Editing, editing and more editing
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The day that the taxi dumped us in the wrong place and we had a yomp across the Rio Olympic Park to the Main Press Centre. ©Neil Turner, September 2016

By the time I leave here tomorrow I will have been in Rio de Janeiro for three weeks. In that time I have managed to take less than a dozen photographs – none of which are of any note whatsoever. I’ve been here as part of the OIS Photos team as one of two editors with my colleague Julia Vynokurova grabbing RAW files from a seemingly endless stream of FTP transfers from the four amazing sports specialists that have been here shooting the Paralympic Games for the Olympic Information Service.

Editing and captioning other people’s work is something that I do from time-to-time and it is a whole different skill set from shooting and editing your own pictures. It may sound obvious but I wasn’t there when the pictures were taken and so I have to judge them against criteria set down by the client and by each individual photographer on the team. They only send the pictures that they judge to be their best from the LCD on the back of the camera and so the editor has to assume that the photographer likes the picture. Some only send the cream whilst others send a wider selection to be narrowed down at the edit stage and you get to learn really quickly which camp each of them falls into.

Some photographers add voice captions to their pictures whilst others include frames of scoreboards, close up of competitor’s numbers – basically they need to do as much as they can to help the editors identify people, places and events so that captions can be as full and accurate as possible. It all happens really quickly and turning the photographs around looking their best consistently takes skill.

The photographers that we have been working with here are shooting with different cameras too: Bob Martin and Thomas Lovelock were using Nikon D5 bodies whilst Simon Bruty and Al Tielemans were using Canon EOS1Dx MkIIs. That means subtle but important differences with the file handling – although I don’t think that there has ever been so little difference between the way the two major manufacturers top-of-the-range DSLR’s RAW files have rendered.

The picture preparation, even with the truly challenging light that we have had both indoor and outdoors here, is in many ways the easier bit. Getting the captions right takes time – especially if there’s no voice caption and no obvious clue who is in the picture. We have had to turn detective more than once eliminating people from the list of who it could be. The schedules and results system provided by the Rio Media service has been great along with a bit of selective Googling have combined to get the captions done.

Then there’s distribution. Getting our entire edit onto the www.oisphotos.com website (Photoshelter has proved to be really valuable again) quickly with a selection out to seven different wire agencies even more quickly has meant some long hours and intensive work. It has been worthwhile. We have got quality Paralympic images out there being used in printed and online media all over the world day after day. Athletes and their families have Facebooked and Tweeted us and Paralympic associations, federations and national committees have used our pictures right across social media as well as on their websites.

The pictures are there for everyone to see on the OIS Photos website and any and all editorial use is free. Have a look at the site – I’m going to do just that when I get five minutes too.

32 Months with the MkIII
SHM: The Vitality London 10,000

Lily Partridge of Aldershot Farnham and District crosses the line to win the women’s race. The Vitality London 10,000, Monday 30th May 2016. Photo: Neil Turner/Silverhub for Vitality London 10,000

Whenever you read about a camera the reviewer has usually had it in their hands for a few days and taken a few hundred frames with it. I’ve done it myself with all sorts of kit and I find it interesting that one of my most popular blogs  (a review of the original Elinchrom Ranger Quadra) was written when I had been using the kit for 32 months. As luck would have it I have been using Canon’s EOS5D MkIIIs for 32 months now and as the announcement of it’s widely leaked successor is only a week away I thought that now would be an excellent time to blog about my long-term opinion of these interesting cameras.

By the time my first MkIII arrived I had been shooting for almost five years with its predecessor – the Canon EOS5D MkIIs. I had grown to love the MkII despite its many quirks and faults and I knew them inside out and backwards. I had owned three of them at various times (never fewer than two) and had shot somewhere near half a million frames with them. In some professional circles that would qualify as barely worn in but when you don’t do bursts of three, four and more it takes a while to clock up that many pictures. I was quite excited by the announcement of the MkIII and blogged about it at the time saying that I would reserve judgement until I’d used one.

