I chose the MacBook Air M5 for my work
My new Apple MacBook Air M5 arrives on launch day. 11 March 2026. © Neil Turner

A few months ago I wrote a blog post about the replacement cycle that I have been through since my very first laptop arrived in 1994. It’s complicated because for the last fifteen or so years I have always had at least two laptops on the go at any given time. That has tended to mean a “full-sized” MacBook Pro for the serious editing sessions and a MacBook Air for lugging around with me on jobs. Supplement that with a desk based computer and I’ve always been pretty well equipped.

About six hours after I posted which M4 chipped MacBook I was going to get Apple announced the M5 series of processors and I decided to wait a little while before committing my hard earned cash. I’ve watched the reports about the various configurations of M5 MacBook Pro models but in the end I decided that my need for a lightweight Mac was greater and ordered an M5 powered MacBook Air for delivery on the first day they became available. That was a couple of days ago and so far (and it really is early days) I am delighted with it. I opted for a 13″ M5 10‑core CPU, 10‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine model with 24Gb of RAM and a 1TB hard drive and, as you can see from the photograph above, I opted for the silver finish over the other options as it looks less conspicuous.

After setting it up from a Time Machine backup on a fast SSD external drive and going through and swapping licenses around to enable everything to work my new Mac was ready to roll. “So how is it going?” I hear at least one of you asking…

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Old dog, new tricks
Photo ©Neil Turner, February 2023

Hands up if you read the release notes when you go to update a piece of software. Anyone? Just me?

My actual answer is “occasionally moving towards regularly”. In photographic terms I am most definitely an old dog and whilst I wouldn’t say that I enjoy learning new tricks I definitely benefit from quite a few of them. I write about them on here from time-to-time as well.

This blog post was triggered because I actually took the time to read the blurb for the two main bits of software that I use day in and day out: Photo Mechanic and Adobe Camera RAW within Adobe Photoshop. Neither update was spectacular but my rabbit hole tendencies made me go back and see what else I had missed in previous updates and I think that I found one or two gems that will be very useful going forward. I’m not going to go through and list everything but I thought that it would be useful to mention a few.

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Understanding photography through quotes and inspiration

I mostly write on here about the business of photography, photographic techniques and photographic equipment. Every once in a while I will indulge myself and wander off into simply thinking about photography and see where a few paragraphs take me. With that in mid, let’s go.

In early December we were on holiday in Venice and whilst wandering around some of the beautiful back streets of one of our absolute favourite cities we stumbled across a small gallery showing the work of two British artists so we went in. We were lucky enough to met them and in chatting about galleries, art and shows to see they told us that there was a major exhibition of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe showing for a limited time at Le Stanza della Fotografia on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

Immediately I have three thoughts here: The show was wonderful as you would expect from such a famous photographer. Secondly, the gallery was itself gorgeous and probably one of the best dedicated spaces for showing photography anywhere that I’ve been. Thirdly, and finally, I kept my ticket and it has been sitting on my desk since we returned home. You can see above that the reverse side has a quote from Helmut Newton “Photography is always a way of seducing”. There were several quotes on the backs of people’s tickets but this one was mine. My wife got Josef Koudelka’s ” The biggest lesson in photography is that from negative we make positive”.

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Merry Christmas
Sometimes the best light is when there isn’t very much of it. This photograph shot on a rainy winter’s evening in Venice in December 2025 is proof that can be the case. ©Neil Turner

The year is rapidly drawing to a close and everyone is looking back at 2025 with the familiar mix of joy, regret and thankfulness. We all have high hopes for 2026 and that goes for both our personal and professional lives.

So how has 2025 been for me and my work? Well – a mixture of joy, regret and thankfulness sums it up surprisingly accurately. It has been quieter than the previous three or four years with a little less travel and fewer peaks of excitement but my clients both new and old have presented me with moments that I will treasure and memories that will stay with me for a long time.

The joy of being out there, cameras in hand and doing what I love to do is just as real and just as strong as it ever was. Combine that with the joy of seeing my work used well and widely it’s been a good year.

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Calm, confident and in control

Dame Janet Baker operatic mezzo soprano. January 2008. ©Neil Turner/TSL

In my career (39½ years and counting) I have shot a lot of portraits and probably as many headshots. I’m not going to go back over my definitions of either or the subtle differences between them right here but when I point my cameras at the subjects there’s one question that I get asked. A lot.

“How should I look?”

For the first bit of my career I didn’t have a stock answer so I would often turn the question back on them: “How do you want to be seen?” It worked sometimes, occasionally failed miserably but mostly solved nothing. “Just relax and pretend that there isn’t a big bloke with a big camera and a few lights pointing at you” was never going to become the simple and snappy response that I required. It didn’t even worked on the few occasions that I tried to inject some humour with it.

