Like most photographers I’m always looking at new ways of showing my portfolio. I’ve saved the presentation version of my editorial portraits folio as a QuickTime movie and posted it here. Please let me know what you think. If you look at it without going for the full-sized version the captions are a bit small but, apart from that, I quite like it!
Author: dg28
No such thing as professional?
Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Meyer made a stupid remark yesterday whilst announcing a complete overhaul of their Flickr photo-sharing website service. She actually said was that “…there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore”. Like many people who used to think that they were professional photographers I became very angry.
What I’d love to happen next is to get commissioned to shoot her portrait for a major newspaper or magazine and to prove her wrong. That’s unlikely to happen, which is a shame. Within a few hours of hearing what she had said I had deleted my Flickr account and let my Twitter followers know that I had done it and why I had done it.
Did Ms Meyer really mean to upset hundreds of thousands of hard-working professionals? Does she really think that our profession has ceased to exist? I suspect that what actually happened is that she made her remark with the subtlest of hints of humour in her voice in order to promote her company’s new-look product. I doubt that it has done too much harm but why do corporates continually keep doing this kind of thing? Gerald Ratner famously compared his company’s gold jewellery to a prawn sandwich wiping millions of pounds off of its share value and ultimately leading to his downfall. Time after time people at the top who believe their own hype and who think that they can be funny in order to sell their products make this same mistake.
Flickr’s owners won’t apologise. They have sought to make light of her remark because it was ‘light-hearted’ – or at least it was light-hearted in her mind. At a time when the value of photography is, in many ways, at an all-time low the owner of one of the biggest sites based on photography has unwittingly reinforced that perception. Stupid and un-thinking throw-away remarks do damage in ways that only become apparent over time
My business model isn’t based on Flickr. I had about thirty folio images up there simply because it probably pays to have a presence on all of the social media sites. I have probably shot myself in the foot by deleting my account but anger leads to gesture and the biggest gesture that I could make was to leave Flickr.
The point that I really want to make here is that photography does have value. Good photography is, in fact, invaluable. Maybe if the Board of Yahoo realised that they’d actually get their CEO to apologise.
Location flash workshop – June 22nd
For anyone who remembers that far back, my dg28.com website started out as a vehicle for me to post updates about the work that I was doing along with some technique examples that I rather pompously called “photographer education”. Well, that was in 1999 and a couple of years later I started doing occasional workshops and lectures about my use of portable flash on location. I have done a lot of talks over the years but, because of my commitments at the London Olympic and Paralympic Games I didn’t take part in any workshops last summer. That is about to change.
In conjunction with the team at Up To Speed we are going to be running a lecture and workshop on Saturday 22nd of June right here in my hometown of Bournemouth. There are two options for anyone wanting to come along: there’s a half day morning session which will be classroom based where we will explore some theory, go through some of the basic techniques and generally talk the talk. For anyone wanting to make it a full day (smaller number of places) we then go off to a nearby park for the afternoon and put some of what we have discussed into practice with a model and some of my gear. You can bring your own kit as well if you want to get better acquainted with what you use – your choice.
- Morning only £80.00 inc VAT
- Full day £120.00 inc VAT
- Some group discounts are available
- Discounts for members of The BPPA and NUJ
I’m happy to answer any questions that you might have or you can get in touch with Up To Speed on 0800 121 6818 or by email rcarr@uptospeedjournalism.co.uk
No two workshops are alike because we can never know what the British weather is going to give us; the good news is that cloudy days are just as much fun as shooting against the sun. The workshop is aimed at three groups:
- Professionals wanting to develop their skills
- Serious amateurs who want to get more from their passion
- Photography students wanting to supplement their knowledge
I hope that this will be the first of many that we run in Bournemouth. Remember that you can always dump the rest of the family off on one of our rather good beaches and join them for the last swim of the day…
Headteachers or whatever you want to call them…
Almost everyone remembers their head teacher. If they don’t then they will probably remember the Principal, Headmistress, Headmaster, High Master, High Mistress, Direktor or whatever other title the person who led their schools went by. Since 1986 I have photographed hundreds of these people and I have made the journey from being a little bit scared of them through accepting them to being impressed by the work that they do and the huge difference that their being good at their job makes to children and young adults.
I decided to put together a slideshow of some of the headteacher portraits that I have done. Most of the portraits date back to my time at The Times Educational Supplement. I also made the decision to keep them anonymous – I just wanted to show how different they are yet how much they have in common. Some of the Heads featured in this selection are famous in the world of education and one or two have been made Knights or Dames for their services to education. A few have since retired but that doesn’t matter. I don’t want to suggest that the person in charge is the only reason that some schools are better than others but I have yet to visit a successful school that doesn’t have first rate leadership.