I need to say this: I have loved the 5D MkIII and almost everything about it pretty much from day one. It wasn’t just a little bit better than the MkII (which is what I had expected) it literally did everything better. From the far less annoying shutter sound (yes, really, the MkII shutter noise bugged me intensely) to the greatly improved layout of controls and from the vastly superior auto-focus to the improved image quality everything about the MkIII was an improvement. To this day, and having worked with files from just about every serious camera on the market, I find the image quality of the Mark 3 wonderful and the CR2s easy to work with in post-production. It may not have the highest pixel count and it may not top any tables designed to excite pixel-peepers but the files are a joy and the image quality displays subtleties and that indefinable je ne sais quoi that makes me smile. A lot.

Please don’t get me wrong, the EOS5D MkIII is not perfect. There are a couple of recurring build quality issues that Canon should have addressed during the product cycle rather than waiting to fix them with a new model. Almost every professional user of the MkIII that I know has had the disc on the mode dial with the various options on it fall off and/or lost the plastic multi-controller on the back of the camera. Neither should have been as easy to lose or as flimsily built as they were and having either replaced wasn’t cheap. Beyond those two niggles, on the odd occasion I put the camera into continuous shooting, I was never impressed by the 3.5 frames per second top speed and the 1/200th of a second flash synch has always been a disappointment. The LCD screens on mine have never felt that accurate and they have always looked very different from one another.

Beyond that I have always found that the camera fits beautifully into my hands and it is a joy to use – especially with smaller and lighter lenses. The MkIII is a versatile camera that fits into the range well and after four years on the market it can still hold its own – selling well and coming up on the used market a lot less often than most of its rivals.

The upcoming MkIV has an interesting list of features. Most of them are evolutionary (USB3, more megapixels and better video) and one or two will need to be explained to me when the announcement is official.

Just as I said when the MkIII appeared I will need to do the mathematics and decide whether buying a couple of these new cameras will be cost-effective for my business because there’s a distinct possibility that the advantages won’t make me any more money. Built in wifi and GPS are a good idea but I have the WFT-E7 which gives you so much more than the built-in wifi on a camera such as the EOS6D – a camera whose GPS has been switched on to see how it works, realised how much it drains the battery and switched off again.

Having used an EOS1DX MkI for a few days I have high hopes for the implementation of the communication settings on the MkIV. We have fed lots of information back to Canon over the last couple of years and I hope that they have listened. I am also looking forward to what they are going to do with their bundled software. EOS Utility is crying out for some easy improvements and I hope that this new camera will be shipped at the same time as na better application to aid setting it up and maintaining it.

We are all different and we all want subtly different things from our gear. I am quite excited about the EOS5D MkIV but whether or not excitement will turn into ownership is a whole other matter.

Photography compared to…
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BOURNEMOUTH, DORSET. 08 April 2016. A fairground on Redhill Common. © Photo Neil Turner – Freelance photographer.

When you try to explain concepts in photography to someone who isn’t deeply embedded in the art/craft/science/passion it makes sense to find something else top compare it to. My favourite comparisons are driving, cooking and sport.

Driving is something most of us do and, on the whole, we do it without having to think too much about the basics. I’ve talked about it before so I’ll quickly recap my thoughts:

Changing gear, using the indicators, knowing when to use windscreen wipers and headlights are all pretty much done on auto-pilot whilst we think more consciously about road awareness, speeds, traffic, navigation and much else besides. The comparison to photography is an easy one to make because there are basic controls that we like to think are second nature; exposure, focusing, making sure we have memory cards and batteries whilst composition and anticipating things happening in front of your camera (and often off to the side and behind you) are things that require more conscious thought.

Tempting though it is to continue stretching the analogy I want to move onto cooking. All pictures have some basic ingredients and the skill of photography is to take those basics, add some interesting extras and know how to combine them and serve them up. That’s the schmultzy bit out of the way. Great chefs (and I’ve photographed a few and dined in the restaurants of several) are constantly looking for new twists and the odd exotic ingredient whilst making food that serves the joint purpose of feeding and engaging diners. Mediocre chefs overdo it, use too many trendy techniques and ingredients at the same time and generally fail in the main task of presenting good food where substance and style are in balance. The rest of us when cooking do the same old dishes, warm up too many ready meals and generally avoid any pretence of culinary ambition or expertise.

