Author: dg28

I've been a full-time editorial & corporate photographer since 1986 and I'm still as passionate about the work now as I was then. These days I also write about photography, teach photography and act as a consultant on all things photographic - so, basically, photography is my professional life.

Pile it high and sell it cheap? Please don’t.
Glenda Jackson, Labour Party Prospective Parliamentary Candidate. 25 September 1991. Photo: Neil Turner

On the day that an image library licensed one of my historic pictures for just a little under $6 to a well known publisher for use in print and on-line in perpetuity I have been thinking about the value of photography.

We all take pictures on our phones on a daily basis. It’s easy, it’s somewhere between cheap and free and because of that very few of us truly value many pictures. We all have sentimental and meaningful photographs that we have taken and those that have been shot of and with us but do they even have a monetary value? Rarely.

The ability of pictures to influence and even directly alter our mood or play with our aesthetic sensibilities and emotional states is inarguable. It should be those things that make the images that we produce, view and consume on an industrial scale that that give them their true value. I’ve made a living, a pretty decent living, for almost thirty-seven years from photography and I have been lucky enough to find clients (and an employer) who largely understand what the right pictures are actually worth. I’ve been commissioned to shoot many interesting, funny, sad, dramatic, terrifying and downright mundane things and I hope that it is my ability to produce the most eye-catching, informative and memorable images from them that has a real value.

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Live pictures
This photograph of The Most Revd and Rt Hon Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury walking from Lambeth Palace to Westminster Abbey accompanied by another Archbishop and seven Bishops taking part in the Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III was transmitted from the camera as I walked backwards over Lambeth Bridge. ©Neil Turner. 06 May 2023

Before I ask you to imagine a scene, I’d like to point out that (for the avoidance of any doubt) this has never actually happened. There’s a big group of clients and potential clients staging a demo with placards and a megaphone with the chant

“What do we want?”

“Great pictures!”

“When do we want them?”

“As fast as the technology will allow!”

News and sports photographers are all very well versed in supplying pictures really quickly. These days that mostly means transmitting directly from the camera or, as a fall back, moving images via their smartphone or tablet or even sticking cards into a laptop every few minutes during the event to upload from there. I’ve talked a lot about FTP from the camera and have even made a couple of tutorial videos about exactly how to do it with the various Canon cameras that I’ve used. Obviously the concept is exactly the same with Sony and Nikon as well as some of the latest Fujifilm bodies.

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An upgrade already

It was only last summer that I made the jump to using Canon EOS R6 bodies for the majority of my work and now I’ve swapped to the R6 MkIIs. I had listened to my own wisdom for a few months and calculated that I couldn’t make the business case for going for an upgrade so soon. Then I got to play with a MkII and I changed my mind.

There wasn’t one thing that made me make the swap – it was a list of little upgrades here and there that made my mind up for me.

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Canon’s EL1 flash unit – first impressions
The EL1 (left) sits next to one of my trusty 600 EXII RT speedlites to show the size difference.

When Canon announced their top-of-the-range flash unit, the EL1, I read the specification and thought to myself “looks nice but probably not worth the money”. It has taken from that announcement until this week for me to actually use one and, I’m slightly embarrassed to say, change my mind.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is the first hot shoe style flash unit from Canon that I would be confident of using as a day-to-day piece of kit for editorial portraiture with a whole range of light modifiers and be able to leave my Elinchrom kit at home. It’s powerful, has superb recycle times and in both TTL and manual modes it does everything that I might want it to. There are tons of other bits of kit that are on the market competing in this space but I haven’t used most of them and so I will only stick to what I know.

Like every piece of equipment ever made it isn’t perfect so I’m going to quickly examine some of pluses and minuses.

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Working with Archbishops – act two
Cyril Kobina Ben-Smith, Primate of the Church of the Province of West Africa, Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury and Howard Gregory, Primate of the West Indies in one of the cells at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana used to hold enslaved people before they were loaded onto ships to be taken to the Americas. Photo: Neil Turner for ACO

Towards the end of the summer of 2022 I was lucky enough to be commissioned to spend two weeks photographing The Lambeth Conference. 650 Bishops, 450 of their spouses and a few hundred guests and staff in and around the University of Kent, Canterbury Cathedral and Lambeth Palace made for a fascinating experience and some very interesting pictures. That was act one.

The last eleven days have been act two. This time there are fewer Bishops, fewer Archbishops and a very different location. I’m writing this whilst still in Accra – the capital city of Ghana in West Africa – waiting to go to the airport to fly home. The difference between the locations is vast. It’s hot here and the humidity has been tough on me and almost as tough on my cameras. It’s a developing country with all of the colour, noise and atmosphere you’d expect but with so much more.

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Working with mirrorless – a problem solved…

Last summer I jumped into the world of Canon mirrorless cameras with a blend of caution and enthusiasm. I recognise that many of my colleagues made the DSLR to mirrorless switch way before I did but, being the anorak that I am, I was determined to make the swap work for me. Having used Canon SLRs and DSLRs for over twenty five years it was always going to be an interesting time and it has taken me five months to iron out all of the niggles. The funny thing is that 90% of the change was painless and happened in under a month. It has been the one part of my work that I was always well known for that has taken me an age to completely master.

Flash.

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2022 is almost done…

As 2022 comes to a close I just wanted to grab a few minutes to wish those who has visited my websites, clients past, present and yet to come as well as friends and colleagues a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.

2023 looks like it might be pretty exciting and, like everyone else who works in the creative industries, I am hoping that it will bring new challenges, new opportunities and new people to work with.

All the best, Neil.

Bad marketing
© Neil Turner. December 2016

Like almost everyone else, I get a lot of suggestions on Facebook for products that I might like to buy. Some are worthwhile, a few are comical and a lot of them are pointless but the other day I had something pop up in my timeline that struck me as plain wrong.

The product in question was an application aimed, allegedly, at professional photographers and claiming to make big inroads into their post-production. As regular readers of this blog will understand – anything that can possibly improve my workflow has got my instant attention.

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