Sunday Night Live is back, and I couldn't have asked for a better guest to start the new series than my friend Ben Kapur. The replay is above, and here's a flavour of what we talked about.
I've only known Ben for a few months. We met on the Wex Summer Roadshow, where Ben was filming all the promo, and it was our mutual friend Mark Baber who introduced us. It turned out we live about fifteen minutes from each other and had no idea, and after a five hour drive up to Manchester together that felt like twenty minutes because we didn't stop talking, we've been good friends ever since.
Failing photography, and what came next
Ben grew up in Lyme Regis, and like a lot of us he started out with a GoPro at around 14, filming mountain biking and jumping into the sea. When it came to choosing his AS levels, photography was the only option left that wasn't biology or chemistry, so he took it, then dropped out in year 13 and, in his words, failed it.
He told us he could never get his head round aperture, shutter speed and ISO back then, and the structure of the course didn't help, because just as he was starting to understand what an ND filter did for a long exposure, they'd moved on to something else.
The best bit is what happened years later. Ben's younger brother went to the same school, and his tutor turned out to be Ben's old photography teacher, who asked what Ben was up to now. When he heard Ben was a full-time photographer, his answer was that there was no way. I'll be honest, I loved that.
Photography properly took hold when Ben was 19 and met his fiancée Primrose, an actor and influencer who needed photos for her blog and Instagram, and whose dad is a photographer as well. Taking her pictures got him behind a camera regularly, and living on the Jurassic Coast did the rest, because when you've got compositions like that on your doorstep, landscape photography is hard to resist.
The Storm of Storr
In 2020 Ben won [FILL IN: the competition's exact name, it came up on the night as Scotland's Photo of the Year] with a picture he called the Storm of Storr, and the story behind it is a good one.
It was February 2020, just before lockdown, and Ben and his friend Paul had driven up to the Old Man of Storr on the Isle of Skye. It's about an hour's walk up to the viewpoint, and it was raining at the bottom and snowing further up. Paul sensibly sheltered behind a rock, but Ben carried on over the brow of the hill into sideways snow and something like 70 mile an hour winds.
He lasted a couple of minutes before deciding it was daft to be up there on his own, and on the way back down, with the snow freezing to his glasses so he could barely see, he just kept the camera pointed at the Old Man with the autofocus on and fired away. That's the frame that won.
He was shooting on a Lumix S1R at the time, back when he was a Panasonic ambassador; something he gets a bit of stick for, having changed systems a few times since. I'm hardly in a position to comment on that, and as I said on the night, it's about what's fit for purpose.
Kingfishers, and a lens that's older than you'd think
Wildlife is where Ben switches off, and right now that means kingfishers. His idea of a day off is getting up early to go and photograph them, which I completely understand; a follower once told him to leave the camera at home on holiday, and as Ben said, he'd rather book a trip somewhere beautiful and take it with him.
What I really like is how he talks about wildlife sharpening everything else he does. You never know what you're going to get, and with something as quick as a kingfisher you can't be fumbling around for settings, so knowing the camera inside out becomes second nature, and that carries straight into his client work.
He's moved from Sony to Canon, now using the EOS R5 Mark II and the C50, and for the kingfishers he's using the older Canon EF 500mm f/4L IS II, adapted onto the R5 Mark II. He tried it, along with an EF 400mm f/2.8, when Dave, one of the photographers on one of his workshops, brought them along, and he couldn't see any difference in the autofocus compared with a native lens. For something like a third or a quarter of the price of the new RF version, he's getting the look that only a long prime gives you.
He also showed us a clip of a kingfisher landing and shaking off the water, caught with the R5 Mark II's pre-record. He hadn't pressed record when the bird came in; he pressed it afterwards, and the camera had kept the five seconds before. If you've ever sat waiting for something to arrive with the camera recording the whole time, you'll see why that's such a big deal.
Golden eagles at minus 35
Last December Ben went to Sweden with Jack Lodge, [FILL IN: check the spelling, Rhiannon Lawler?] and Paul, looking for golden eagles from hides built by Conny Lundström, who has spent years photographing them. With two brilliant wildlife photographers already there, Ben decided to shoot video instead, and the short film he made, which we played on the night, was shot in a single afternoon at minus 35.
He edits everything himself in DaVinci Resolve, and he made a point I think a lot of photographers will recognise; you can create so much emotion with video and music. He came back to the cabin that night feeling sorry for those eagles, out in that barren landscape trying to find food, and that's what he cut the film to show.
Video is now most of what Ben does, and he describes himself as a videographer and photographer, in that order. Automotive work makes up a big part of it, with clients including Carwow and work for Ferrari through Joe Hayes at Kindle Creative, and he doesn't niche; he does everything and anything, which is clearly working for him.
Speak to people
Two pieces of advice from Ben stood out. The first was about honeypot locations. He's shot the Cobb hundreds of times, and his view is that the conditions are never the same twice, so go and shoot Durdle Door or Corfe Castle as often as you like, because you're learning every time.
The second was his one piece of advice for anyone starting out, which was simply to speak to people. Ask the photographers you look up to how they did something, and ask if you can tag along. After one of his talks on the Wex Roadshow, a young woman asked him about getting into wedding photography; Ben happened to be shooting a wedding near her that weekend, so with the couple's blessing he invited her along to shoot alongside him, and she's since launched her own website and is booking weddings of her own.
When I asked what he'd tell his 14 year old self, his first answer was to buy Bitcoin. His proper answer was not to give up. Not long after the Storr picture, YouTube and brand work had turned photography into a chore, and he stepped away from it for six months while working in an office job.
He said he feels lucky to be doing what he does now, and I pushed back on that a little, because I don't think luck has much to do with it. Ben's out with a camera most mornings before most people are up, and given what that teacher told him, keeping going is advice he's clearly already taken.
You'll find Ben on Instagram and YouTube as:
youtube.com/benkapur
@benkapurphoto