I found myself a little further away than I would of liked as I was moved to one side by a Chinese secret service agent. As I started shooting, something appeared to be wrong. My exposure was all wrong and was exposing at nearly a second (see above). Far too long. Mild panic started to set in, as this was the big moment. It would be over in 30secs and knew I couldn’t miss it. I glanced down at the body looking for the problem. I noticed the settings wheel had been nudged off of its normal aperture-priority setting and onto manual, probably whilst I was shooting just before. I quickly flicked it back to where it was meant to be and was back to normal. Thankfully, I have come to know my equipment so well, I could change most settings blindfolded. All that practice on other shoots prepared me well to not panic and identify the problem and solve it quickly. This is a big part of what being a professional is about.

Hu Jintao, during meeting with British PM, David Cameron.

No sooner had I fired off a few frames, Cameron and Hu moved into the main meeting room and myself and the press pack, who I was now part of, followed. We had a few minutes stood behind a rope a few metres away from the meeting to get what we could. After that, we were all ushered out by security.

Standing outside of the meeting room, the adrenaline was still pumping from what was one of the most surreal shoots I have ever had. I put a lot of pressure on myself  to make sure I deliver for my clients. Combined with who these people were and the restrictions that were upon me, it made for quite an intense experience. At the end of the day, I was able to deliver the images I needed to my client and had the freedom to be a little creative with the pictures.

I certainly won’t forget the day I got to photograph (arguably, at the time of writing!) the most powerful person in the world.

<<Return to the Learning Zone

The Guardian Newspaper | UK

<<Return to the Learning Zone With today’s post, I wanted to give readers an insight into the day-today shooting of a pro-photographer. I’ll be talking about something that is a key skill for working photographers, especially those who work on-assignment usually to tight or restrictive deadlines. When you are working as a photographer, it is of paramount importance that when you are assigned to a job, you ‘get the shot’ that your client wants.

Most editors/clients have little patience for excuses such as ‘the light wasn’t good’, ‘i didn’t have the right lense’, ‘the atmosphere wasn’t right for a picture’ etc. These are poor excuses and a client hires you because they expect you to overcome these obstacles and get the picture, because it’s your job to deliver.

About 18 months ago, I got a call from the Guardian Newspaper from the UK for a 1-day assignment. At that time, the country was panicking about a recent health scare involving a potentially harmful substance in milk products, called melamine, which was especially harmful to children. My brief was to get a portrait of a child (and parent preferably) who was suffering from melamine poisoning.

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I went to the Beijing’s Children Hospital, early in the afternoon. Although I was unsure of the specific lighting situation in our ultimate destination I tried to guess what it would be like i.e. indoors, fluorescent lighting maybe, natural lighting from a window possibly etc. This enabled me to set-up so that I wouldn’t have to change too many settings once we arrived.

Eventually I arrived in one room with about four or five children and their parents. There was one lady who was there with her grandson who was suffering kidney problems, as a result of melamine poisoning. The lady was happy to talk and gave me permission to photograph her grandson. I knew I had to work fast. For one, I was a non-Chinese with a professional looking camera in my hand, secondly there was a large window on one side of the room which went directly into the nurse’s station.

In this post, I have posted the 17 frames that I managed to shoot before we were (politely but sternly) told to leave. The first 7 frames were shot as soon as I got into the room in the space of about 30 seconds. In the 8th frame (IMG_5027) you can see that my angle changes. This is because I was forced to stand from a crouching position as a nurse walked into the room and questioned us. It was quite clear that we were going to be asked to leave. So, as I stood and listened to nurse talk (on my right), I folded my arms and positioned my camera to aim at the grandmother and child (on my left) and shot 10 more frames without drawing the nurse’s attention. This period lasted no longer than a minute and then we were asked to leave.

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I was quite nervous after we left as I was unsure if I had ‘got the shot’. This was a new client and I had not time to check my pictures as I went, as I would normally do. Some portrait shoots are short, but a minute and a half? With over half of the pictures taken without looking? It was going to be a close call.

I sent all the pictures to the client and they chose the very last picture (IMG_5036) of the 17 picture sequence to run with their article. This was the picture taken a fraction of a second before we had to leave from my hip without looking. Luck? Well, I like to think that experience meant that I was prepared (technically) before I got in the room to act quick. Also, when positioning the camera under my arm and not looking, I knew my camera and lense well enough that I could position the subject within the frame without looking. The autofocus was on because as I was working quickly and the autofocus ‘beep’ was switched off, as it normally is, so no attention was drawn when shooting the extra shots. All of these combined to get the shot.

I hope the above information helps, in terms of trying to get a shot under pressure. The main points I want to highlight are (i) to know your equipment to the point where you can use it blinfolded (ii) try to anticipate the shot and shot location before you get there and set yourself up accordingly  (iii) act quickly, in preparation and when the subject appears (iv) try to squeeze out that one last shot if you aren’t convinced you got it, or you need to ‘cover your bases’.

Interestingly, as a side note, I was contacted a day later my another newspaper, this time in Australia. They wanted to use the image seen in the Guardian. I sent through the picture, plus a  few other images from the sequence. They decided to go with a different picture (IMG_5032). Lesson? Different editors may go for different pictures. Always give them a choice. Even if you only have 17 frames to work with!

