canon

Canon announces a new 24-70 f2.8L lens

New objects of desire on the equipment front will probably start to appear with monotonous regularity between now and The London 2012 Olympic games. Overnight Canon have announced a new version of the 24-70 f2.8L lens – the mark II.

The older version has been my workhorse for so many years now that I would find it hard to do my job without one and the appearance of a new (and improved?) version makes get my abacus out and start to apply the cost/benefit calculations that professionals need to make every time we consider a new piece of kit.

If I decide that I cannot justify buying it, then it still remains an object of desire! Apparently another major camera manufacturer has also been busy on the launch pad overnight. Nikon have announced the D800 with more megapixels in a 35mm style DSLR body than anyone thought possible/desirable/necessary. Given Nikon’s recent track record of getting things right I would not bet against this being a great piece of kit and a runaway success. For my part, I hope that the next full-frame Canon doesn’t follow suit and re-ignite the megapixel race. A 5D MkIII with decent AF and a chip at around 24-25 megapixels with decent options to shoot smaller (and maybe custom sized?) RAW files would suit my needs rather well.

Carlos Fuentes portrait – the “contact sheet”

Going back through an old portfolio I was reminded of a lot of portraits that I used to love. One of them is this session with Mexican author Carlos Fuentes shot at his London home in December 1999. He was both charming and cooperative and his home was easily spacious enough to set up as much gear as I had been able to carry up the stairs.

©Neil Turner/TSL. December 1999. London

He had already been interviewed by a reporter to whom he was obviously a hero and I had spent a while asking her about him and his work. These were the days when the internet was just starting to become useful for background research. The trouble was that this was a last minute assignment and getting on line when you were on the road was a very tricky task. These days we all have smart phones with Google and Wikipedia but back then it was a lot tougher to become an instant expert of your subject. I looked his CV up later and was a bit embarrassed that I had never heard of him. I read a coupe of translations of his books over that Christmas break and I hope that I will never get caught out like that again.

Techie stuff: Kodak/Canon DCS520 cameras with 17-35 f2.8L, 28-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses. All lit with a Lumedyne Classic series flash and a 70cm shoot through umbrella with the hair light in some frames provided by a Canon 550ex flash unit.

Choice adviser – the “contact sheet”

This is another contact sheet that doesn’t quite fit in with my previous postings. The lady in the portraits is a “Choice Adviser” whose job it is to work with children and their parents to help them choose which secondary schools are best for them and to help them make their applications to their chosen schools. Part of her job is to hold workshops and the pictures were taken outside the most beautiful of the buildings where she does those workshops.

©Neil Turner/TSL. December 2006, Kent.

The portraits were done quite late in the afternoon on a cold and miserable December day back in 2006. I chose to shoot with quite a lot of light and there were two Lumedyne packs and heads used on most of these images balancing the flash with the ambient light. My brief was just to shoot nice portraits and I had no idea what kind of shape or even where in the newspaper they would go and so I had to give the Picture Editor as much choice as I could.

I wouldn’t normally choose to shoot someone in a black coat against a black door but on this occasion I really like the effect. For my money, making good portraits with people who are shy and who are unused to being photographed on cold, damp December days is a lot tougher than working with celebrities.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 85 f1.2L lenses. Mixture of available light with two Lumedyne Signature series flashes, a small soft box and a 70cm shoot through umbrella.

Merger talks – the “contact sheet”

Until now all of the ‘contact sheets’ that I have blogged have been from portrait assignments. Whilst looking back through some old pictures that haven’t seen the light of day in many years I came across this set of images. I was commissioned to do a sort of ‘fly-on-the-wall’ coverage of a Board meeting of the combined Westminster and Kingsway College governors.

©Neil Turner/TSL. July 2000, London.

The idea was that two medium sized central London colleges were to merge and become a single large institution on multiple sites and a series of meetings like this one were taking place to make important decisions about almost every aspect of the way that the new Westminster Kingsway College would function. This particular meeting was about the logo. My task was to get a whole series of black and white images (even if they were shot on a digital camera in colour) that could be used through a multiple page article about the merger once it was complete.

Moving around the room as quietly as possible, using no flash and getting a set of pictures that represented the meeting was my goal and it was actually a fairly tense meeting, which made my job all the more difficult. In the end I left the meeting before I was asked to. It was only a matter of time before I got the “tap on the shoulder” anyway and I thought that I wasn’t going to get anything very different and a voluntary departure would be a good move.

The magazine actually ran nine pictures across three pages in the end and I was very keen to repeat the exercise. Sadly, it didn’t really happen in the same way again for many years.

Techie stuff: Kodak/Canon DCS520 cameras with Canon 17-35 f2.8, 28-70 f2.8 and 70-200 f2.8L lenses at 640 ISO and colour converted to black and white using the Kodak DCS Acquire software.

Ahmet Zappa – the “contact sheet”

Ahmet Zappa is the son of legendary rocker Frank Zappa and is an author who has written books for children. A resident of Los Angeles, he was photographed at the offices of his publishers, Penguin Books on The Strand in London. I was there at the same time as one other photographer and we played this weird “your go, my go” dance shooting portraits in turn in different parts of the beautiful building. He was more than happy to clown around – his PR team were less sure until we showed them what the pictures looked like on the LCD screens, at which point they became very happy indeed!

