beach

Five day black & white challenge
©Neil Turner, November 2014. A young woman jogs along the promenade near Portman Ravine in Bournemouth with a child in a pushchair.

©Neil Turner, November 2014. A young woman jogs along the promenade near Portman Ravine in Bournemouth with a child in a pushchair.

A couple of weeks ago I was nominated by another photographer to take part in a Facebook Five Day Black & White Challenge. The idea was simple: to post a new black and white photo every day for five days. I have to admit that I was a bit reticent at first and posted pictures that I’d already taken in the previous few weeks. Then someone mentioned that they found the discipline of having to go out every day and shoot something new invigorating and so I started the challenge over again and shot specifically for it every day. My second challenge ended yesterday but it wasn’t until I was out shooting again today that I remembered that the challenge was over. What to do with the pictures from day six? The answer was to post the chosen frame to Facebook anyway and then to post it here too – as another “just because I like it” frame.

Technical stuff: Canon EOS6D with a 28mm f1.8 EF lens (cropped slightly). 160 ISO and 1/1250th of a second at f11 RAW file converted and desaturated using Adobe Camera RAW CC 2014 with a 5% bronze tint added.

After the storm
©Neil Turner, November 2014. A pensioner walks along the beach near Bournemouth Pier.

©Neil Turner, November 2014. A pensioner walks along the beach near Bournemouth Pier.

Following on from my post about zoom and prime lenses I was out with just the primes yesterday – walking along one of my favourite bits of beach in wild winds and failing light. I was just out having some photographic time before getting into the car for yet another drive up the M3 for work. This one was shot at 640 ISO at 1/1000th of a second at f4 with an 85mm f1.8 Canon EF lens on my rather lovely little Canon EOS6D – a camera that I am becoming increasingly fond of. When I’m doing personal work like this I tend to set the white balance to daylight and accept whatever colour cast I get and in this case it wasn’t far off of what the naked eye saw.

Scavenging starlings
©Neil Turner, October 2014.

©Neil Turner, October 2014. Hengistbury Head, Dorset.

Anybody who knows me or my work would put wildlife and nature photography somewhere near the bottom of my interests. We were out as a family at the weekend having a drink and a snack at a cafe when a table of people enjoying an all-day breakfast behind us got up and left without clearing their plates. A mass of starlings descended and grabbed anything edible off of the plates. All I had to do was turn around and grab a few frames!

Canon EOS6D with Canon EF 50mm f1.4 lens.

Tonality – the black & white conversion app
Screen grab from Tonality 1.1.1

Screen grab from Tonality 1.1.1

I was intrigued by a recommendation that I read from a colleague for Tonality. I rarely go outside Adobe Camera RAW these days, even for black and white conversions, but I was tempted to have a go at something new and so I went to the Apple App Store and bought it. After a few attempts at fiddling with it I dismissed it as a very interesting application that I would master one day when I had the time. A few days ago I was asked by a client to convert a lot of images supplied to them as colour Jpegs into mono Jpegs with a slight tone over them. In the past I would have gone straight back to the RAW files and started again but I had the idea of giving Tonality a go.

Like so many of the corporate jobs I shoot, the client would rather I didn’t show they images on my personal blog and so I grabbed some other interesting pictures from my ongoing personal work and applied the same sort of presets to them. It had taken me less than five minutes to become familiar with the sliders and controls and probably another five minutes to create the ideal and very subtle split toning effect that the client had been asking for. The two versions of a photograph taken on the beach at Bournemouth that you see below were a quick test for this blog post. The colour image is a Jpeg converted from a Fujifilm X20 RAW file in Adobe Camera RAW and the black and white version underneath was converted into black and white using the “adaptive exposure” auto setting in Tonality from that Jpeg.

©Neil Turner, September 2014. Bournemouth.

©Neil Turner, September 2014. Bournemouth.

©Neil Turner, September 2014. Bournemouth.

©Neil Turner, September 2014. Bournemouth.