I’m pretty sure that I don’t even need to draw the comparisons between cooking and photography except to say that I’d almost rather have the gourmet food and the home cooked stuff all of the time and miss out the self-regarding nonsense in the middle. Restaurant critics and food writers have a lot in common with people who write pretentious twaddle about photography. This is one analogy that can go on for a long time.

So what about sport? I am sitting and writing this on the day of the opening ceremony for the 2016 Rio Olympics thinking of my many friends and colleagues who are already there working as photographers, editors and photo managers. They will be watching/photographing/witnessing some of the finest athletes in the word today. Athletes that have spent years perfecting their skills and getting themselves into peak condition being photographed by many of the finest photographers who have also spent years getting to where they are today.

Comparing photography to sports isn’t so much about finding similarities – it’s more about the differences. When you run 400 metres as a professional nothing much changes. Tracks are tracks and running shoes develop little by little. I know that diet, training and off-track activities change but, essentially, the principal task remains the same because running one lap of a track as fast as possible is what it is; tremendously tough but always the same. Photographing that event is a constantly changing thing. From black and white to colour, from manual focus to auto-focus and now we have to shift the pictures extremely rapidly too. Technology means that day-to-day, week-to-week and year-to-year shooting the same kind of job changes. An athlete remains at the top of their game for a relatively short time whilst the best photographers are around for decades. A swimmer attending their third or fourth Olympics is news whereas a photographer doing that would be just getting started!

Comparing apples with bananas has value when trying to explain the wider art and craft of photography to someone whose experience has been the odd compact camera and their smartphone. Right now I need to go and explain why it takes at least three hours to do the post-production on a six hour shoot and why I can’t just give the client some rough Jpegs. Anyone got a compelling analogy for that?

Getting captions right, quickly
Members of the AELTC Photography team heading home after another log day. AELTC/Neil Turner

Members of the AELTC Photography team heading home after another log day. AELTC/Neil Turner

I was about to sit down and write a blog post about the last four weeks of my life – three and a bit of which were spent underneath Court 14 at Wimbledon – when I realised that I had written the self-same post this time last year. Instead I thought that I’d tackle the subject that causes me the most work and the most angst when I am working as an editor; IPTC captions. For those who don’t know or whose photography doesn’t involve writing them, IPTC (the International Photo Telecommunications Council) captions are the standard for adding the details in words describing the “where, when, who, what and why” of the image  almost universally used in our industry. It is a form of metadata added after taking the pictures – although if you are smart and use the right software, quite a bit of it can be drawn automatically from the camera’s own EXIF metadata.

This has already turned into a geek-fest. I apologise to those who want to read about technique and kit but without good metadata, finding the right pictures in amongst tens and hundreds of thousands of others becomes a chore and can become almost impossible.

I try to use as many ways as I can to save time and increase accuracy when captioning and four of the best techniques are found within Photo Mechanic (my absolute favourite piece of photographic software). One of them is called code replacement which allows you to use pre-defined short codes to insert longer and more complex elements into the metadata. As an example, the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has three entries in my own system. If I type \tmay\ the software automatically replaces that with Theresa May whereas if I type \tmay1\ it will substitute The Rt Hon Theresa May MP and \tmay2\ brings The Rt Hon Theresa May MP Prime Minister, First Lord of The Treasury , Minister for The Civil Service into the metadata. By creating a whole code replacement for the new Cabinet I can save myself lots of time typing their names and their job titles and almost guarantee to get them right every time. Code replacement can even grab bits from the EXIF and translate them into vital details.

