Here we go again – version 9.0 of my folio

When I went freelance again in the summer of 2008 I knew that having a strong web-based portfolio was going to be important. I had already been publishing websites for over nine years by then so, on day one, I published something that I thought looked good and which was entirely built by me using Dreamweaver. A few days later I made some substantial changes following feedback from friends, colleagues and a couple of clients. For the next six years I made major design updates at least once a year until I switched to Pixelrights in 2014. Between that point and today I had only done one major overhaul because their system offered exactly what I needed and so it feels rather sad to have had to migrate neilturnerphotographer.com to the Adobe Portfolio platform. Welcome to version 9.0 of my folio.

The move has happened because I wanted speed and features that Pixelrights don’t currently offer. I have kept the old site sitting there in the background just in case they leapfrog Adobe again allowing me to swap back. I looked at so many others before opting for the Adobe option and I feel happy that I have the best one for me at this time. It won’t suit others – especially those who have a need for online sales or storage. For me, this is just a shop window and, in that limited way, it really looks like it is going to work. (more…)

That was the year that wasn’t…

The Elf on The Shelf or the Naughty Elf had a big year…

As we reach the end of the year that very few will remember with even the smallest degree of fondness I wanted to just compose a note to thank everyone who has read any of my posts, got in touch with me or even been one of the tiny few who have put work my way. So many of the events where I should have been working as a manager, an editor or a photographer were cancelled or postponed and the work that I’d normally be doing in schools and with corporate clients was pretty much wiped out.

New work was replaced by old and I have really got on top of my archiving – which has been fun but memory lane isn’t a place where you’d want to spend too much time in this industry and so I hope, along with pretty much everyone else that I know, that the new year brings some sort of resolution to the pandemic and frees us all up to get out there and pick up where we left off in March. I know that a lot of my news photographer colleagues have been as busy as ever but very few of them have been doing things that have brought them much joy.

2020 is almost done and 2021 will be upon us in a few short days. Stay safe, stay well and stay positive.

One hundred and eighty portraits later

A section of 180 of my portraits posted to Instagram during my project.

After six months and 180 portraits posted to Instagram and Facebook I find myself at a point where I’ve shown enough archive imperfect portraits for now. It’s nearly Christmas and it feels like the right time to hit the pause button on, what has been, a very enjoyable diversion from the woes of the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns, restrictions and the lack of new work on offer.

As I sit here and contemplate what has been good, bad and indifferent about posting so many of my favourites from 1988 to 2008 the temptation to perform some sort of statistical analysis has been quite strong and the parallel temptation to draw conclusions from the feedback has been stronger still. For now I am going to settle for some general impressions and some feelings that have struck me during the whole process so here’s a bullet-pointed list of some of them: (more…)

Two set-ups at once

Bill Cockburn at the School Teachers Review Body. ©Neil Turner/TSL

From time-to-time I repost one of the fifty technique examples that were posted on the original dg28.com website between 1999 and 2008. I have timed this one to go with uploading this particular frame to my Instagram feed as one of the series of archive portraits that I’ve been putting there for well over five months.

The idea here is to have two separate lighting set-ups for one interview portrait without having to constantly move around the room adjusting lights. This interview was with a senior businessman who chaired a body that decided how much teachers’ pay rises will be each year. The reporter wasn’t all that comfortable with me shooting through the interview but it was what the picture editor wanted, so that’s what I did. This job required a bit of quick thinking so that I could get two different set-ups in place. (more…)

Failed hard drives

It is generally accepted in the world of information technology that there are only two types of hard drive; those that have failed and those that haven’t failed yet.

Evidently that is true but as part of my COVID-19 tidying-up, sorting-out and archiving I have dragged out my plastic box full of “failed” hard drives (some of which date back over twelve years) to see if there’s anything that I can drag off of any of them that I don’t have elsewhere. I didn’t think that there would be because I have been almost anal in my backing-up and backing-up the back-ups for many years now.

I’ve powered them up and connected them to a couple of different Macs and a PC to see what there is – if anything there. Of the old 3.5” drives only one out of nine actually mounted and was accessible but that was a bare drive that I had put into a housing as part of an experiment to see if that was actually a good way to go. It turns out that it is – or at least it would be if USB2 wasn’t so slow. I can stick that bare drive into a faster housing but there’s no useful data on it that I don’t have in at least three other places. (more…)

Adobe Camera RAW 13 – not so bad!

A few months ago I wrote a blog post criticising Adobe for making wholesale changes to the Camera RAW interface with Photoshop and Bridge. It appeared that they wanted to make it more like Lightroom and I questioned why they would do that given that there are relatively few crossover users of the two very different (but identical under the hood) RAW conversion options. If you want to go back and read the whole post then you can on the link above but in summary I said the following;

… my other main gripe with Adobe is to ask why call this an update move from .2 to .3 and not actually call it what it is with some decent warnings – as a user this feels like a whole new version and I would like to have had some warning before having to spend time (which I luckily have right now but that’s immaterial) getting to know the new interface. At the end of the day my workflow isn’t going to change much, if at all. Equally, this is still a more suitable application than any of the others I have tried and tried again – including Lightroom. I have challenged myself to work with the default version of the new workspace to see if it is better because a couple of others have assured me that they prefer it and those are also people whose opinion I would always respect but I have to be honest and say that I’m not looking forward to the next big edit

I have been working away with various updates and then, along with the 2021 version of Photoshop CC which appeared a few days ago, version 13 of the Camera RAW module landed and I am able to pronounce myself reasonably happy. That’s for two reasons really, the first is that I have been plugging away learning how to work with the new interface and the second is that I have gone over to using more and more keyboard shortcuts – which makes so much sense given that I have always been a fan of them in other applications such as Photo Mechanic. (more…)