news

Editing, editing and more editing
olympic_park_pano

The day that the taxi dumped us in the wrong place and we had a yomp across the Rio Olympic Park to the Main Press Centre. ©Neil Turner, September 2016

By the time I leave here tomorrow I will have been in Rio de Janeiro for three weeks. In that time I have managed to take less than a dozen photographs – none of which are of any note whatsoever. I’ve been here as part of the OIS Photos team as one of two editors with my colleague Julia Vynokurova grabbing RAW files from a seemingly endless stream of FTP transfers from the four amazing sports specialists that have been here shooting the Paralympic Games for the Olympic Information Service.

Editing and captioning other people’s work is something that I do from time-to-time and it is a whole different skill set from shooting and editing your own pictures. It may sound obvious but I wasn’t there when the pictures were taken and so I have to judge them against criteria set down by the client and by each individual photographer on the team. (more…)

Elinchrom Quadra ELB

27 April 2016. Bournemouth, Dorset. Elinchrom Quadra ELB. Hillcrest Road Neil Turner

When I get a new piece of kit worthy of mention, I usually write a first hand account of how it is working out and go into details based on using it on a few jobs. I bought an Elinchrom Quadra ELB HS kit a couple of weeks ago and I thought that it was about time I gave some first impressions on this blog. Sadly, I haven’t used it for anything particularly interesting and I certainly haven’t stretched it beyond what I would normally do with my old Quadras (some executive portraits and a quick location shoot) but I can already see a lot of small but amazingly significant changes from the original system.

Those of you who read this blog regularly will know that I was very impressed with the Quadra when I wrote about it in my “32 Months On” and was further impressed when the Lithium Ion batteries came out. The differences between the ELB and the Quadra for most jobs aren’t huge but everything about the new kit tells me that the designers have listened and that the manufacturers have allowed their engineers to implement some great changes. For me, the positive changes with the pack are:

  • Far better display
  • Vastly improved menu system
  • Ability to recondition flattened lithium batteries
  • Better cable port covers
  • All of my old Quadra bits and cables are compatible with the new pack

I have the new High Synch head too which brings one key improvement which is the ability to synch with my cameras at shutter speeds right up to 1/8000th of a second using the EL Skyport Plus HS Transmitter and I’ll talk about these a bit further down the page.

Let’s talk about the menus: (more…)

A Quick Sony RX1 Update…
Dusk at the Stampesletta during the Winter Youth Olympic Games, Lillehammer Norway, 17 February 2016. Photo: Neil Turner for YIS/IOC Handout image supplied by YIS/IOC

Dusk at the Stampesletta during the Winter Youth Olympic Games, Lillehammer Norway, 17 February 2016. Photo: Neil Turner for YIS/IOC Handout image supplied by YIS/IOC

I’m very busy out here in Lillehammer, Norway working with an amazing team of sports photographers covering the Youth Olympic Games. I have been busy editing all day, every day and haven’t had as much time to go out with the Sony RX1 as I’d like. I did, however, shoot a few frames in the dark the other night on the main park. I’ll post more when I get home but I just wanted to say that the RX1 is performing really well despite the temperatures being below freezing.

If you want to see the work that my colleagues Bob Martin, Simon Bruty, Al Tielemans, Arnt Folvik, Thomas Lovelock, Jed Leicester and Jon Buckle are doing please go to the YOGPHOTOS website

My iPhone & not taking pictures with it

iphone_grabThere’s no getting away from two facts:

1. I am a fan of almost everything Apple for the work that I do and the way that I do it.

2. I rely on my two and a bit year old iPhone 5S for quite a lot of things when I’m out on assignments.

The speed of the 4G network and the brilliant array of apps available for all smartphones has changed the way that I do some of my jobs quite a lot in the last few years. Recently I wrote about getting pictures away quickly  and I have also written about the workflow that I use with some of the phone apps and you can see from a current grab of one of the app pages on my phone I have quite a few ways to do similar things.

I’d like to talk in this blog about some of many of the ‘un-sung heroes’ of my mobile life – at least one of which is a very new and a very, very welcome addition to the set up.

The backbone of my mobile image acquisition and transmission system is formed of the Eye-Fi and Photogene apps which have been covered at length before but you can also see plenty of other work related apps on this single screen. (more…)

The story behind a picture #2
© Neil Turner. Joe Rush and the Mutoid Waste Company stage a spectacular demonstration of their vehicles on the beach next to Bournemouth Pier.

© Neil Turner. Joe Rush and the Mutoid Waste Company stage a spectacular demonstration of their vehicles on the beach next to Bournemouth Pier.