I started to make mental notes about who asked the question, what kind of person they were and one thing started to become really obvious – those who had been photographed professionally a few times before rarely asked whilst those who hadn’t often did. Not entirely surprising, but interesting nevertheless.

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Trying new things
The Sarum Lights exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral. November 2025. © Neil Turner

Whilst doodling around on the internet the other day I was looking at a few reels on Instagram. Now it probably won’t come as much of a surprise that that my Instagram feed is filled up with great photographers and so it will equally make sense that the all-powerful algorithm serves me up photography related content most of the time. One of the reels was from a relatively young and relatively inexperienced photographer proclaiming that he had discovered a new technique. It went on to show a technique that is, to me, as old as the hills. Dragging the shutter to create a deliberate blur.

I was just about to type something that gently and constructively pointed out that this wasn’t anything new and that an old hand like me rarely (if ever) sees anything that’s truly new when I decided to see what other viewers of the reel had commented first. Sure enough, there was a small number of constructive and supportive comments but the vast majority of them were not even remotely constructive and way too many were downright dismissive. I breathed a huge sigh of relief that I hadn’t been that person – the one who sought to boost their own sense of self-importance by squashing the joy and enthusiasm of someone who had discovered a potentially exciting technique that was new to them.

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The laptop cycle

I’ve had laptops since the mid 1990s and I have used each of them until they were no longer capable of doing their job quickly and efficiently. Most of that work has involved editing photographs and the vast majority of the time those edits have been completed away from the office. The title of this post is “The laptop cycle” and I called it that because my needs from a laptop vary over time. Things are changing again and it appears that I am just rotating into a period where I am doing a lot of editing on the road.

For the last couple of years I have either been uploading direct from my cameras and then doing a considered edit when I am back at my desk or doing some very simple and quick edits on my 2021 M1 MacBook Air. I bought it as a back up for a fully loaded 2017 MacBook Pro and to have as a lightweight travel companion. In 2022 I invested in an M1 Mac Studio for the office and the older MacBook Pro (which still works fine) was relegated to being a back up itself. The 2017 machine which felt relatively lightweight when I bought it now feels pretty cumbersome and so I haven’t carried it on a job since early in 2021.

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In my camera bag, 2025

Writing a blog for over a quarter of a century means occasionally repeating yourself and/or celebrating anniversaries of things. Back in 2011 a regular follower of my posts used my “Ask Me a Question” link to enquire about what was in my day-to-day camera bag. I duly wrote a post called “In My Camera Bag” in which I listed everything that was in my go-to bag of choice at the time. A couple of Canon EOS5D MkII bodies, two 580ex II flash units and 16-35, 24-70 and 70-200 f2.8 L lenses lived in a LowePro Stealth Reporter 650AW bag along with a Mac laptop and quite a few accessories. That was a heavy bag.

Fast forward seven years to 2018 and my much loved and rather ancient Domke J3 camera bag (pictured above) was filled with two EOS5D MkIV bodies, 16-35, 24-70 and 70-200 f4L lenses with two 600EX RT II flashes. By this time my laptops were carried in a tiny little rucksack because I’d been through some bad experiences with a spinal issue and didn’t necessarily need to carry it all of the time. I’m not sure when I bought the bag but it was well over twenty years ago and when I wrote the 2018 remix version of what I carried in my camera bag of it was already my well-worn favourite.

So, a further seven years on, here are some short updates on a few bits of kit that still spend a considerable amount of time in the same old bag.

  • Canon EOS R6 MkII camera bodies
  • Canon EOS R5 MkII camera bodies
  • Canon RF 14-35 f4L lens
  • Canon RF 24-105 f4L lens
  • Canon RF 70-200 f4L lens
  • Canon RF 100-500 f4.5 – 7.1 L lens
  • Canon EL5 Speedlites
  • Canon ST-E10 Speedlite transmitters

Out of the two R6 MkII and two R5 MkII bodies there will be a total of two in the bag at any given time. I leave it packed with one of each just in case I get a short notice job and need to run out of the door but I rarely work that way and so I will pack the right bodies for the job before I leave and keep the others in the rolling bag with the rest of the spare kit because not all of it can be accommodated at the same time, and even if it could that would be a seriously heavy bag. Laptops live in small rucksacks or a Think Tank rolling bag depending on what I’m doing. I’m not going to mention the other gear sitting in a cupboard in my office but there are a few camera bodies, a dozen or so lenses and more flash units than any sane person should own. So, if you like the shortened version of the kit review – it goes like this:

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