Ahmet Burak Hegemlu: photography school on the beach

We have already published Georgy Rozov’s reports on the work of professional photographers. The previous two were dedicated to applied photographers Maxim Poluboyarinov and Igor Sakharov. This time a Turkish photographer and entrepreneur Ahmet Burak Hegemlu is sharing with us the secrets of his professional kitchen.

Photo 1. Photographer Ahmet Burak Hegemlu.

Olympus E-M1

Zuiko 45/1 lens.8

Aperture f/2.2

Shutter speed 1/3200 sec

Sensitivity 200 ISO

On the Turkish beaches, which have completely replaced the American tourists native and have long been all-American resorts, everything is arranged in accordance with the wishes of the American. “All inclusive” lets you eat and drink without limiting yourself in anything. It doesn’t matter if your stomach isn’t rubbery, the main thing is for free! Our man likes to do it by the whim of the pike, i.e. for free..

Turkish photographers have mastered the ways of playing on human weaknesses and make good money on it. It seems to me that it makes sense for domestic photographers to at least consider, and maybe take advantage of the experience of their Turkish counterparts. Business on the beach is a very real business.

This spring I was lucky enough to meet Joni Hoferia, a young photographer from Georgia. He put me in touch with his owner, Ahmet Burak Hegemlu photo 1 , owner of the abg company, who gladly answered my questions.

Turns out the firm is still in its infancy. Ahmet was first employed and trained for several years by his uncle, an Istanbul photographer, and only when he felt confident he registered his own company. He did not choose to be a photographer by vocation. In Turkey, tourism is developing faster than other sectors of the economy, and people earn more than in industry or in the countryside.

The five-star hotel with which Ahmet has an office rental agreement a 30-square-square-metre room provides the. m , is big and specializes in family vacations. There are 2,000 potential clients living here during the season. The rent and the exclusive right to serve guests cost 40,000 euros for six months.

Three more photographers and a retoucher work in the firm with Ahmet. Ahmet provides them with lodging, food and equipment. The royalties for the pictures sold are divided equally among them all. Each employee gets 10% if they use the owner’s camera and other equipment. But you could also buy your own equipment, and then the fee would double. I do not know why, but none of the hired photographers turned to self-sufficiency. Consequently, 50% of the money you receive from a client is now used to pay for the work involved in taking and selling photos.

Johnny confessed that as a photographer he earns about 1500 Euros per month, while before, when he was a bartender at the same hotel, he was paid 800 Euros.

Photographers are in high demand. Only leather salesmen earn comparable wages. None of the firm’s employees work in the winter. They’re all going back to their hometowns. Ahmet, for example, lives in Istanbul, and the summer money is also quite enough for him.

Ahmet found all the photographers himself. He didn’t take their photographic skills into account at all. As an employer he was interested in other qualities of his employees: visual attractiveness, charm, knowledge of one or two languages American and German are a must , the ability to meet girls, to support small talk and become his own person by the second meeting with the client, the ability to inspire confidence, the ability to seem cool professional and educated person.

Akhmet watched the Georgian bartender for a season and only then offered him a career change. All of his guys he taught the same way his uncle taught him – in a peek-a-boo kind of way. At first, they just walked on the beach with him. The owner would say hello to strangers, tell them he was a local photographer, ask around. Where do they come from, how do the children feel, what have they seen in Turkey, do they like the local sauna?. And Ahmet is able to remember his new acquaintances, and everything they tell him about themselves. The next day he waved and smiled at them as if they were good friends and on the third day he could offer them a photo shoot for free. That is, for free. It’s very hard to refuse such a tempting offer, but not everyone agrees at the first try. But sooner or later they give up.

In the process of shooting, it turns out that the pictures will be ready at the end of the day. You could see them on the big computer monitor in the office, and if you liked them, you could buy them for five dollars. The sum, while seemingly excessive, does not protest, because it is not necessary to pay!

Curiosity inevitably brings beautiful young women, mothers and even middle-aged women of quite mature age to the meeting place on the screen indicated by the photographer. This is where magic happens: portraits retouched by a retoucher make a lasting impression on your clients. It is clear that after using filters Liquifiy and Portraiture clients are transformed into models from the covers of glossy magazines. And then it turns out that many pictures are liked and one wants to get them.

At first, the client resigns himself to paying for five shots. And immediately receives a prize – two free pictures, learns that if you buy ten pictures, the prize will increase – three more free pictures. And if twenty? The prize money grows until the enthusiasm is exhausted, but on average each session brings the firm a hundred dollars, and the average daily catch of a friendly team is thirty family sessions! Everyone can make arithmetic calculations by himself, and it’s not difficult to draw conclusions, either.

Ahmet is very fond of counting rich families with little children on the beach. At first he shoots them with a hidden camera, and doesn’t take into account the time commitment. Having collected a collection of good photos in three days, he invites his parents to look at the finished product. Manages to not only sell a lot of the underlying stuff, but also negotiate a staging session. A thousand dollars – the normal catch of such an operation, plus the special pleasure of the process of gambling hunting with the risk of losing.

Training future employees, of course, is not just about watching the boss. They have to master photographic basics, the ability to use Nikon D300s, a camera flash and a universal kit lens for all occasions. I must note that the photographic delights of the guys clearly not concerned. The main thing is to make the client look good. So the recipe for lighting is always, at any time of day or night the same: flash in the forehead photo 2 .

