Feedback is very helpful


By the time I was a teenager I had received enough sports coaching (football and cricket) that I was pretty hardened to being told I was doing something wrong and just the tiniest bit embarrassed and surprised by those rare moments when they told me I’d done well. I will be celebrating my fortieth anniversary as a working photographer later this year. I left college at the age of 22 in the early summer of 1986 and started working for a magazine publisher about two months later. I can’t claim to remember every time my work was picked out for praise but I can remember each and every time it was singled out for being sub-standard, off-brief or just not quite right. Back in the early days criticism, positive or negative, made a huge difference and I’d say that those sports coaches did a good job of helping to prepare me for this career.

I wish that I could remember which of the many dozens (or even hundreds) of authors that I have photographed who said it to a reporter as I sat through another interview but I have never forgotten their words “criticism is the lifeblood of the author”. I’m going to water that down quite a bit and say “feedback is very helpful to the photographer”.

Just recently positive comments have been like the proverbial London bus – nothing for ages and then three come along all at once. There haven’t been any complaints but I have been lucky enough to receive three extremely positive comments about me and my work.

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Content Transfer Professional

Some of my posts here on the blog over the years have drifted into the “niche” category. I’m afraid that today we are going full steam ahead into the heart of niche-ness.

I have mentioned Canon’s Content Transfer Professional app a few times without reader comment. After last month’s post about a very busy few weeks I received three separate requests to expand on why I bother to pay £5.99 a month for an app that a lot of my colleagues find difficult to use, uninspiring and a bit of a waste of their hard-earned money. At the risk of sounding like a salesman from the Canon app team I’m going to try my best to explain what it is, what it does and what it doesn’t do.

Looking at version 1.2.10.15 (build 458), I’m going to start with “what it doesn’t do”. There are two reasons why I have chosen to write that way around:

  1. If you are looking for something that this app cannot do then I’m saving you time and giving you a reason to stop reading.
  2. Should Canon’s app development team happen to read this then maybe they can find a way to get this already useful app to do some, or all, of the things that it can’t and won’t do.
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A busy few weeks
The Revd Paula Hollingsworth, Chaplain to St Paul’s Cathedral leads a Service of Blessing of Pilgrims on their Departure with The Most Revd and Rt Hon Dame Sarah Mullally DBE, Archbishop of Canterbury, before she sets off with her husband Eamonn Mullally and their team. Tuesday 17th March 2026. Photo: ©Neil Turner

It all began with a short service in St Paul’s Cathedral before the Archbishop of Canterbury set off with her husband and a small team on their Pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. That was on Tuesday 17th of March. I photographed the blessing and the first few miles of their 87 mile journey before leaving them at Rotherhithe to go and edit my pictures. A couple of days later I joined them again at Aylesford Priory for a couple of hours and then dipped in and out of the pilgrimage before covering the last couple of miles as they walked from Chartham to Canterbury itself.

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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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