 

I don’t know what you think but I am really impressed by the job that the auto has done and, whilst I could fiddle and get it even better, I am more than happy with it. I can hear you saying that this is also easy to do in Photoshop (and quite a few other apps and plug-ins) but the point is that it was done in Tonality and it was really easy. The application is capable of a lot of good stuff as well as a lot more completely over the top special effects that I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.

When I get more time, I’m going to get right under the skin of this application. Until then, it will be used on my personal project work. If a client asks for toned mono images again, I will definitely look as using Tonality for that too.

The UK price is £13.99 – which is a little bit dearer than most Apps that I would buy just to have a play. It’s a very simple app that achieves its goals.

Performing the ritual of “The Selfie”

For as long as I can remember I have shot pictures of my wife and I on holiday with a compact camera at arm’s length. I have examples in the family album dating back to 1984 and, whilst I’m not claiming to have invented “The Selfie”, it really isn’t anything new in our house. We started doing those pictures just because there was never anyone else around to take the picture for us and so it was very much a second best picture. Slowly and over the many holidays that we have enjoyed together it became something of a tradition to do at least one of those arm’s length couple pictures but we always liked to get a passer-by to do the picture if we could. It is a phenomenon that I am fascinated by and I often shoot pictures of people as they perform the Ritual of the Selfie.

Olympic and Commonwealth Gold medallist Laura Trott posing with riders on The Mall in a break between media interviews during the Freecycle event - part of Prudential RideLondon. 9th August 2014.

Olympic and Commonwealth Gold medallist Laura Trott posing with riders on The Mall in a break between media interviews during the Prudential RideLondon Freecycle event. ©Neil Turner, 9th August 2014.

I was prompted to compose this blog post because I suddenly realised why it works so well. One of the media team working with Prudential RideLondon had offered to take the picture and the three young women dutifully posed but their faces didn’t come alive until they rescued the phone and performed the ritual of the selfie. There seems to be a confidence and a joy in taking your own picture of yourself and your friends or, in this case, you, your friend and an Olympic and Commonwealth champion. Is it because these days that can see themselves in the screen and only shoot when they are happy with what they see? I believe that there’s an element of that in it but the sense of self-reliance is just as important as far as I can see. There is a joy in The Selfie that is missing from a perfectly well taken group photo. Time after time we all saw people enjoying taking self portraits during the event and that’s the case almost everywhere almost every day.

Where I depart from the celebration of The Selfie is where media outlets and PR companies encourage people to do it and post them as part of marketing campaigns. For me the innocence and joy of the ritual gets lost when it is prompted like that. Where I also have an worries about it is when people do it dozens or even hundreds of times a day. I had a link request on EyeEm the other day from a guy who have over 6,000 images on his account and, from what I could see, they were all of himself.

I don’t object to The Selfie at all. In fact I indulge in the ritual myself from time to time. All I’d ask is that marketing people without another great idea stop trying to make something from them that isn’t really there. Photography is about a lot of things and fun is right up there as one of the most important.

The one "selfie" that I do like of mine - under water at the beach in Bournemouth in the summer of 2013. ©Neil Turner.

The one “selfie” that I do like of mine – under water at the beach in Bournemouth in the summer of 2013. ©Neil Turner.

My Fujifilm X20 – the final word?

It’s amazing how often a casual conversation or a quick exchange on a Facebook group can spark a train of thought. Earlier today a comment by a friend and fellow photographer about how a photo sharing site had made him look around him and start taking pictures for the love of it again. I agreed whole-heartedly and began to think about uploading a few more pictures here. That moved my train of thought onto the various reviews and updates that I’ve written on this blog and elsewhere about the Fujifilm X20 that has been my almost constant companion for the last 11 months. So what I decided to do was to say a few words to summarise my experiences with this camera and add some pictures shot in the last couple of weeks.

©Neil Turner, March 2014. The photographer's shadow forms part of the scene as an elderly couple walk along South Bank of the River Thames in London.

