equipment

I can’t imagine being without a fifty
©Neil Turner. October 2022. Canon RF 50mm f1.8 mounted on an R6 body

When I worked in a camera shop in the early 1980s we used to sell ninety percent of the camera bodies with a standard lens. Olympus, Pentax, Nikon, Canon, Minolta, Ricoh and a few others all came in a kit with a 50mm lens. By default almost every camera owner ended up with a decent quality pretty fast and actually very versatile bit of glass. Even before I took that job my second SLR (an Olympus OM10) came with a Zuiko 50mm f1.8 and I kept that lens as long as I had Olympus cameras. They were cheap and did the job at a time when very few people shot with zoom lenses.

Since then I have owned over a dozen other 50mm prime lenses as well as two different 55mm ones. At no point in the period from 1981 until today have I been without at least one 50mm optic. At one point I had no fewer than four Canon fifties: f1.0, f1.4 f1.8 and the f2.5 macro. I swapped the f1.0 for an f1.2 a few years ago and it was only comparatively recently that I culled my collection to the point that I “only” have three; the EF 50mm f1.2L, EF 50mm f1.4 USM and the relatively recent RF 50mm f1.8 STM. The two EF lenses will be going soon and it looks as if my collection of fifties will be down to a single lens for the first time since 1995.

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An update on my mirrorless journey…

It’s hard to know where to start when talking about the changes that shooting with mirrorless cameras have made. In the absence of anything profound I think that I will start with something that has been said by others but which I need to express very strongly. So much so, I’m going to make it a quote:

“Canon got everything right when they introduced the EF to RF converter”

Why did I feel the need to say that in quite such strong terms? I hate changing systems. Back in the day (1995) when I swapped from Nikon F4S bodies to Canon EOS1Ns, and had to swap all of my lenses as well, it was tough. Nothing was familiar apart from the rolls of film I was slotting into them. Changing everything in one hit meant that I had to get my head around half a dozen different things all at once. This time around, swapping from Canon EF to RF I got to keep my familiar (and much loved) lenses whilst I got used to the new bodies and their wildly unfamiliar viewfinders. Eventually I will swap out all of the lenses too but there really is no hurry. The converters aren’t perfect but, looking back over the last few weeks, they have been such a help in making the transition.

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Mirrorless here I come

It’s surprising how much of the work that we all do could be done a little easier and with a little less stress if our cameras were silent. I have been shooting inside a Cathedral quite a bit over the last couple of weeks and I have been shooting in a conference much of the rest of the time. The combination of that recent experience and the news that next year’s tennis at Wimbledon will be DSLR and shutter sound free have made me decide that it’s time to give the whole mirrorless experience a proper go.

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Mac Studio arrives…
The Apple logo on top of my Mac Studio. ©Neil Turner, June 2022

A couple of months ago I wrote about the amount of power that I perceived that I needed in a computer in order to efficiently edit images. Shortly after that I saw a Mac with an M1 Max processor in action converting batches of RAW files and I decided that I’d order a Mac Studio a couple of days later. I went for the base model with a 512Gb SSD and 32Gb of RAM for two reasons; the first of which was that it was easily going to be powerful enough for even the chunkiest RAW files and the second was that it was the only model that had any chance of being delivered in time for the heavy batch of editing that I am now in the middle of.

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How not to choose a new camera
©Neil Turner

Please accept my apologies. This post starts with a short rant.

Every time I read an opinion about which of the many utterly superb cameras that are on the market produces the best colours, my heart sinks. When the writer gives their opinion on the colours or the contrast that this or that model produces I know that I can safely ignore them but I also know that others listen. They often sound convincing because what they say has some small foothold in reality. I find it unbelievable but some people actually base their selection of equipment on how they perceive a camera model to render colours using the factory settings and often under conditions over which they have little control. Even worse; others actually allow the opinions of these short-sighted and wildly ill-informed folks to influence their purchasing decisions.

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Apple MacBook Air M1

Ten years ago I bought an 11″ MacBook Air. It went everywhere with me because it was so portable, so useful and did the job that I needed it to do. Four years ago I tried really hard to find a way to use an iPad to do the same sort of on-location quick edits that the small laptop had been so good for but I never really made it work. I kept the rapidly ageing laptop in service for longer than I should have and carried my 2017 15″ MacBook Pro on more jobs that I would have wanted to. When Apple released the M1 powered 13″ laptops earlier this year I thought that I might finally have found a solution and the reports coming from other photographers about how good they were helped me make my mind up to invest in one.

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Camera timeline & nostalgia trip

A colleague of mine, Edmond Terakopian, put a post on a Facebook groups a few days ago talking about the Nikon FM2 cameras that he has owned for many years. From there lots of people agreed with what he had written and a few others moved the conversation on to some of the kit that they’ve owned through their careers.

Most of the comments were about how good and how reliable the earlier kit was and how bodies and lenses from the 70s, 80s and into the 90s are still working and still able to run out quality pictures. Lots of nostalgia for the way things used to be!

Personally speaking I wouldn’t want to go back the shooting and processing film – even if that meant you could get a complete professional kit (two FM2s, two motor drives, 24mm, 35mm, 85mm and 180mm lenses and two flashes) for under £2,500. I was never as big a fan of the FM2 as so many of my colleagues were. The much more expensive and robust F3P/MD4 combination was my favourite of all of the manual focus film cameras but the arrival of the EOS1N made me realise that auto-focus was the way to go.

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FTP and the Canon EOS R5

ftp with the Canon Eos r5 tutorial

A little over three and a half years ago I made a video showing users how to do a simple set-up to transmit images directly from the Canon EOS 5D MkIV camera using the built-in FTP feature. Recently a chap who saw that video asked if I could do the same with the EOS R5. At that time I didn’t have access to an R5 so I made a note to get around to it ‘one day’.

Last week I needed to get my hands on one to make sure that it was able to transmit into a server that some of the photographers that I work with use. Thanks to Canon UK and CPS (Canon Professional Services) I have had the camera for a few days, ironed out any issues we had and so I thought that I’d go ahead and make a quick walk-through tutorial and comparison video.

The video is now on YouTube and you can use this link to watch it. Spoiler alert; (more…)