It was only last summer that I made the jump to using Canon EOS R6 bodies for the majority of my work and now I’ve swapped to the R6 MkIIs. I had listened to my own wisdom for a few months and calculated that I couldn’t make the business case for going for an upgrade so soon. Then I got to play with a MkII and I changed my mind.
There wasn’t one thing that made me make the swap – it was a list of little upgrades here and there that made my mind up for me.
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When Canon announced their top-of-the-range flash unit, the EL1, I read the specification and thought to myself “looks nice but probably not worth the money”. It has taken from that announcement until this week for me to actually use one and, I’m slightly embarrassed to say, change my mind.
Not to put too fine a point on it, this is the first hot shoe style flash unit from Canon that I would be confident of using as a day-to-day piece of kit for editorial portraiture with a whole range of light modifiers and be able to leave my Elinchrom kit at home. It’s powerful, has superb recycle times and in both TTL and manual modes it does everything that I might want it to. There are tons of other bits of kit that are on the market competing in this space but I haven’t used most of them and so I will only stick to what I know.
Like every piece of equipment ever made it isn’t perfect so I’m going to quickly examine some of pluses and minuses.
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Towards the end of the summer of 2022 I was lucky enough to be commissioned to spend two weeks photographing The Lambeth Conference. 650 Bishops, 450 of their spouses and a few hundred guests and staff in and around the University of Kent, Canterbury Cathedral and Lambeth Palace made for a fascinating experience and some very interesting pictures. That was act one.
The last eleven days have been act two. This time there are fewer Bishops, fewer Archbishops and a very different location. I’m writing this whilst still in Accra – the capital city of Ghana in West Africa – waiting to go to the airport to fly home. The difference between the locations is vast. It’s hot here and the humidity has been tough on me and almost as tough on my cameras. It’s a developing country with all of the colour, noise and atmosphere you’d expect but with so much more.
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Last summer I jumped into the world of Canon mirrorless cameras with a blend of caution and enthusiasm. I recognise that many of my colleagues made the DSLR to mirrorless switch way before I did but, being the anorak that I am, I was determined to make the swap work for me. Having used Canon SLRs and DSLRs for over twenty five years it was always going to be an interesting time and it has taken me five months to iron out all of the niggles. The funny thing is that 90% of the change was painless and happened in under a month. It has been the one part of my work that I was always well known for that has taken me an age to completely master.
Flash.
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As 2022 comes to a close I just wanted to grab a few minutes to wish those who has visited my websites, clients past, present and yet to come as well as friends and colleagues a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.
2023 looks like it might be pretty exciting and, like everyone else who works in the creative industries, I am hoping that it will bring new challenges, new opportunities and new people to work with.
All the best, Neil.
Like almost everyone else, I get a lot of suggestions on Facebook for products that I might like to buy. Some are worthwhile, a few are comical and a lot of them are pointless but the other day I had something pop up in my timeline that struck me as plain wrong.
The product in question was an application aimed, allegedly, at professional photographers and claiming to make big inroads into their post-production. As regular readers of this blog will understand – anything that can possibly improve my workflow has got my instant attention.
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When I worked in a camera shop in the early 1980s we used to sell ninety percent of the camera bodies with a standard lens. Olympus, Pentax, Nikon, Canon, Minolta, Ricoh and a few others all came in a kit with a 50mm lens. By default almost every camera owner ended up with a decent quality pretty fast and actually very versatile bit of glass. Even before I took that job my second SLR (an Olympus OM10) came with a Zuiko 50mm f1.8 and I kept that lens as long as I had Olympus cameras. They were cheap and did the job at a time when very few people shot with zoom lenses.
Since then I have owned over a dozen other 50mm prime lenses as well as two different 55mm ones. At no point in the period from 1981 until today have I been without at least one 50mm optic. At one point I had no fewer than four Canon fifties: f1.0, f1.4 f1.8 and the f2.5 macro. I swapped the f1.0 for an f1.2 a few years ago and it was only comparatively recently that I culled my collection to the point that I “only” have three; the EF 50mm f1.2L, EF 50mm f1.4 USM and the relatively recent RF 50mm f1.8 STM. The two EF lenses will be going soon and it looks as if my collection of fifties will be down to a single lens for the first time since 1995.
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I don’t actually remember the first time that I heard the phrase “pay it forward” but I know that it accurately summed-up something that was there in my mind from quite a young age. I had two parents who both loved to explain how to do things and both of them took enormous pleasure in “paying it forward”. Both of my older brothers either consciously or subconsciously echoed our parents attitudes as well. In fact, if you look around, it’s happening all of the time and it is to be appreciated and celebrated.
I can remember watching a film actually called Pay It Forward which came out in 2000 and that, despite it’s rather cheesy nature, it definitely helped to put a name to what I had already been doing for many years.
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Neil Turner Photographer 