Dogs on the beach – a personal obsession
I have a bit of an obsession when shooting pictures for fun. Dogs on the beach have featured in my personal work for many years and when I was out for a stroll the other day I shot this on my Fujifilm X20.
©Neil Turner, April 2013. Alum Chine, Bournemouth.
I haven’t got a great deal to say about the picture but I have to say that I really enjoy shooting with the Fuji compact. There is something about the way it handles and about the very satisfying click that the artificial shutter sound makes that makes me want to take pictures. Professional photographer, keen amateur or camera novice – it doesn’t matter as long as you get that “I want to take some pictures” feeling every once-in-a-while.
1/1000 sec; f/9; ISO 100
The light in the garden
I don’t do this very often but, given that so many people are interested in the Fujifilm X20, I thought that I’d share a picture that I took yesterday ‘just for the fun of it’. No story, no real importance – just a bit of fun…
©Neil Turner April 2013. The light in our garden yesterday afternoon.
This was shot as a RAW file and converted with almost no help using Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop CS6. The camera was in programme mode (yeah I know!) and handled the exposure remarkably well.
1/800 sec; f/5.0; ISO 100
The constant software update dilemma
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.
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”
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.
Fujifilm X20 – the first update
So here is what I’ve decided to do about writing an X20 review: it’s actually going to be a series of short (ish) updates as, and when, I have got something new to say about it.
Typical UK road sign: the weight is given in metric units whilst the distance is in imperial. Are we European or aren’t we? ©Neil Turner, April 2013
I have been shooting with the new camera as much as I can and in as many different situations as I can. I’ve even used it as a third camera on a live commission. Most of the time I have been using the Fuji RAW mode so that I can get the most out of the files and so that I can compare the different ways that you can choose to work with the images. Most people prefer not to have to read long and drawn out musings when they look at reviews – they just want to cut to the chase and so here are a few likes and dislikes in the form of bullet points:
LIKES
- The colours – straight out of the camera you have clean, realistic and accurate colours. This shouldn’t be a surprise from the company that brought you Fujichrome all of those years ago.
- Smooth tonal range – at low ISOs the files have a wonderfully smooth tone
- Handling – the X20 feels good in my hands and it is very easy to hand hold down to some pretty slow shutter speeds.
- The manual zoom – it is a model of how other manufacturers should be building cameras – enough said.
- Buttons and dials – related directly to handling but I felt that the way that Fuji have kept the number of buttons down whilst giving you a lot of freedom to customise deserves credit.
- The optical viewfinder – it works really well and the addition of shooting information in the viewfinder is a big bonus.
- Auto Focus – it is good for a compact and tracks moving subjects rather well.
DISLIKES
- The battery life is not good when shooting with the LCD screen on. It’s a good job that after market NP-50s are so cheap.
- The Fuji RAW format (.RAF) takes a lot of computing power and a lot of getting used to.
- Low light performance – I was expecting this camera to be a couple of stops behind a DSLR but I would estimate that it is at least fours stops worse than a Canon EOS5D MkII
- Video – it is just not that good or easy to use… and don’t get me started on playback!
- Battery clip – if the small clip that holds the battery in place lasts as long as I tend to keep my compacts I will be surprised.
- Buil-in flash – it is as weak as consumer models and you have to remove the lens hood if you don’t want horrible shadows across your pictures when shooting flash.
- Auto white balance – it isn’t that bad actually, except under mixed lighting when it is a bit unreliable.
I like this camera… a lot. That having been said, I am genuinely disappointed with the files at anything over 640 ISO and there is a build quality question mark on the battery clip – especially as you are going to be swapping the battery out for charging with great regularity. If I needed to, I could shoot some editorial assignments with the X20 and that isn’t something you could say about many compacts. More importantly, I would quite enjoy doing so and that isn’t something you could say about any other compact that I’ve used. Professional photographers talk about their “walk about” cameras and the X20 is certainly my choice for that task. It isn’t the “best” at anything but it does represent a good set of compromises and that, at the end of the day, is what you want from a small camera.
As I said in the opening paragraph, this will be a series of updates rather than a single “this is my opinion” review. At the recommended selling price the Fujifilm X20 is a little expensive but the price is coming down on a weekly basis and once it dips under £400 it will become a well-priced piece of kit.
Neil Turner Photographer 