Ask me anything…

June 14, 2013 1 Comment

©Neil Turner, June 2012. Dorset.

©Neil Turner, June 2012. Dorset.

Whilst looking back through some of my most popular blog posts in the last few years a surprising number of them were written in response to questions that other photographers and students of photography have asked me. That got me thinking about posting this simple update with a very simple request/offer:

“ASK ME ANYTHING… WELL SOMETHING… ALMOST ANYTHING…”

So not exactly ANYTHING – I’m only going to answer interesting questions about photography and my own work! Please use the contact form or reply to this blog posting. You could tweet me but I might miss that given the avalanche of stuff that goes across my desk each day. I will then pick out a couple of questions and use them to write future blog posts. Great… get other people to come up with the ideas!!!

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The constant software update dilemma

April 20, 2013 Leave a comment

Back in the day we used to occasionally try out new chemicals and different printing papers. We used to experiment with new film stock when it hit the market and, on the whole, it was a welcome distraction from the day-to-day work. In the digital era we have to get new cameras a bit more often and we need to keep our IT current but the biggest battle and the largest dilemma is software. Because I teach a bit and because I am a complete anorak** I always have a look at new software packages as they become available.

menu_bar_screen_grab

Keeping up to date is not cheap. Upgrades are often necessary – especially when none of the software companies make their RAW converters backwards compatible when new cameras and new lenses hit the market. The move by Adobe towards the monthly or annual subscription model is very interesting and brings into very sharp focus the real cost of having the latest software. I have written before about making the business case for buying new gear and the same formula should apply to upgrading software. Every time I talk or write about these kinds of financial decisions, the same piece of music pops into my head… Bruce Springsteen’s song “Cautious Man” where there is a line that says:

“When something caught his eye he’d measure his need
And then very carefully he’d proceed”

lightroom_5_screen_shot

This week, to misquote the wonderful Fast Show, “I are mostly been playing with Lightroom”. To be more precise I have been looking at the new Lightroom 5 beta that Adobe have made available. This comes against a background of having experimented with pretty much every version of Lightroom since it hit the shops back in 2007 and found that I wasn’t entirely sold on the application despite seeing why others love it so much. And that is a huge part of the software conundrum – there are lots of options that achieve pretty much the same end result but get there via very different routes. If, like me, you shoot RAW pictures you need to have a way of editing, captioning, renaming, converting, saving, delivering and archiving your work. This can be achieved using a single application or you can use three , four or five different ones – it really doesn’t matter as long as your workflow is repeatable, flexible, efficient and accurate.

I will write a lot more about Lightroom 5 when I have really used it properly but I have to say that it seems a lot quicker than the previous version and the interface for Adobe RAW Converter is even closer to to the version that I use in Photoshop CS6 than ever – making using Lightroom a lot easier for me. I have also realised that Adobe’s efforts to create a programme for photographers to edit their work in are bearing fruit. The time has definitely arrived when I could easily do without Photoshop altogether and run pretty much everything from Lightroom. Of course that doesn’t mean that I want to… yet.

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Saving an author’s life

March 21, 2013 2 Comments

This is not a claim to any act of great heroism, it’s not even a particularly accurate heading but I’ve been wanting to tell more ‘stories behind the pictures’ for quite a while and I’ve decided to give them all pretty eye-catching headlines. This portrait of the author Philippa Gregory has a story behind it that I have enjoyed telling many times over the years since I took it in 2004.

©Neil Turner/TSL. Philippa Gergory, October 2004.

©Neil Turner/TSL. Philippa Gergory, October 2004.

I was shooting a lot of portraits of authors and academics at the time and I was given the job of meeting Philippa Gregory who had just written “The Other Boleyn Girl” and shooting her portrait to accompany an  interview in one of the magazines that I worked for. No problem, run of the mill? Well… yes and no. The location that I was given was rapidly becoming an issue.

Let me explain: in the three or four years leading up to this particular job I had been sent to shoot three portraits of authors at a particular hotel in central London favoured by one or two publishers as a place for them to stay if they needed a hotel or as a great place to hire a private room for interviews and photography when they were on the publicity trail promoting new books. Once again, pretty run of the mill stuff. Except. Except the three previous subjects that I had shot at this particular venue had all died within a few months of having their picture taken by me. I’m not superstitious. I live at No13 and I couldn’t care less about black cats crossing my path. I have a healthy respect for ladders and I try to avoid blindly walking under them – that’s a mixture of common sense and the fact that my Father once dropped some turpentine on me when he was painting our house when I was about six or seven years old. Superstitious I am not but I did have a 100% record of people that I photographed at this hotel being dead pretty shortly after having their picture taken.

