On holiday with a (new) compact camera
Crowds on the Rialto Bridge in Venice at dusk. © Neil Turner. Friday 24 November 2023

A little over five years ago I bought a new compact camera. I like compact cameras and I’ve never been a great lover of using my phone as my walk-about medium for taking pictures. Spoiler alert: I prefer the control that you have with a camera rather than having to jump through hoops to get the same from a mobile. I wrote about the compact on this blog and it was a Canon Powershot G7X MkII. To save you from reading that post (unless you want to) my main conclusion was:

The bottom line is that this is a truly capable, highly affordable and genuinely compact compact digital camera. A while ago I wrote that using a different compact camera just made me smile and I’m starting to develop a grin when using this new one too. That’s a good sign and I’m pretty sure that it will lead to some pictures that will make me smile too.

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High ISO fun and games
Some quick tests using different workflows with a low light high-ISO image. ©Neil Turner October 2023

For a very long time I have been an advocate of shooting RAW files and processing them through Adobe Camera RAW. Recently I have been shooting a lot of pictures in dark spaces with poor light and have been regularly using ISOs of 6400 and above. What has shocked me is that my normal workflows have been producing results that I find a bit grainy – even with the superb high-ISO capabilities of the latest Canon R series cameras.

Having edited some of the live jpegs transmitted during events it has become apparent to me that I need to get stuck into some of the latest noise reduction options as well as having a better look at what in-camera processing can do.

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Eight days in Rome and the South Caucasus
St Peter’s Basilica with three Cardinals and no crowds ahead of an Ecumenical Prayer Vigil in St Peter’s Square. Photo: Neil Turner for Lambeth Palace. 30 September 2023

A couple of days ago I returned from a bit of whirlwind tour to Rome, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia accompanying The Archbishop of Canterbury and his team on a trip where they met politicians, faith leaders, members of the Anglican Communion, internally displaced persons and refugees across those four different countries in a mere eight days. Lots of flights (six in total), lots of being driven around and a few opportunities to shoot meaningful images.

Inevitably a large percentage of my pictures were just recording who met who in which grand surroundings they happened to be in. We met His Holiness Pope Francis at The Vatican and then witnessed two very grand occasions in St Peter’s Square. We travelled to Baku in Azerbaijan where several meetings took place including one at the British Ambassador’s residence with a range of faith leaders. From there to Tbilisi in Georgia and a packed couple of days. The first was meetings with Orthodox, Catholic and Anglican leaders as well as visiting the Peace Cathedral with its adjoining Church, Synagogue and Mosque before going to Gori and the administrative boundary line between South Ossetia and the rest of Georgia.

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AI imaging for beginners
Should we be worried?

A few years ago I shot a nice picture of two of the younger members of the family jumping over small waves at the seaside. It’s a lovely picture showing the innocence and joy of youth and, though I say so myself, the photograph was perfectly timed with both children in the air at the same time. I guess that they would have been about four years old when it was taken and we have a print of it framed in the house. Fast-forward another three or four years and one of the kids in the picture asked me if it had been Photoshopped. I was taken aback and reminded him that this is what I do for a living; taking good photographs without the need to resort to fabrication. It then struck me that they have lived all of their lives in a world where pretty much every image they see is subjected to some sort of manipulation and that their trust in the accuracy of literally anything is pretty limited.

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Say something nice
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun ©Neil Turner June 1994

Almost exactly three years ago I published this picture on my Instagram feed when I was using my time during Covid 19 to go through my archives and get them into better order than they ever had been. Shortly after it went live I had a really nice message from her daughter who wanted to purchase a copy. That one simple act made me go through Instagram and add lots of simple positive comments about pictures that I liked and ever since then I have tried to say nice things about the work of others.

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Mirrorless for twelve months and counting
My brother’s car photographed in the New Forest National Park. 04 May 2023. Photo: Neil Turner

Twelve months ago I swapped over from beloved Canon EOS 5D MkIVs to Canon mirrorless. In that time I have had quite a few different mirrorless bodies: two R6s, an R5, an R3 and my absolute favourites the R6 MkII. It wasn’t all plain sailing but I have ended up in a position where, when I tried to use my one remaining EOS5D MkIV on a job, I struggled. From a position of feeling desperately uncomfortable with EVFs (electronic viewfinders) I appear to have performed a complete 180 degree switch and found the optical viewfinder, mirror and prism set up hard to re-adjust to. That’s pretty remarkable given that I had almost forty-two years of using SLRs and DSLRs (with the odd rangefinder) and only one with mirrorless as my main camera option.

In the next few weeks I expect to part with that final DSLR and a few more of my EF lenses and pretty much complete the switch because going between the two options isn’t going to work for me.

So what have I learned in the last twelve months?

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Pile it high and sell it cheap? Please don’t.
Glenda Jackson, Labour Party Prospective Parliamentary Candidate. 25 September 1991. Photo: Neil Turner

On the day that an image library licensed one of my historic pictures for just a little under $6 to a well known publisher for use in print and on-line in perpetuity I have been thinking about the value of photography.

We all take pictures on our phones on a daily basis. It’s easy, it’s somewhere between cheap and free and because of that very few of us truly value many pictures. We all have sentimental and meaningful photographs that we have taken and those that have been shot of and with us but do they even have a monetary value? Rarely.

The ability of pictures to influence and even directly alter our mood or play with our aesthetic sensibilities and emotional states is inarguable. It should be those things that make the images that we produce, view and consume on an industrial scale that that give them their true value. I’ve made a living, a pretty decent living, for almost thirty-seven years from photography and I have been lucky enough to find clients (and an employer) who largely understand what the right pictures are actually worth. I’ve been commissioned to shoot many interesting, funny, sad, dramatic, terrifying and downright mundane things and I hope that it is my ability to produce the most eye-catching, informative and memorable images from them that has a real value.

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Live pictures
This photograph of The Most Revd and Rt Hon Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury walking from Lambeth Palace to Westminster Abbey accompanied by another Archbishop and seven Bishops taking part in the Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III was transmitted from the camera as I walked backwards over Lambeth Bridge. ©Neil Turner. 06 May 2023

Before I ask you to imagine a scene, I’d like to point out that (for the avoidance of any doubt) this has never actually happened. There’s a big group of clients and potential clients staging a demo with placards and a megaphone with the chant

“What do we want?”

“Great pictures!”

“When do we want them?”

“As fast as the technology will allow!”

News and sports photographers are all very well versed in supplying pictures really quickly. These days that mostly means transmitting directly from the camera or, as a fall back, moving images via their smartphone or tablet or even sticking cards into a laptop every few minutes during the event to upload from there. I’ve talked a lot about FTP from the camera and have even made a couple of tutorial videos about exactly how to do it with the various Canon cameras that I’ve used. Obviously the concept is exactly the same with Sony and Nikon as well as some of the latest Fujifilm bodies.

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