photography

Getting to grips with my Sony RX1
Stage door of the Apollo Theatre, London. ©Neil Turner, January 2016

Stage door of the Apollo Theatre, London. ©Neil Turner, January 2016

A week ago I was shocked when the lovely folks at Castle Cameras here in Bournemouth got in touch to let me know that I’d won a new camera in a Sony competition that they were running on their Flickr site. I had completely forgotten that I had entered and when they told me to come and collect my shiny new Sony Cybershot RX1 I popped up later that afternoon. I spent most of the rest of that day playing with the camera and (shock horror) reading the instruction manual. I checked out what “the internet” had to say about the camera and stuck it in my bag determined to give it a proper outing at the first opportunity. You can see the winning picture here.

The weather hasn’t been great and I have been a bit busy with the day job and so it took a full six days before I got a proper chance to take some pictures. I happened to be in London with about three hours to kill yesterday and even though the weather was poor I was determined to have a wander and see whether I could get to grips with the RX1. I don’t really write full-on product reviews because there are other people that do it so much better than I can and this particular model Sony has been around for quite a while. It is, however, a very close contemporary of my beloved Fujifilm X100S and I was keen to find out whether the Sony could do two things: (more…)

Don’t panic…

I use Apple products. In fact, I use a lot of Apple products and some of my less generous colleagues might even label me a “fanboy”. I’d call that unfair because I’m not blind to their faults and I know that, like all technology, it will fail at some point.

I have tried my best to develop ways of avoiding failures, making sure that they cause as little damage or disruption as possible and generally covering my back wherever and whenever possible. The other day, whilst doing routine updates to one of the Macs in my office, I experienced something that would probably have completely freaked most computer users out and necessitated a lot of aggravation or even a visit to a service centre or Genius Bar.

dock_error

Simply put, all of the applications went AWOL. The dock, of which you can see a screenshot above just showed a whole row of question marks indicating that the applications were missing and a quick visit to the applications folder showed that the Mac clearly thought so too. The error message said that I didn’t have permissions to use the folder which made me believe and/or hope that nothing was actually missing. The “missing” applications included Time Machine and all of the repair and diagnostic tools that I would normally go straight to. I looked in the bin and I tried to search for items that I know should have in my applications folder but found nothing.

This has never happened to me before and I have never heard it described so I tried solution number one – to use a different device, get onto the internet and search the collected knowledge of the world’s computer users. The general consensus appeared to be that I had a major issue and that I needed to reinstall the Mac operating system. Easier said than done given that, despite trying every kind of reboot and diagnostic test I could, the App Store, all web browsers and Time Machine were amongst the locked/blocked/missing applications.

I could have done it all from one of the other Macs but I have, for many years, had a back-up drive from which I can boot my computers. These days it is a USB3 SSD drive with OSX Yosemite loaded on it and I used that to reboot my computer and install a fresh copy of OSX. Twenty-five minutes later with a mildly raised heart rate and some cramp in my fingers from keeping them crossed my computer was back as if nothing had happened. No screwdrivers were involved and nobody had to drive anywhere. No data was lost and I could get on with work.

Just in case you are wondering, panicking wasn’t even in the top ten ways to sort this out – about five places below a stiff drink or three!

A case that proves the old military phrase that I was taught at school in the 1970s and 1980s – “precise and proper planning prevents poor performance”.

Welcome to 2016
© Neil Turner, December 2015. Ullswater, Cumbria.

© Neil Turner, December 2015. Ullswater, Cumbria.

So here we are entering 2016 trying desperately to work out what’s going to happen during the year. Like every year since I returned to freelancing I have a pretty blank diary facing me. As always that leaves me simultaneously excited and petrified.

My new year has started as the old one ended with some back pain and so I’ve spent more time with a Chiropractor than I have with my cameras recently. I’m slowly getting better and over the next few days I will be getting in touch with some of my current and lapsed clients to have a chat about what I can offer them. This is probably the part of being freelance that I enjoy the least – looking for work.  (more…)

Brian Harris’s Book

Brian was there when I got started and his stories have always been entertaining. I’d strongly recommend anyone interested in photography or just life itself to follow Brian and read his book when it comes out.

brianharrisphotographer's avatarThe aim of this blog site is to introduce my soon to be published book to a wider audience. I will write on a regular basis about the process, the ups and downs, of self publishing a high end beautifully designed and tightly edited book about my work as an editorial photographer for the past 45 years. Please enjoy and feel free to make comments in the box at the foot of this page.