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Detail from a code replacement text file with the names and job titles of the UK Government

Following on from code replacement is autocomplete. This is a different way to add regular words or phrases easily. By creating the right kind of .txt file with all of the names and phrases you need in advance you can make your workflow a lot faster. For Wimbledon I have a list of all of the major players (well over 300 of them) correctly spelled with their correct three letter country code so that when I start to type it offers me choices from that list. With the text file loaded into Photo Mechanic when I type And it offers me a drop-down list of every person whose name begins with And. That’s several Andreas, a couple of Anders and, of course, Andy. If I keep typing then the choices shrink and I can select the one I need and add it to the caption using the return key. In the same list I have all sorts of key words and phrases including locations, sponsors, types of shot, the various competitions. There’s no limit to the size of the file and it works really well. At least it works really well on a Mac – some of the features seem to not work as well on Windows computers that I have used.

My third method of speeding up captioning is to use drop-down menus. Many of the fields in the Photo Mechanic captioning “stationery pad” allow you to pre-load options. In the cities I have a great long list of places around the world that I visit regularly and not having to type them over and over again saves time. Similarly, when I’m editing for a team of photographers I have all of their names pre-loaded into the photographer field. If you want a list of UK Counties to add yourself, you can find one here. 

The final gem is variables. These take information from the EXIF or from elsewhere in the caption and turn them into words. An example would be {photog}. If I put the name of the photographer in the correct IPTC field (possibly using a drop-down menu), the variable will then copy that and insert it anywhere that I use the variable {photog} – so that could be in the main description, in the copyright field or in the byline field. There are dozens of variables and you can use them in conjunction with code replacements to automate a lot of captioning. The Camerabits YouTube channel has some good tutorials for all of this.

Captioning is a vital job and anything you can do to make it easier/faster/more accurate has to be a good thing!

 

ABOUT CAPTIONING

The  word  “caption”  has  two  meanings  in  our  industry.  It  can  mean  the   metadata  and  descriptive  information  that  the  photographer  supplies  with  their  images  when  submitting  them  to  a  newspaper,  magazine  or  website.  It  can  also  mean  the  words  that  accompany  the  photograph  when  it  appears  in  print  or  on  a  website.  Much  of  the  information  is  the  same  but  the   way  that  it  is  written  can  vary  and   in   this   document   we   are   solely   referring   to   the   information   supplied   by   the   photographer.   Whether   it   is   a   hand   written  paragraph   on   the   back   of   a   photographic   print   or   uses   the   latest   metadata   standards,   the   caption   has   to   describe   what   the  photograph  shows,  why  it  is  newsworthy,  who  took  it,  who  owns  the  copyright  to  the  picture  and  when  and  where  it  was  taken.
Background: Since  the  first  news  photographs  were  transmitted  over  “the  wires”  in  the  1920s  there  has  always  been  a  need  for  clear,  concise  and  informative   captions  to  accompany   them.   The   earliest   images   simply   had   a   short   caption   typed  and  stuck   onto  a   space   at   the  bottom  of  the   print  and  the  words  were  encoded  in  the  same  way  as  the  image  so  that  when  the  machine  at  the  other  end  decoded  the   image   it  simply   printed  the   caption  as  if  it  were  part  of   the   photograph.  Technology  has  moved   on  but  the   need  for  captions  hasn’t.  When  the   first negative   scanners  attached  to  Apple   computers  were   introduced  at  the   beginning   of  the  1990s  along   with  early  versions  of  Adobe  Photoshop  the  style   was  to  add  some  white  space  on  the   bottom  edge  of  the  photograph  and  use  the  type  tool  in  the  software  to  add  a  caption  to  the  face  of  the  image   in  almost  the   same  way  that  wire  photos  had  been  doing  for  nearly  70  years.
 