This presented me with a few issues.

  1. I didn’t know how well I would be able to put the idea of another ex-author on my hands when shooting if I decided to ignore what was rapidly becoming a curse.
  2. If I wanted to go elsewhere, how was I going to explain that idea in mid-October to the author and her publicist?
  3. Where else could I go and how far should I be away from the hotel to avoid worrying?
  4. What would the reporter who was doing the interview think?

Driving to the location I decided to try my best to get the subject away from the hotel. Hyde Park was only a couple of hundred yards away and  it shouldn’t be too tough to get her to cross four lanes of fast moving traffic in heels just to have her picture taken under the trees. Well, I arrived nice and early and I spoke to the publicist about atmosphere and about getting a picture that nobody else was going to get. I laid on what little charm I have and we agreed that a short walk (using the underpass rather than running across the road) was going to be OK. I got in before the interview, Philippa Gregory seemed happy to get some fresh air and we had ten productive minutes under some trees shooting a pleasant set of portraits. I even delivered her safely back to the hotel-of-doom in time for the interviewer to do her bit.

Now I’m not claiming to have actually saved the author’s life as such. I don’t even believe in curses or even in extended coincidence and the real truth is that all three of the authors that died were in their late 80s and 90s when I took their pictures. I was telling this story to an author’s agent the other day and she asked me what I would do if I was sent back to the same hotel to photograph an elderly author who was, for argument’s sake, wheelchair bound and it was a day when it was bitterly cold? Tough question…

For those amongst you who always want to know about gear and settings:

  • Canon EOS1D MkII with a 70-200 f2.8L IS lens at 145mm 
  • 1/22nd of a second at f5.6 on 100 ISO
  • Lumedyne Signature Series flash kit with 32″x24″ Chimera Softbox

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Elinchrom Ranger Quadra Update

March 6, 2013 4 Comments

What do you call it when something that was already very good gets quite a lot better? Well I guess that would be an upgrade. That’s exactly what happened yesterday when I changed to the new Lithium Ion batteries on my Elinchrom Ranger Quadra kit.

New lithium ion on the left and the old lead gel on the right.

New lithium ion on the left and the old lead gel on the right.

From the picture above, you can see that there is an appreciable size difference – which is always handy but there’s no way that I would have swapped them out just because of that – after all, they weren’t exactly huge to start with. There are four real reasons that I swapped:

  1. My old batteries were over four years old and had stopped holding a full charge – especially in the cold weather
  2. Elinchrom claim a higher capacity of up to 320 full-power flashes per charge for the new battery compared to only 150 for the old ones
  3. Faster recycle times. I’m going to have to believe Elinchrom and my own gut feeling here because you cannot compare brand new batteries to four year old ones in any meaningful way but at full power the recycle time appears to have halved to just over 1.5 seconds
  4. They weigh a lot less – 892 grammes less each. The new battery is 784 grammes compared to the old one which was 1,676 grammes. With two batteries in my kit I have saved a massive 1,792 grammes

Less weight, even in a rolling case, has got be a good thing 99% of the time and I am really looking forward to having to carry less. Of course I have always loved using the pack and battery to weight the base of the lighting stand down when working outdoors. I might have to find a few rocks and bricks lying around to supplement the pack more often that I used to but that’s fine by me.

I’ve only managed to shoot two small jobs with them so far and the speed of the recycling is great – even with my four year old Ranger Quadra pack and S heads. Some portraits yesterday afternoon shot indoors and on a lower power setting had the kit recycling in a fraction of a second which made the job go very smoothly indeed.

I have yet to try out the new Quadra Hybrid pack which promises all sorts of extras that I don’t think that I need. Elinchrom offer an upgrade to packs as old as mine to get the brighter display but my purchasing decisions these days are made on a perceived need rather than on wanting the shiniest and newest kit.

I’ve blogged about this Elinchrom kit before. The first time was in May 2009 when I’d only had the kit a short while. 32 months later I blogged again and, in what has become my most popular posting ever, I gave my considered review of the kit. One of the first comments on that posting alerted me to the new batteries being on their way. It’s taken me twelve months to get around to getting the new batteries and having the small modifications done to the S heads and I’m a happy man.

