photography

Instagram – one month into the project

#archivephoto from November 2010 showing a father and son walking the dog in the park as the mists lift. ©Neil Turner

In my last blog post I announced that I had finally decided to get on board and establish an Instagram account. Just over one month later, I have sixty-nine images on my feed and 282 followers.

Not many, I know. I am delighted by the quality of those followers though because they include at least two dozen photographers whose professional and personal work I admire along with a small number of picture editors and commissioners of photography. Sadly, the young picture editor whose comment triggered this project still hasn’t added herself as a follower but that’s probably just as well because out of those sixty-nine images only eight have the hashtag #newwork which I’m using to indicate brand new pictures shot since I established my account. It has been great going back through archives to find the others and I’ve still got a dozen or so #archivephoto options that haven’t been posted yet. (more…)

Instagram… finally!

Gates to a disused Royal Mail sorting office, Christchurch, Dorset. ©Neil Turner. November 2013

I’m not actually sure why but I have avoided Instagram since it was launched. I am aware that it can be used as a good shop window for photographers and I am equally aware that it can suck hours from your day. The thing that finally made me sign up and dive in was when a third picture editor informed me that they didn’t look at portfolios unless they’d seen an Instagram feed first.

When it happened for the first time I wrote it off as the narrow silliness of a very young picture editor. The second time made me think that the whole industry was going nuts but when it happened a third time I decided that I had to move with the times. Now this isn’t the first time that I have been (too) late to a party. I used Flickr when it first came out but deleted my account fairly promptly before getting back in the saddle a couple of years later. I had perviously used EyeEm as a mini-folio but that appeared to be a waste of effort after several months of putting effort into it. Could Instagram be the answer for me? (more…)

In my camera bag – the 2018 remix

Screen grab from an older version of my website showing the ‘obligatory bag shot’

I am writing this in response to a request from a long-time follower of my blogs who wanted me to do an update to an old posting which was, in turn, an update to an even older one.

Back in January 2009 I had been freelancing again for just over four months and I posted what I called the “obligatory bag shot” and went on to detail the kit that lived in my everyday camera bag. At the time that was a Lowe Pro Steath Reporter 650AW – a bag that I still own and use from time to time. These days I am more likely to either have a Domke J3 (with less kit) or a Think Tank Airport Take-Off rolling bag (with slightly more kit) and I wanted to compare notes on what I had in the bag back then compared to now. As a direct comparison I am going to talk about how I load the Lowe Pro when I use it:

(more…)

Adobe Camera RAW – big (ish) changes

 

I sat down to edit a set of pictures this morning and went through my normal routine before actually touching the RAW files:

  1. Calibrate monitor
  2. Check for application updates
  3. Restart the computer

All went well, I had a cup of coffee and then opened the set of pictures as a contact sheet in Photo Mechanic. I went through, added the relevant IPTC captions and then imported the selected images into Adobe Camera RAW and then I noticed that a new icon had appeared in the tools on the right hand side of the screen. A small ‘film strip’ had appeared in Camera RAW 10.3 and below that a new ‘treatment’ option was sitting there offering me the choice between Color (surely they mean Colour?) and Black & White with the choice of profile sitting there in a much more convenient place than it ever has been before.

Change is good. Isn’t it? (more…)

My iPad workflow – some conclusions


Over the last couple of months I have been looking hard at the whole idea of an iPad and iPhone based workflow for the kind of photography that I do. I have tried to find a workflow that is repeatable and adaptable that could replace my tried and tested (and damned good) workflow on a laptop or desktop computer.

I’ve failed.

After trying different iPads and iPhones as well as dozens of apps and an endless combination of those apps I have come to the conclusion that there is no way that an iOS device can replace a computer for the vast bulk of my work. There are several reasons for this but the main one is that iOS was never designed for this kind of heavy lifting and the way that you move files around between apps is still pretty painful and that it is even worse with RAW files. Don’t get me wrong, using a fully-loaded top of the range iPad Pro with decent internet connectivity and a keyboard you get really close to a good workflow but by then you have a device costing at least £1,000.00 (and a lot more if you go for the 12″) which weighs and costs almost as much as an Apple MacBook without the access to rock solid made-for-the-job applications. (more…)

Memory card sizes

Once upon a time I had six 128 and 160 megabyte PCMCIA memory cards and I happily rotated them through my 1.9 megapixel Canon/Kodak DCS520 cameras. That was over nineteen years ago and, like most other photographers, I have kept on buying more and more newer, faster and larger cards ever since. In 2002 when I was shooting with the original Canon 4.1 megapixel EOS1D I graduated to a small pile of 256 megabyte cards which were replaced by 512 meg’ cards pretty quickly. Nine and a half years ago (2008) when I went freelance I was shooting with 8 megapixel Canon EOS1D MkII cameras and I had eight 2 gigabyte cards (along with a stack of ‘retired’ cards) and rarely needed more than four of those a day.

Fast forward to today and I still have a Think Tank wallet with eight compact flash memory cards in it – but now they are all 32 gigabyte plus three spare SD cards for the Canon EOS5D MkIVs and the 7D MkII. On top of that I keep a couple of 16 gig’ CF cards, six 8 gig’ cards and a couple of specialist SD cards in my ‘just-in-case’ case. further on top of that each camera starts the day with a 32 gig’ CF card as well as a 32 gig’ SD card. (more…)

Merry Christmas

After what has been a difficult year for me 2017 is ending on a good note. My fitness is still an issue but work is interesting and the rest of my life is good too.

I just want to wish everyone who reads this blog the very best for the holidays and a fun and interesting 2018.