‘…and then the Prime Minister hit me…’

Brian Harris blog pics-Jan 2016_20166182

My partner Nikki is partly to blame, for it was she who has pushed me to write down all my stories, my lectures, my history from over 45 years working as an editorial news photographer for the national press in the UK and turn them into an enjoyable illustrated read.

Writing an autobiographical book about ones life is like cleaning out the hard drive on a computer…and best done before my hard drive of a brain starts to fail and all that history, all those wonderful stories and self deprecating anecdotes disappear for ever.

The 75,000 plus words have taken over 5 years to write. It has been a full time job and even now I am finding more stories to add.

At the beginning I really had no idea where to start…a blank page, even on a computer screen, is quite frightening, and so, I…

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Another Merry Christmas
Lights from the Old Vic Theatre reflecting on wet roads near London's Waterloo station.

Bringing home the panettone. London. 17th December 2015.  ©Neil Turner

Another year is drawing to its end and I hope that you have enjoyed reading some (or all) of my blog posts through 2015. I just wanted to post a sort of a Christmas themed street photo to round the year off.

I have entitled it ‘bringing home the panettone’ which makes it a bit festive but it was taken as I was on my way to meet up with some friends and colleagues for a Christmas drink and meal and that adds to its seasonal feeling. Being an independent and freelance photographer I don’t get to spend enough time working with a team and it is lovely to get to be part of an office party like this one was.

2015 has been a good year for me and for my work but it has been tinged by the sadness of losing too many fellow photographers, most of whom were far too young.

Thanks for reading my blog, thanks for contributing and I wish you a very merry Christmas and successful new year.

Technical stuff: Fujifilm X100S 1/80th of a second at f2 on 2000 ISO.

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…)

Canon 16-35 f4 L IS
Test shot with Canon 16-35 f4 L IS in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields

London. 08 December 2015 Test shot with Canon 16-35 f4 L IS in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields Photo: Neil Turner

A couple of months ago I cracked and bought the Canon 16-35 f4 L IS lens to replace my very elderly 16-35 f2.8L having borrowed both this one and the f2.8L MkII to see what all the fuss was about. I shoot quite a few pictures of buildings and having a 16mm lens is very useful – especially when the space is really tight.

My old 16-35 and just about every other super-wide lens I have ever used has suffered from barrel distortion, been less than pin sharp in the corners and generally required a bit of work to get great pictures that are as free from distortion as possible.

I was on a job last night in a tight space where the 16-35 f4 L IS was being pressed into service to do shots of an empty venue before an event. I hadn’t brought a tripod because I hadn’t expected to be doing these shots but I did my best with what I had. The photo above was taken hand-held at 1/60th of a second at f4 on 2500 ISO with the IS switched on with a Canon EOS5D MkIII. I have applied no correction to the uprights and the frame is un-cropped at 16mm focal length.  (more…)

What makes this photo a Flickr favourite?
Waiting for people and texting their friends outside the Apple Store, Covent Garden.

Waiting for people and texting their friends outside the Apple Store, Covent Garden. © Neil Turner. November 2015

When I rejoined Flickr a couple of months ago my main aim was to learn the ins and outs of how it works so that I could help an important client build their Flickr profile. One of the side-effects is that I have become quite interested in how and why some pictures get no attention and why some others get loads. This was made all the more interesting when one single picture of mine went from the normal 100-200 views and 2-3 likes to having over 10,000 views and around 130 likes.

I don’t think that it is any better or worse than most of the rest of the (178 and counting) pictures I have uploaded so why did it get so much attention?

I genuinely don’t think that it is because it is a wonderful image so maybe it is because someone influential in the Flickr-sphere decided that they liked it and that prompted their followers to also like it. Maybe it is because I uploaded it on the right day at the right time in the right groups to get so much attention.

The truth is that I don’t know – (more…)