In the “32 months on” review I mentioned a few other things that I’d like to have seen produced to go with this kit. In the last six months I have become less and less pleased with the Skyport remote system that comes with the Ranger Quadra. The original triggers were prone to falling out of the hot shoe and the controls on the mark two version are tough to see in low light. I know that the whole raison d’être of this system is to be small and lightweight but they went too far with the Skyport transmitter – so much so that I’ve gone back to using Pocket Wizard Plus III transceivers a lot of the time at the expense of being able to remotely control the power.

So, Elinchrom – I hope that some senior managers are reading this… if you really want to make my happiness complete, can you please produce a transmitter that works with the EL Skyport receiver built into my Quadra pack that takes AA batteries, is about the size and weight of the Pocket Wizard Plus III unit with a digital display that has all of the functionality of the small Skyport transmitter but that is easy to use in subdued light, doesn’t require a tough-to-find button battery and that stays in the hot shoe properly. Pretty please?

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Getting colour right on four year old cameras

March 4, 2013 3 Comments

Back in June 2010 I wrote a blog post about getting the colours to match on multiple Canon digital camera bodies. Ever since then I have tried really hard to keep my cameras synchronised for colour and contrast as well as making sure that the clocks are set to identical times. What has become obvious to me is that as cameras get older they shift their colour balance and the shift seems to accelerate a little. What has also become obvious is that the clocks built into Canon digital cameras get out of synchronisation far too quickly.

WB Shift on a Canon EOS5D MkII

WB Shift on a Canon EOS5D MkII

Getting the clocks the same is a simple task: you can either do it in the menu on the camera or synchronise the clocks when the camera is connected to the computer using the very useful Canon EOS Utility software – a simple task that I find needs to be checked at least every four to five weeks. When I did the synch’ this morning two Canon EOS5D MkII bodies were nearly fifteen seconds different.

Moving on to the much trickier question of colour, I suggest that you read the old post before actually doing any work. Getting two cameras to match takes a while and getting three to match when one of them has a significantly different chip is even harder. This time I was simply wanting to get my two four-year-old 5D MkIIs to give me the same colour rendition as each other. I had started to notice that one required quite a bit more magenta removal than the other and so I put my 70-200 lens on a tripod, connected the first camera (which was giving me some fairly magenta images) to the laptop and mounted the body onto the lens. I built myself a little still life with a cereal box and a grey card, lit it with a reliable flash on manual power output and shot a frame or two.

My makeshift test target

My makeshift test target

The images were brought into Canon’s EOS Utility software and then into Photo Mechanic on the calibrated computer screen and I had a look. The grey was noticeable pink and the whites on the cardboard box were too and so I adjusted the white balance shift (WB SHIFT/BKT in the camera menu) from it’s starting position of B1,G2 to B1,G4 and took a couple more frames. Much better, but still a tiny bit magenta. I shifted it to B1, G5 and took another picture and the grey was finally grey and the white was finally as white as it could get.

That was the first camera sorted. All I had to do was to get the second one to match it. Leaving the lens on the tripod I simply swapped the bodies over,  matched the exposure and fired a couple more frames. This body was on B0, G1 and, after a bit of fiddling, I got the colours to match by eye on B1 G2. Comparing the frames shot on the two cameras showed that one was a tiny amount more contrasty than the other and so I simply adapted the Picture Style “standard” that I habitually use for RAW files to get the contrast between the two cameras to match as well.

All-in-all it took about thirty-five minutes to set the kit up and get the results that I wanted (including synchronising the clocks). On my shoot today everything was the right colour as soon as I dragged it into Adobe Camera RAW from both cameras and I saved myself a fair amount of computer time – which is important because in the editorial markets where I make most of my money nobody pays for the time you spend in front of the screen and adjusting images from two different cameras can take quite a bit of time.

For me, this kind of techie stuff is vital. A lot of people just plough on and shoot without ever calibrating or changing anything but I am sure that thirty-five minutes work once every few weeks will save an enormous amount of time in between and time is, they say, money!

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The Copyright Fight

February 19, 2013 Leave a comment

It’s not very often that something comes up that threatens your livelihood in quite such a stark way as the current piece of legislation going through the UK Parliament. My colleague Eddie Mulholland says it far better than I could so please follow this link, read what he has to say and let your MP know that they need to remove the copyright clauses from the bill before our industry is damaged (again).

The Copyright Fight.

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