Jeremy Humphries is an acclaimed director of photography, with many documentary series for the BBC, Channel 4, ITV, National Geographic and The Discovery Channel to his name. Many of Jeremy’s projects have been BAFTA nominated, and he is a winner of the award for Best International Cinematography.
In a 30-year career that spans the globe, Jeremy’s appetite for human stories is evident in a hugely diverse body of work that, to date, has covered politics, war, history, science, culture, music, social issues and even Gordon Ramsay’s cutthroat kitchen oratory. Wherever Jeremy’s work has taken him, his fascination with people, perspectives and their stories always shines through.
Trained in cinematography at the BBC, Jeremy’s later career as a trainer took off as production companies began to send self-shooters on location in place of traditional camera crews. But as Jeremy points out, despite the many gains the self-shooter brings to modern production, much now rests on their shoulders:
“For all the agility and immediacy that working solo allows, self-shooters today don’t have a team to turn to and learn from. And as a career advances and technology evolves, knowledge gaps emerge that can be hard to fill all by yourself.”
That’s why Jeremy founded Skills2Film; to give self-shooters a place to close skills gaps and develop their visual storytelling, whatever their experience.
Jeremy on visual story telling
We humans can’t remember lists. That’s why we created stories; a memorable coding system to share complicated information with each other. And because sight is our primary sense, we are also highly attuned to visual forms of storytelling.
Good films talk in pictures, using as few words as possible, with each shot carrying the story forward to its conclusion. The self-shooter’s challenge is to tell that story well, to have the big picture in mind before rolling, ready and alert to moments and visual associations that build context and enrich character across every frame.
With planning and technical training, the self-shooter is liberated to shoot in a state of flow, focusing fully on each moment within its wider narrative context. With preparedness and narrative clarity from the start, your pictures will be richer and your stories stronger.
Jeremy speaks
Listen to Jeremy talking about his remarkable career on the One Moment Please podcast. From shooting conflicts in Iraq and Angola, to filming troubled family lives in inner-city Britain, to capturing the stories of the last surviving British and German veterans of The First World War, Jeremy shares the highs and lows of his own unique story and a few of the lessons he has learned along the way.