Back in 2013 the Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival was getting bigger and better and I was asked to come along and shoot some of the events. The climax of day two was to be a spectacular show on the beach next to Bournemouth Pier by Joe Rush and The Mutoid Waste Company who build and drive fantastic vehicles made from scrap. The organisers had penned off a large area of beach, put up a large public address system and once night had fallen the vehicles and their crews came onto the beach.

I had been there earlier in the festival when some of the vehicles had driven through the town and so I knew roughly what to expect. I got there reasonably early and staked out what I thought would be a good position with the sea and the pier in the background. I had two cameras with me – one with a 70-200 f2.8 and the other with a 24-70 f2.8 zoom lens. I had a couple of Canon speed lights and a high-voltage battery pack, plenty of memory cards and then waited for darkness and the start of the show.

Half a dozen vehicles sped onto the sand and I started shooting away without flash. It was pretty dark, despite the arc lights that had been positioned at various points around the perimeter. These vehicles weigh several tons and one or two of them got caught in the soft sand but that made for great pictures because the people who ‘crew’ them are artists and showmen and they gave the most amazing static display whilst waiting to be hauled free.

© Neil Turner. Audiences watching Joe Rush and the Mutoid Waste Company on the beach next to Bournemouth Pier to close day two of the third annual festival. Photo: © Neil Turner

© Neil Turner. Audiences watching Joe Rush and the Mutoid Waste Company on the beach next to Bournemouth Pier to close day two of the third annual festival.

The edit of the pictures was done in rapid time and sent to the client ready for the next day’s papers and any number of websites and social media platforms and accounts.

The 2015 festival takes place in October and I’m looking forward to seeing some of it up close.

Technical stuff: Canon EOS5D MkII cameras with Canon EF 70-200 f2.8L IS and 24-70 f2.8L lenses. Top picture 1/100th of a second at f2.8 on 2000 ISO with white balance corrected in Adobe Camera RAW. Bottom picture 1/25th of a second at f3.2 on 2000 ISO.

Portfolio updates

Like many photographers I invest a lot of time and energy into my portfolio. I have had a Pixelrights folio since they launched their service earlier this year and every time they add more functionality I tinker with both the design and the content. Right now the service is looking great and the content management system is working well. One of these days I’m going to relegate my other folio platforms and throw everything at this service but until then please come along and have a look at the galleries for portraits, features and my personal work.

MY PIXELRIGHTS HOME PAGE

Three weeks in a bunker
Court 14 - above the Photographers Workroom. ©Neil Turner, June 2015

Court 14 – above the Photographers Workroom. ©Neil Turner, June 2015

There aren’t too many offices with a cooler roof than the one I’ve spent the last three and a bit weeks working in. The brilliant new Photographers’ Workroom at the All England Lawn Tennis Club is directly under courts 14 and 15 and having world class tennis being played on the office roof isn’t an every day boast!

For the second year running I have had a contract to work as a Picture Editor for the AELTC and I can honestly say that it is an exciting, exhausting, fulfilling, frustrating, full-time and full-on twenty three days.

I get to work early in the morning just as the Ground Staff are starting to get the courts ready for action and I leave as they are putting most of them back to bed for the night. In that time thousands of top class photographs cross my screen and I have hundreds of conversations with our photographers and the dozens of other professionals with whom we work.

What I don’t get to do much of is take pictures. A few snatched frames on my Fujifilm X100S on my way in and my way home and some candid shots of the team in the office are my only chances to use a camera. (more…)

Choosing between full frame Canons…
The Canon EOS6D, EOS5D MkIII and the EOS1DX

The Canon EOS6D, EOS5D MkIII and the EOS1DX

A couple of years ago I wrote about how, as a working photographer, I make purchasing decisions. The formula is simple: assess the actual need against the purchase price and proceed accordingly. On that basis I own Canon full-frame digital SLRs (the cost of switching to another brand would be too high – even if I wanted to) and about ten Canon lenses. My last crop-frame DSLR was the EOS7D which was lovely to use but utterly useless to me above about 640 ISO and I shoot at 1000 to 2000 quite a bit these days. I’m always interested in new kit but rarely do I buy something just because I want it.

The chances are that all three of the cameras in the picture are nearing the end of their model lives. The rumours of an EOS5D MkIV and even an EOS1DX MkII (or whatever they choose to call it) are already swirling around the web and it cannot be long before the EOS6D gets an update either. That doesn’t make them bad cameras – far from it, they are all exceptional bits of kit.

I was asked the other day by a talented amateur photographer that I happened to be shooting a portrait of whether it was worth his while “going full-frame”. There’s never a right or wrong answer to questions like that: (more…)