©Neil Turner, March 2014. The photographer’s shadow forms part of the scene as an elderly couple walk along South Bank of the River Thames in London.

In general, my opinions about this camera have barely changed since I posted the first update back in mid April 2013. Given the product cycle that Fujifilm seems to gallop through the X20 is probably about to be superseded anyway but I thought that I’d offer some advice to make this camera (that I still like very much) better if they want to bring out an X30.

  • The battery life has to improve. Despite doing everything possible to limit power drain I get through two batteries a day when shooting with ordinary SD cards and up to four batteries a day when I’m using one of my Eye-Fi cards. This makes a cool and convenient camera a lot less convenient and pushes up the cost of ownership – even if you go for third party spare batteries.
  • Start-up delay. About once in every third time I switch the camera on it takes three or four seconds to adjust and get the exposure correct. The first picture is often three or more stops over-exposed.
  • Autofocus at the telephoto end of the range. My camera sometimes refuses to auto focus when the lens is zoomed all the way to the 112mm equivalent end of its range.
  • The review time options for looking at images you have just shot are too restrictive. There are no options between 1.5 seconds and zoom (unlimited).
  • The built-in flash isn’t compatible with the lens hood – you get shadows and so to use that function you need to remove the hood.
  • The video isn’t great – but I didn’t buy this camera to shoot video.

On top of all of that it would be great if the focal range went from 24-120, the camera had two SD slots and if there were lens correction options for Adobe Camera RAW because at the 28mm end there is the slightest barrel distortion.

This is a great camera and I love using it. I am seriously tempted by the X100S too. Having borrowed one for an extended period, I would very much like to own one. Fujifilm have done a great job with their X-series cameras and they should be very proud of the effect that their cameras have had on a lot of very old and very picky professionals (like me) who all grin like idiots when using the kit. So now, without further ado, here are a few more recent X20 images for you…

So there you go Fujifilm… bring on the X30…

Dogs on the beach and the Fujifilm X20

My addiction to taking pictures of dogs walking on the beach with or without their owners shows no signs of abating and neither does my joy at shooting pictures with my Fujifilm X20. When I get to shoot bon the beach with the X20 my photographic life is almost complete (laughs ironically there). So, once again, for no other reason that I loved taking and editing the picture here is a photograph taken last Saturday at Boscombe Manor during a break in the foul weather that the whole of the country has been getting.

© Neil Turner, February 2014. A couple walk their dog on the beach between storms.

© Neil Turner, February 2014. A couple walk their dog on the beach between storms.

To the north of us was the wreckage of broken beach huts, to the east was an area closed off to the public and to the west was the only stretch of the beach where you could walk with reasonable safety. Happy days.

Back on the beach

In another “just because” moment I thought that I’d post this picture I grabbed on the beach today. I’ve blogged about my near obsession with shooting dogs on the beach and today I was at my favourite part of my favourite beach when the combination of light and subject matter came together meaning that all I had to do was compose, wait and click.

©Neil Turner, October 2013. Bournemouth

©Neil Turner, October 2013. Bournemouth

I actually saw this picture as a mono image too and anyone who has been following this blog will know that this was a major step forward for me in my quest to be able to truly see in monochrome when I want to. To add the final piece to the jigsaw of this image, I love a good silhouette too.

The picture was shot on a Fujifilm X20 at the fullest extent of its 112mm equivalent zoom and it shows a dog with its owner having something of a difference of opinion about what should happen with a ball. You don’t expect to get such beautiful weather in late October – especially less than 36 hours after a massive storm had lashed this part of the English coast. Within a minute or two of shooting this picture I did a RAW conversion in the camera before using an Eye-Fi card to transfer it to my iPhone 5S where I used the Photogene 4 app to optimise and caption the image before uploading it to EyeEm (in colour). The version shown here is the more considered black and white image converted in Photoshop CC on my Mac at home.