Having  started  to  develop  techniques  for  adding  data   to  copy  as  early  as  1971,  the   International  Press  Telecommunications  Council  (IPTC)  published  the  standards  in  1991  that  formed  the   system  that  we   still  use   for  adding  metadata   caption  information  buried  in  the  jpeg  or  tiff  file  rather  than  having  to  add  it  to  the  actual  image.  This  significantly  reduced  the  amount  of  time  that  it  took  to  add  captions,  meant  that  those  captions  could  be  cut  and  pasted  into  a  text  document  and  made   the  actual  file  smaller  at  a  time   when  modems   were   slow   and   every   kilobyte   that   could   be   saved   was   a   valuable   contribution   to   transmission   speeds.   Today’s   IPTC  standards  were  introduced  in  2001  after  Adobe  developed  the  “Extensible  Metadata  Platform”  (XMP)  -­  which  allowed  far  more  data  to  be  attached  to  each  image  and  introduced  a  greater  number  of  “fields”  in  which  that  data  could  be  entered.
Styles: The   US  news  agency,   The   Associated  Press,  has  published  its’  style   guide   for  a   number   of  years.   It  covers  just  about  every  area   of  journalistic  activity  including  the  way  that  photographic  captions  are  written.  It  dictates  the  tense,  the  way  locations  are  mentioned  and  even  the   format   in  which  dates  are  written.   Photojournalists  the   world  over   have   been  following  the   AP  style   guide   for  many  years  but  other  agencies  such   as  Reuters,  The   Press  Association  and   more   recently   Getty  Images  have   moved   away  from   the   AP  style  and  developed  their  own  ways  of  writing  captions.  Several  newspaper  groups  have  also  looked  at  their  own  needs  and  decided  that  the  AP  standard  is  not  entirely  suitable  for  their  needs  either  and  we   now  have  a  very  wide   variety  of  styles  and  style   guides  to  choose  between.  
Photographers  working  for  a  new   client  should  always  check  to  see  if  there  is  a  style  that  they  should  follow  when  working  for  them  but  as  a  general  rule  IPTC  captions  should  be  clear,  precise  and  contain  the  five  Ws  –  where,  when,  who, what and why.

Canon feature request?

I had an email from someone who has followed my blogs for many years this week. He’s a working news photographer who I bumped into on a job a few weeks ago. He had noticed some tape on the top of my Canon EOS5D MkIII and my EOS 7D MkII and simply pointed to his cameras and said “snap”. He had tape on his cameras too – doing precisely the same job that the tape on mine does and went on to ask what the chances of Canon making a change to future cameras that would eliminate the need for us to tape that particular feature on our cameras. The email was to remind me that I had promised to do a quick blog post about the issue.

Taped diopter adjustment on a Canon EOS 5d MkIII

Taped diopter adjustment on a Canon EOS 5d MkIII

The tape on our cameras holds the built-in diopter adjustment dial and stops it from being moved in the bag or over your shoulder – something that happens to me a lot if I remove the tape. I have no idea if anyone from Canon’s design department reads this blog (I doubt that they do) but it seems to me that if enough of us sufferers from this problem mention it to them when we talk to them then they just might do something about it. Nikon have a lock on the diopter adjustment on some of their professional cameras so it has to be relatively easy to do.

The EOS5D MkIV will be appearing later this year if all of the rumours are to be believed so this may be a little late but you have to give these things a try.

Canon employees and dealers reading this… please help to reduce my gaffer tape bill. Soon. Please.

Think Tank Logistics Manager 30

31 May 2016. Bournemouth, Dorset. Think Tank Logistics Manager 30. Hillcrest Road

Think Tank Logistics Manager 30.

A few weeks ago I bought some more Elinchrom Ranger Quadra kit and after a short while lugging my gear around in multiple bags and cases I decided that it was time to get myself one big case to take most or all of my Quadra gear. My rationale was that I am pulling one bag on wheels and carrying two or three others so why not make it one on wheels with the lighting and one smaller bag with cameras and lenses riding on top of it or over my shoulder as required? There’s quite a bit of choice on the market but all of my experience with Think Tank bags told me to start my search there. They make lots of rolling bags but only three specifically designed to lug large amounts of kit. My benchmark was that I had to be able to get at least two of my Manfrotto 156 stands plus a couple of Manfrotto 001s in there along with two or three packs, three or four heads, spare batteries, cables, light modifiers and plenty of accessories.