©Neil Turner/TSL. London, August 2006.

The magazine went for frame 032 but I have always preferred 027. It has been in and out of my folio over the last three years and I think that it will get another outing soon.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses. Some available light but mostly with a Lumedyne Signature series flash and a 24″ x 32″ Chimera soft box. There is also quite a bit of ambient light in the pictures.

The early days of digital

I took delivery of my first Kodak DCS520 digital camera in late November 1998. It was a revelation. I had used a previous model (DCS3) which was pretty poor and I wasn’t really that convinced about the whole process. After three days, I was a convert – the kind of convert who then sees it as their role to evangelise about their new-found wisdom/insight/faith. Based on the Canon EOS1n camera, the Kodak conversion replaced the whole of the back of the camera and quite a big chunk of the electronics too. It was expensive, relatively slow and it only had 1.9 megapixels. It had a tiny low resolution LCD screen on the back and it used enormous and expensive batteries that rarely lasted a whole day but I absolutely loved it from that first week!

©Neil Turner/TSL. 10th December 1998

This was one of the first proper portraits that I shot with my first DCS520 (known as the Canon D2000 in some countries) and it was of a double bassist and jazz teacher in his own home. My conversion was so dramatic and so complete that I even remember sulking a little when I had to shoot on film for the glossy sections of the newspaper. We worked with these early cameras for nearly four years until the Canon EOS1D came out. Nikon had introduced the D1 in that period and the see-saw battle for supremacy between the two big manufacturers with input from Kodak and Sony began in ernest.

I quite often get asked what the big trigger was for digital in the newspaper industry. There are a few factors;

  • The arrival of cameras capable of shooting quality images
  • The money saved by newspapers getting rid of darkroom staff
  • The arrival of new health and safety laws that meant waste chemicals became very expensive to dispose of
  • The speed of turnaround of digital pictures
  • The ease of archiving digital images

Talking with others who used the Kodak DCS series camera from that era we all agree about one thing – how good Kodak’s software was. What a shame that they threw away their lead in professional digital photography. If they had even kept their software development going, they could possibly have avoided needing to file for bankruptcy protection in the US courts last week. I look back at the early days of digital with a real fondness – they really were the most exciting of times. There’s something very cool and very rewarding about being in the second row of pioneers!

William Atkinson portrait – the “contact sheet”

When I took these pictures in May 2008 it was only a month before William Atkinson was Knighted in the Queen’s birthday honours list. He had been the Head Teacher at The Phoenix High School in west London since 1995. I shot these portraits on the school’s “farm” which had been an unused area of land which has been brought into use as a community resource and outdoor classroom.

©Neil Turner/TSL. May 2008, London

His CV is long and distinguished and he is an impressive man. Shooting his portrait took patience because he had quite a bit to say about quite a few topics and, like so many head teachers I have photographed, he was constantly watching what was going on around us. This wasn’t the first time I had photographed him – I first shot pictures at Phoenix when he first arrived back in 1995 and the lovely thing was that he still had a copy of that magazine cover on his wall.

I shot 92 frames on this job and submitted a tight edit of 11 having previously trimmed the selection down to 18. Looking back through a lot of the portraits that I did between 2000 and 2008 it is amazing how often 18 was the number of frames that I kept. There has to be an explanation but I am afraid that I cannot think of it!

Techie stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L lenses. Lumedyne Signature series flash and a 23″x24″ Chimera soft box.

The personal frames you shoot…

I have shot thousands of editorial portraits over the last 26 years and every once in a while I shoot a few “personal frames” at the end of a job. What I mean is that there are pictures that I shoot if I have time that I know the client would not publish in a million years and so I am doing them for my own amusement/sanity/experience/curiosity. When you start shooting pictures, everything you do is an adventure. Slowly you learn how to achieve the results that you (and your client) want and it becomes very easy to just take the pictures that you need to take without pushing any boundaries or trying anything new.

Professor Lewis Wolpert. London, March 2004. ©Neil Turner/TSL

I wrote an essay in 2004 about why black and white is so effective and why so many people profess to preferring it to colour for a lot of ‘serious’ pictures. The reason that I have always believed is that good photography is about giving people a view of your subject that they recognise but that, at the same time, is not how they themselves would have see the same scene. There are plenty of ways of achieving this but the one that non-photographers seem to respond to most positively is to show black and white pictures. For about two weeks after writing that for the first time I consciously shot pictures that I could convert to black and white to prove or disprove my theory. I even submitted a few black and white images with my edits to the newspaper I was working for.

The experiment developed a little and I started to try to actually mimic the feel of black and white film and prints. Lots of filters and plug-ins were appearing on the market at the time and I played with as many as I could get my hands on. The experiment ended when I shot this portrait of Professor Lewis Wolpert at the Department of Anatomy, University College London in March 2004. I had spent quite a while using Photoshop’s darkroom style tools to dodge, burn, correct contrast and generally make an otherwise ordinary picture look rather nice. I really liked the picture but I decided that the personal frames idea needed to head off in a different direction and so I stopped shooting with mono in mind for quite a while.

In common with almost all of the work that I was doing at that time, this was shot on a Canon EOS1D with a 70-200 f2.8L lens. It was shot at 640ISO (which for me was the highest you could go on the original EOS1D without getting a lot of noise) at 1/125th of a second at f2.8.