The Age | Australia

<<Return to the Learning Zone

Charlotte, poses for a photo, during a break between classes. 2007

*This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ is an image from my story on the Bethel Training Center for Blind Orphans, currently being featured on the Photophilanthropy website. Below is the extract which supports the story. To see more images from this story, please click on the Photophilanthropy link.”

“I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden.” – Helen Keller, Blind and Deaf US Writer.

There are around 500,000 blind and visually impaired children in China. As a result of China’s strict one-child policy, children born with physical or mental disabilities are regularly abandoned as parents strive to have their only child born ‘normal’ and well.

In 2003, a young French couple, Guillhaume and Delphine Gauvine, founded the Bethel Training Centre for Blind Orphans near Beijing. Having sold everything they owned in the West, they relocated to China, setting up their training center as a response to their concerns about the lives of orphans in state orphanages, especially those suffering from blindness.

In December of 2003, Guillaume and Delphine took their first 3 orphans. Now, their project “Love is Blind” has expanded into a 17-acre property, housing over 30 blind orphans, with 50 local staff caring for them 24 hours a day. Their foster home is one of the only institutions throughout the whole of China which specifically provides education and care to orphans with disabilities.

When I first discovered Bethel in 2007, Guilhaume and Delphine welcomed me into their home to witness and photograph the extraordinary lives of their young children. After having been abandoned and facing the incomprehensible challenges associated with blindness at the beginning of their young lives, I arrived expecting to tell a tale of despair and sadness at the situations these children found themselves in. What I found however was the complete opposite; I discovered the most inspiring place I have ever been to.

Bethel is a place of love, joy, kindness and most importantly, hope.

A Japanese child, perched on his mother's bike. 2003

I was trawling through my archive today, looking for images to accompany a presentation that I am giving as part of my workshop tomorrow. As I looked through my ‘older’ files, I stumbled upon many of my images that I took while I lived in Japan between 2003-2004. I had just finished University and I was quite unsure about what direction my life was taking. Having been dabbling in photography for a year or two, I decided to take myself off to Japan in order to experience a completely alien culture to my own and see what it brought out in me photographically.

At the time I did not work as a professional photographer. I was on the JET programme, an initiative run by the Japanese government that brought native English speakers to the country to teach schoolchildren. I was based in the small and little-known town of Himeji, on the coast, south of the larger cities of Kobe and Osaka. My main school was in Himeji itself, however for two days of the week I would get on a boat and head out to a small group of islands off the Japanese coast to teach in a school that served the small archipelago.

My daily commute involved a 20 minute bike ride to the local docks, a 25 minute speedboat ride and then another 20 minute bike ride to the school. Not the worst way to travel to work! On one of my commutes whilst cycling on the small islands, I stopped at a small junction and saw this young Japanese buy perched on his mother’s bike. Using my small Minolta Dynax 5, loaded with my favourite film at the time, Fuji Velvia 50, I snapped this one frame of the boy.

I love this photo, as it is one of the first portraits that I was truly happy with and it takes me straight back to my experience of living and working in Japan. The islands (called Ieshima, by the way) were a unique place, and like Japan, hold a special place in my memories living, working and travelling in Asia.

My Image on the front page of Canada's national newspaper yesterday.

I got a surprise yesterday evening when I got a text from a colleague telling me that one of my photos had run on the front page of Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have been contributing the visuals from China quite a lot to the Globe and Mail recently. They are a great team to work with and I was delighted to see that they had decided to run my photo of Mao Zedong’s personal photographer Hou Bo, taken at her home in Beijing, as part of the coverage of China’s 60th birthday.

If you missed my last post about this assignment and meeting this remarkable photographer, please head here to read it.

China. Beijing. A young boy in a hutong near Tiananmen Square. 2005

I first came to China in the autumn of 2005. I had just finished a 1-year paid internship at Magnum Photos in London and upon the completion of the internship, Magnum gave me and my fellow interns a grant in order to help begin our work as photographers. The grant basically enabled us to afford a plane ticket to anywhere in the world. I decided to go to China.

For 6 weeks, I walked the traditional alleways, or  hutongs, that make up the old part of the center of Beijing working on a story about the disappearance and destruction of these traditional neighborhoods. One evening I came across this young boy, standing, watching the world pass him by in a hutong to the south of Tiananmen Square. At this point, I spoke virtually no Chinese which presented the challenge of trying to capture a portrait without being able to communicate with my subject. So, how do you do it?

Any photographer who has photographed in other countries to their own, where they do not speak the language, face this challenge. There is no hard and fast way to achieve a natural shot, however I have always found that your body language in these situations is the most important thing. Making eye contact is number one. You must be able to speak through your posture, your smile and your nature with the camera so that you project a feeling that is completely unthreatening to the subject. If you can achieve this, you don’t actually need any words at all to approach a subject and take their picture. This process and method takes time, practice and patience. Inevitably sometimes people will not want to have their photo taken and in these situation you should always just smile, respect their wishes and move on. The vast majority of the time though, people will open up to you with little or no effort on your part.

Children, or people of a younger age, tend to be easier to photograph like this in my personal opinion. They are less threatened or wary of you taking their picture. To begin practising this method, of photographing without talking, they are the best age group to begin with to build up your confidence. Once you start to feel more confident, try photographing other age groups with exactly the same approach.

At the end of the day, it’s all about your body language. Stay confident, project an unthreatening demeanor and most important of all, treat your subjects with respect.