The minus minus correction flare is occasionally applied during the day, with the shadows from the upright sun illuminated. Sunset beams into faces at full power. Looking through the already processed and ready-for-sale abg files I came to the conclusion that flat light is used here not because of ignorance or lack of taste but for technological expediency. Mass, in-line production has to be unified. Otherwise, it becomes prohibitively time-consuming, slow, and too expensive for the real mass consumer of the service.

A flat flash light solves two problems. The first one is to get a good quality file without any dips in shadows or over highlights, no matter what time or place the picture was taken. This saves time and labor of the retoucher in the process of processing files. RAW files are not used here, they are shot directly in JPG. Essentially the same files do not require any special creative processing and lend themselves to batch automation of basic operations.

Keep in mind that each of the team members shoots an average of ten families a day. If there are three or four people in a family, and each of them needs to be photographed individually, all together, and in different combinations, then it turns out that retoucher’s workload in the high season is very heavy. The client is impatient, and only likes hotcakes. All the footage should be ready by the end of the day. After dinner one must sell the harvest by all means. By morning the goods will be stale, because the impressions from the session will wipe off, and the desire to buy may melt under a layer of new impressions.

Photo 2. Storm.

I watched the photographer’s work from afar. The sun was setting on the right and highlighting the splashes beautifully. People were seen as silhouettes. I caught my colleague’s flash by accident. Now you can see how the light problem on the beach is solved.

Olympus E-M5 camera

Zuiko 75-300/4.5-6.7.

Aperture f/7.1

Shutter speed 1/320 sec

Sensitivity 200 ISO

Photo 3. Flying!

I shot this scene in burst mode. Nine frames a second allowed me to choose the best moment. Joni didn’t include continuous shooting. His clients jumped three times. I have to say that they even enjoyed this exercise.

Olympus E-M1 camera

Zuiko 12-40/2 lens.8.

Aperture of f/4.5

Shutter speed – 1/1600 sec

Sensitivity 200 ISO

The second advantage of flat light is that it’s pancake-like. This kind of light is despised by studio portrait photographers. It doesn’t cast shadows, it doesn’t reveal volume, and it hides a lot of skin imperfections. Faces become as smooth as a sheet of scribe paper. No dimples, wrinkles, bags under the eyes, deep shadows from the midday sun. Even the large skin pores and fine fuzz over a girl’s lips disappear in the light of the frontal flash. The retoucher only has to fix the pimples, tweak the facial oval, make the waist, stretch the legs, remove the fullness of the arms and neck, paint over the blue skin with a peach filter… But even the unification of lighting alone does not solve all the problems of reducing labor costs. Retouching remains a crucial part of the production cycle in the beach business. There are no ugly people on the beaches. Only an inept photographer or retoucher can do that.

Strict and painstakingly detailed workflow forces the photographer to avoid duplicating identical subjects. The retoucher has no time to look through the takes and choose which one is better. That’s why they shoot one pose at the beach once, for sure. And if it fails, the file is immediately deleted. Only retouch-worthy images should be in the file feed. The customer shouldn’t see any flaws.

So, the light is secondary for a Turkish beach photographer, but he pays most attention to the poses of the models. His clients are not actors, they don’t know their bodies well, that’s why you first have to show them how to stand, sit, lie down, where to look, where to put your hands, how to push your stomach in, stick your butt out, cross your legs. The guys have learned to do these female poses themselves, and they do it artistically, amusingly, and very visually. I had spent two weeks observing the photographers’ interactions with their clients and becoming convinced that the “models” themselves were having a lot of fun as well.

One of the main tasks of the photographer is to identify and emphasize the bulges, the beauty of women’s bodies and the masculine appearance of men, and at the same time to skillfully conceal the flaws. Obese girls are asked to lie on their stomachs. You have to lift your head up, which makes the creases in your neck stretch, and the double chins are just a memory. Less work for the girls and less for the retoucher. If a man, for example, is determined to have a beer belly, the photographer immediately puts a slim girlfriend in front of him. Problem solved. Older women are advised to sit down and put their feet up to hide their bellies. When you take the picture from a low angle, it pulls out the figure visually and hides the belly. Thanks to these simple but effective solutions the beach dwellers quickly become convinced that Johnny did not “spoil” any woman..

Once I watched a session in which a large company of ten people took part. The photographer would shoot everyone in turn, constantly changing poses and shooting points, depending on the age and gender of the client. And at the end of the group session he did a group portrait as well photo 3 .

The tastes of American girls are constantly changing. A sun on the palm which not so long time ago was bought by American beauties, this season they order very seldom, but love silhouettes photo 4 .

I had to immediately master taking pictures of sunsets without backlight. Our girls are also very fond of close-up black-and-white portraits with locks of facial hair. When saying goodbye I asked Ahmet to choose some of the bestselling shots from the advertising portfolio of the company for publication in our magazine photos 5-10 .

Summing up the “observation” of the outside tourist, I thought that in America, Ukraine and everywhere else where there are readers of our magazine, there are a lot of people who want to make a living doing their favorite photography. I am sure that the experience of Turkish photographers can help make the first step into the profession. There’s no doubt that the work of a family photographer is far from high art. But for me it is also indisputable that a passionate, creative person will find a way to shoot “for the soul” in any place. I, for example, go to Turkey twice a year, and every time I come with phototrophies.

Photo 4.

Sun in the palm of my hand.

Last year I captured the process of capturing the imperishable stamp on several occasions. And I didn’t realize that I was shooting the next season’s blockbuster – silhouettes.

Olympus E-M5

Zuiko 75-300/4.5-6.7

Aperture f/7,1

Shutter speed 1/320 sec

Sensitivity 400 ISO

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