canon

Another year almost over
A knitted Bishop is one of the decorations on the Christmas tree at the Lambeth Palace Library . ©Neil Turner. December 2023

As 2023 draws to a close I just wanted to look back at what has been a great year for me professionally. Since badly damaging my spine in 2017 and being diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2020 I have been spending as much time working as a photo editor as I have taking pictures but the latter half of 2022 and the whole of 2023 have changed all of that. I am fitter than I was and the cancer appears to have been soundly defeated and I have been able to take on way more work as a photographer than I have done for many years. On top of that, it has been nice work to do and so I’m a happy chap. I have no intention of ditching the editing work and so I am just a lot busier.

Back in December 2013 I wrote my last blog post of that year looking forward to a family Christmas and commenting on how my year had gone. I offered up my selections of “best of the year” for want of a better title. I’m not going to list the best of 2013 here but here’s a link if you want to go and have a look for yourself. Borrowing much the same categories, here is the best of 2023:

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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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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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Canon’s EL1 flash unit – first impressions
The EL1 (left) sits next to one of my trusty 600 EXII RT speedlites to show the size difference.

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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I can’t imagine being without a fifty
©Neil Turner. October 2022. Canon RF 50mm f1.8 mounted on an R6 body

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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An update on my mirrorless journey…

It’s hard to know where to start when talking about the changes that shooting with mirrorless cameras have made. In the absence of anything profound I think that I will start with something that has been said by others but which I need to express very strongly. So much so, I’m going to make it a quote:

“Canon got everything right when they introduced the EF to RF converter”

Why did I feel the need to say that in quite such strong terms? I hate changing systems. Back in the day (1995) when I swapped from Nikon F4S bodies to Canon EOS1Ns, and had to swap all of my lenses as well, it was tough. Nothing was familiar apart from the rolls of film I was slotting into them. Changing everything in one hit meant that I had to get my head around half a dozen different things all at once. This time around, swapping from Canon EF to RF I got to keep my familiar (and much loved) lenses whilst I got used to the new bodies and their wildly unfamiliar viewfinders. Eventually I will swap out all of the lenses too but there really is no hurry. The converters aren’t perfect but, looking back over the last few weeks, they have been such a help in making the transition.

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Camera timeline & nostalgia trip

A colleague of mine, Edmond Terakopian, put a post on a Facebook groups a few days ago talking about the Nikon FM2 cameras that he has owned for many years. From there lots of people agreed with what he had written and a few others moved the conversation on to some of the kit that they’ve owned through their careers.

Most of the comments were about how good and how reliable the earlier kit was and how bodies and lenses from the 70s, 80s and into the 90s are still working and still able to run out quality pictures. Lots of nostalgia for the way things used to be!

Personally speaking I wouldn’t want to go back the shooting and processing film – even if that meant you could get a complete professional kit (two FM2s, two motor drives, 24mm, 35mm, 85mm and 180mm lenses and two flashes) for under £2,500. I was never as big a fan of the FM2 as so many of my colleagues were. The much more expensive and robust F3P/MD4 combination was my favourite of all of the manual focus film cameras but the arrival of the EOS1N made me realise that auto-focus was the way to go.

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FTP and the Canon EOS R5

ftp with the Canon Eos r5 tutorial

A little over three and a half years ago I made a video showing users how to do a simple set-up to transmit images directly from the Canon EOS 5D MkIV camera using the built-in FTP feature. Recently a chap who saw that video asked if I could do the same with the EOS R5. At that time I didn’t have access to an R5 so I made a note to get around to it ‘one day’.

Last week I needed to get my hands on one to make sure that it was able to transmit into a server that some of the photographers that I work with use. Thanks to Canon UK and CPS (Canon Professional Services) I have had the camera for a few days, ironed out any issues we had and so I thought that I’d go ahead and make a quick walk-through tutorial and comparison video.

The video is now on YouTube and you can use this link to watch it. Spoiler alert; (more…)