Welcome…

On Location

Not so long ago, and thanks in large part to a talented young chef whom I’ve been teaching photography as she makes the move in to food photography, I had the chance to photograph the professional kitchen at The Park on Queensway in West London — a restaurant from the renowned restaurateur Jeremy King.

Photographing in a busy working kitchen requires concentration. Not only on getting the pictures you want and the technical settings required to do so, but also no small amount of spatial awareness. People are focussed on their work and there’s a quiet intensity that co-exists with the noise and conversation that you don’t want to interrupt. With my eye to the viewfinder, I was very conscious of getting in peoples’ way, in what was a surprisingly small space - the last thing I wanted was be a nuisance!

I chose the 85mm f1.8 as it’s the perfect lens to allow a degree of distance from the subject, and by shooting wide open I was able to achieve a good amount of separation between the subject and the background through the shallow depth of field.

Despite there being no natural light whatsoever, the overhead fluorescent strip lights provided enough light for me to keep my ISO between 200 and 400. I could have pushed it further to achieve a more grainy look straight out of camera, but old habits die hard and I have a tendency to keep the ISO as low as possible for the ambient light.

Metering wasn’t a problem as there was a fairly consistent light at the working surface - presumably the lighting in professional kitchens is designed to be that way. I set my camera to meter for the highlights and adjusted the shutter speed as necessary, generally shooting between 1/200 and 1/400, the fastest being at 1/800 where there was a lot of light reflecting from all the stainless steel at the pass.

Although leaving the WB on AUTO often produces varying results between images, I do tend to leave it set to AUTO and adjust it in post, as creating a custom WB with a grey card on every location is a bit of a drag. If it had been a food shoot, I’d have created a custom WB, but as it was more documentary in style, and the intention was to produce black and white images, WB wasn’t an issue.

I decided to process this short series in black and white, because there's something about monochrome that suits documentary work, removing colour lets light, texture, and human expression carry the story. I even added a touch of grain in post to push it towards that analog film feeling.

SEE THE IMAGES HERE

Photo credit: Soulless AI slop generator

Will AI really replace Photographers?

There’s a lot of talk about Artificial Intelligence at the moment and the photography industry is no way immune to its impact. But how much of a threat is it really? I decided to put it to the test with the most accessible version of freely available software to see if we should all be worried. HERE ARE MY THOUGHTS

Photo Heroes

Sebastião Salgado

I was recently in Paris where an exhibition of one of my Photo Heroes, the magnificent Sebastião Salgado, was on at the Hotel de Ville. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get tickets but I decided that he would be a great person to kick off my randomly chosen selection of iconic photographers that everyone should know.

Born in Brasil in 1944, Salgado trained as an economist, working first for the International Coffee Organisation and later the World Bank. It was during his travels working with the World Bank that he witnessed tremendous human suffering which prompted him to take up photography as a way of documenting some of the most important issues faced by humanity and the natural world today.

His series on open face gold mining in Brasil as part of his “Workers” series is nothing short of spectacular, as is the rest of the project. It speaks to much of the human condition in its dealing with the relationship between consumerism and poverty in the face of a rapidly changing industrial landscape. In 1986 he spent just over a month in the Serra Pelada gold mine in Para state, living alongside the 50,000 men working in the most extreme conditions imaginable and produced a body of work that offers a vision of human dignity while exposing the brutality of the conditions the workers endured.

The entire Workers project took around six years to complete and spanned four continents. It was followed by two equally epic projects. “Migrations” saw him turn his lens on the mass movement and displacement of communities due to war, poverty and environmental collapse, and “Genesis” was what he called his “love letter to the planet” in which he highlighted the need to preserve the natural world, an cause he was deeply devoted to. Indeed, in the late 1990’s Salgado and his wife purchased a former cattle ranch in his home province of Minas Gerais which had left the local ecology devastated and over three decades they revived the nearly 6000 acres through a program of re-forestation to create a pristine area of protected rainforest which is now home to a healthy and diverse range of indigenous flora and fauna.

Unfortunately there is no single website to view his entire body of work but I would encourage some time spent on the various websites that have featured his work - just google his name, you won’t regret it.

Sebastião Salgado sadly passed away in May 2025 but his work remains as a lasting testament to the human condition and the of beauty of the natural world.

Colour Space

What is it and should you even care?

Colour is one of those things that at first seems very straightforward. We tend to understand colour in relation to traditional artistic theories of primary colours - Red, Blue and Yellow - which combine to produce secondary colours - Orange, Purple and Green.

Light on the other hand is described differently, the primary colours being Red, Green and Blue (RGB), which combine to create the secondary colours Cyan, Magenta and Yellow (CMY).

When we record colour digitally, we are working entirely in RGB, the colour space of light. This RGB data only becomes relevant to traditional colour theory at the print stage of the process, which to add to the confusion is based on using CMY and K (black).

Selecting the right colour space to accurately convey colour throughout that process is therefore an important decision for photographers.

Or is it?

Find out about more about Colour Space here.

Street Photo Walk

That’s it for now! As this is my first newsletter it’s more of a way of saying hi and thanks for signing up. If you have any questions, or suggested topics you’d like me to discuss, don’t be shy, just drop me an email and I’ll try and cover it in the Autumn edition.

Steve

www.stevefranck.com