I had previously seen a colleagues Location Manager 40 case and so I wanted to check out the Logistics Manager 30 because on paper it appeared to be just about perfect. The internal dimensions were listed at 70cm length. My 051 stands are 68cm when folded and so I tried one and when it fitted the deal was pretty much sealed. All I needed to do was make sure that it fitted into the boot (trunk) of the car and it was at this point that I realised that neither of the two bigger “Manager” series bags would have worked. The 30 goes in with a bit to spare but anything much longer would need to go sideways and therefore wouldn’t be much use.

In the ten days or so since buying the case I have only used it twice. On job number one I was delighted with it when rolling it but less so when having to lift it up stairs or into the boot (trunk) of the car. There’s no bag or case in the world that can magically make its contents weigh less and the temptation to load this one has to be tempered with my need to be able to lift it. For job two I went with just two packs, two spare batteries, three heads and only three stands and quickly realised that I could only fully load this case if I were working with someone else who could help with the lifting. I’m getting old!

My loaded and ready to roll current configuration for the Think Tank Logistics Manager 30.

My loaded and ready to roll current configuration for the Think Tank Logistics Manager 30.

I am happy to report that this case comes with so many options for the inserts and dividers that I have a medium sized carrier bag full of unused bits. The flexibility is amazing and the quality of the construction appears to be right up there with every other bit of Think Tank kit I own. I am particularly pleased with the zipped mesh compartments in the lid. I have lots of gels cut into manageable pieces and they fitted into one of them very well whilst the other swallowed lots of those small accessories that can otherwise get lost drifting around in the base of the bag. You can see that I have a couple of pouches in this case. One has the Elinchrom Skyport HS triggers and the other has lots of small and medium sized clips which are great for holding gels etc.

I’m sure that there’ll be a few tweaks and some settling in but, for now, this layout works very well for me when I am working on my own. I haven’t even thought about using any of the exterior pockets but I have already given the built-in combination lock a go – chaining my locked bag to a radiator after I’d finished shooting, packed up and whilst I’d gone for coffee with the client.

My final point here is that turning up with completely professional solutions is good for your image. I’m sure that a reasonable quality suitcase with some makeshift padding would work almost as well and cost £200 less but this really is doing the job properly and my client definitely noticed.

So I bought a Canon 7D MkII

I wrote a long blog post about this time last year talking about the choice between three of Canon’s full-frame DSLR cameras. At that stage in my work I couldn’t imagine buying another crop frame camera after selling my original EOS7D and giving my opinion of it as “loving everything about the camera apart from the image quality above 800 ISO”. Well, hold the front page – the EOS7D Mk II can handle ISOs a fair bit higher than 800.

Cropped area of approximately a frame shot at 3200 ISO blown up to 100%

Cropped area of approximately a frame shot at 3200 ISO blown up to 100%

In the frame above shot at 3200 ISO you can see some noise in the out of focus areas but it isn’t nasty and it isn’t overwhelming. In the sample shot under ‘press conference’ conditions at 1600 ISO I think that the camera performed brilliantly. I would say that the MkII is at least two stops better in low light than the original 7D and maybe a bit more under certain lighting conditions and those two stops are the difference between a camera that is very usable as an every day available light camera and one that isn’t.

So far I have been delighted with it. I’ve used it on ten assignments already and it is rapidly becoming one of those things that goes into the bag first. Married with f4 L series zooms with the image stabilisation turned on I have been deeply impressed with this camera. The AF is brilliant, the shutter is responsive and shooting video with this camera has been the best DSLR video experience I’ve ever had.

Cropped area of approximately a quarter of a frame shot at 1600 ISO blown up to 100%

Cropped area of approximately a quarter of a frame shot at 1600 ISO blown up to 100%

I’m not saying that this camera can, in any way, compete with something like an EOS5D MkIII or even an EOS6D but it is a lot better than the original 7D and I’d be happy to use it at 3200 ISO on a job if I needed to. I bought the camera for other reasons than its high ISO performance (AF performance, speed, video performance and price) but this was a nice surprise. I won’t be parting with any of my full frame Canons but my prejudice against the APS-C format just disappeared in 1/200th of a second.