opinion

Another quiet August

Next month I will be celebrating my fortieth anniversary of working as a photographer. For almost every one of the thirty-nine Augusts that I have been in the business I have either been very quiet or have had to fill my time with photography work that doesn’t necessarily involve taking pictures. The bar chart above shows how much I have worked in the month over the years since I have been back in the world of freelancing. The table clearly shows a few anomalies and the main points of those are:

  • 2012: Working on the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games as part of the photo management team
  • 2014: The first year where I made some of my income working as a photo-editor on sports projects
  • 2017: Laid up after some serious back surgery – so no work of any kind
  • 2020: Despite the covid lockdowns I did do some editing and some consultancy
  • 2021: The delayed Tokyo Paralympic Games
  • 2022: Lambeth Conference
  • 2024: Paris Paralympic Games

Some good years and plenty of flat and relatively uninteresting years have passed and August has become a month of trying not to worry about keeping busy whilst enjoying some time off – which is a lot easier when you live pretty near the beach. Of course it isn’t just August; the latter half of July and the first week in September are often much the same.

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Insuring my gear
The last frame that I shot with one of my cameras before it crashed to the ground and stopped functioning properly. Both the body and lens needed to be sent to Canon UK for repair. Wednesday 01 July 2026. Photo: Neil Turner for ACO

The company that has insured my camera gear for the last eighteen years has just had to pay out for accidental damage for only the second time since I joined them in 2008. When I was looking for a quick phrase about why you need insurance as a creative professional this sentence from their website came up from a Google search:

“Insurance allows you to concentrate on production knowing that your creative assets are protected and you don’t have to worry about the unexpected happening.”

There are plenty of ways to think about equipment and getting some cover for it. A lot has been written on social media in the last few months by my colleagues who have found that some underwriters use some extremely awful and underhand tactics to avoid paying out on what, only a few years ago, would have been cut-and-dried claims for theft. I have no idea what my particular insurer’s angle on theft claims is because I have never made one but, as our American friends say, they are two-for-two on accidental damage.

This time around I was photographing a group of delegates to an International Anglican Church conference as they walked across the Peace Bridge in Derry/Londonderry. It was day four of an eight day assignment in Northern Ireland. I was swapping between one Canon EOS R5 MkII with an RF 70-200 f4L lens to a second R5 MkII with an RF 14-35 f4L lens when I dropped the body complete with the longer lens.

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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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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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Trying new things
The Sarum Lights exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral. November 2025. © Neil Turner

Whilst doodling around on the internet the other day I was looking at a few reels on Instagram. Now it probably won’t come as much of a surprise that that my Instagram feed is filled up with great photographers and so it will equally make sense that the all-powerful algorithm serves me up photography related content most of the time. One of the reels was from a relatively young and relatively inexperienced photographer proclaiming that he had discovered a new technique. It went on to show a technique that is, to me, as old as the hills. Dragging the shutter to create a deliberate blur.

I was just about to type something that gently and constructively pointed out that this wasn’t anything new and that an old hand like me rarely (if ever) sees anything that’s truly new when I decided to see what other viewers of the reel had commented first. Sure enough, there was a small number of constructive and supportive comments but the vast majority of them were not even remotely constructive and way too many were downright dismissive. I breathed a huge sigh of relief that I hadn’t been that person – the one who sought to boost their own sense of self-importance by squashing the joy and enthusiasm of someone who had discovered a potentially exciting technique that was new to them.

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