Dorset

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.

You learn something new every day

It is one of the universal truths of photography that you never stop learning. Almost every time you pick a camera up something happens that you squirrel away in your memory banks that will make a difference to how you shoot something else at some time in the future. Normally these are small things but this week I was shooting the wonderful Talvin Singh performing at an arts festival and something happened that made me scratch my head because I’d never experienced anything quite like it.

©Neil Turner, October 2104

©Neil Turner, October 2014

The two pictures above were taken within a fraction of a second of one another under ‘exactly’ the same lighting without flash and with identical settings (manual everything apart from focus) on the same camera with the same lens and have been processed through Adobe Camera RAW identically. So why are they different? The answer seems to be LED stage lighting. You might conclude that both pictures are ‘quite nice’ and move on but that’s not really an answer when you are shooting something that has a moment that you absolutely have to capture. I’ve had issues with un-balasted HMI lighting and of course strip lights but this was in another ‘issues league’ entirely.

It appears that these brand new lights installed in a state-of-the-art theatre are an absolute nightmare for stills photography. Now that I’ve experienced this, I have been reading up on it and it seems to be a known phenomenon where the lights cycle between the red, green and blue LEDs in the light at a speed that the human eye chooses not to detect but that a camera shooting at shutter speeds of 1/125th of a second or higher has a real problem with. The higher you go, the worse it gets. Of course you could shoot at 1/60th of a second and all would be reasonably well – apart from any movement being a little/lot blurred.

Being a complete anorak I decided to shoot a series of tests at an even higher shutter speed (having first racked the ISO up a way) to see what happened:

©Neil Turner, October 2014

©Neil Turner, October 2014

That makes shooting under these lights at the kind of shutter seeds you need to freeze action nigh on impossible. Once I had realised that there was an issue I dropped down to 1/100th of a second and then to 1/80th and shot lots of frames. The first five frames above were shot at 1/400th and the last one was at 1/100th – what a difference.

Most of what I have read about LED stage lights concerns white balancing – well that was the least of my worries here. It was almost as if shooting with shutter speeds in excess of the cameras maximum flash synch speed (the highest speed at which the entire chip is exposed at the same moment) was part of the problem. The LED stage lights in this theatre were effectively pulsing or flashing and the only way to get a consistent image was to work with that pulsing and use shutter speeds below the maximum flash synch. I have read something on what appeared to be a well-infomed website which implies that this only happens when the lights are dimmed – which makes some sense. I haven’t got enough experience with this to work out whether the speed thing is a coincidence or whether it is directly related but I now know how to shoot in this one venue with these lights.

Shooting with shutter speeds that are a long way below “ideal” some of my pictures were sharp and many weren’t – but the job got done. Constant reference to the screen on the back of the camera is frowned on by a lot of people but this case proves that there are times when it is exactly the right thing to do. Imagine having had to shoot this on film with no LCD…

Presumably more and more theatres and venues will use these lights and the problem will grow. Maybe there’s a solution out there already?

©Neil Turner, October 2014.

©Neil Turner, October 2014.

Techie stuff: Canon EOS5D MkIII with a 70-200 f2.8L IS Canon lens. 1/100th of a second at f3.2 on 2000 ISO. WB set to daylight but adjusted in Adobe Camera RAW removing quite a bit of magenta and adding a small amount of yellow.

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.

Portfolio updates – finally!
©Neil Turner/TSL February 2003. Gordon Ramsay photographed in his kitchen

©Neil Turner/TSL February 2003. Gordon Ramsay photographed in his kitchen

I have just finished uploading a major update to my website with a refreshed selection of new and old images in the portfolio section and an updated look to the templates pages with links to all of my social media.

I still do most of the work on my site myself and so it takes a lot longer to do but I am very happy with the way that photographs look on my site and I guess that is a major selling point. There will be lots more changes over the next couple of weeks but I’d like to invite you come to the site and have a look at the new portraits selection as well as two new galleries of personal work which will definitely be updated as they are both about continuing passions of mine.

My website is www.dg28.com and if you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it.

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.

So here it is… merry Christmas
©Neil Turner, 2013.

©Neil Turner, 2013.

Well today is my last day at the coal face until the new year (unless there’s interesting work and money on offer). Thinking back on the way work has been in 2013, it’s been a funny old year – but I could say that about any one of the last six or seven. Yet again I don’t have any pictures worth entering into competitions but that doesn’t mean that I’m not proud of a lot of the pictures I’ve taken and it certainly doesn’t mean that I haven’t had a lot of fun in the process. There are a few 2014 pictures already in my on-line and hard copy portfolios and my corporate book has had a pretty good year.

I’ve been sticking pictures onto EyeEm and enjoying the work of others on the same platform. I’ve even started to repost some of those images on my Facebook page which is slowly getting more ‘likes’.

Apart from shooting pictures my year has had a lot of great teaching moments and I’m looking forward to returning to the chalk face for one day a week between the new year and Easter.

Blogging has been rewarding and I’ve written a few posts that have been seen by thousands right around the world as well as a few more that only myself and a few regular readers have seen. The highlight of my blogging year was when I wrote about “Photographer B” – a post that was shared and tweeted about more than any other for quite a while. I hope that it made a few people think about what is happening in the world of professional photography.

I tried to resist the temptation of handing out a few awards (no cash, no trophy, just kudos) so, in no particular order here they are:

Best new piece of kit acquired: The EyeFi Prox2 SD card – for transmitting images to my phone, iPad or computer direct from my cameras. The runner-up is the iPhone 5S and an honourable mention goes to the Lithium ion batteries on the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra.

Best piece of old kit: First place goes to my Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS lens. It is 11 years old and just as sharp as ever thanks to one of my other winners. Runner-up is the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra.

Favourite supplier: For the work they’ve done on my gear, for supplying new kit at superb prices and for being some of the nicest people I’ve ever met this award goes to Fixation. I have two runners-up – The Flash Centre and Castle Cameras both of whom treat me very well even though I hardly ever spend any money with them!

Favourite piece of software: For the tenth consecutive year, it has to be Photo Mechanic because it makes my workflow and therefore my working life better. The runner up is Photogene4 on the iOS operating system.

Favourite client: Picking one out of the bunch would be unfair – I would like to say a public ‘thank you” to everyone who has used my services this year and it is heartening to be able to say that I haven’t suffered a single problem of non-paying during 2013.

Unsung hero award: For making great kit that just does its job day after day and week after week I’d like to recognise the contribution that Timberland footwear makes to my working life. I wrote about the photographer and their uniform quite a while ago and nothing has changed.

Happily, I don’t have a crystal ball. If I owned one I’d spend far too much time looking forward and not enough time in the moment and certainly a lot less time trying to perfect the ‘decisive moment’. 2014 promises many things – new cameras, better computers, upgraded software and the ever-present pressure to create more pictures, faster and for less money. It feels as if our industry has lost far too many characters and heroes this year. The list is long and distinguished and I hope that each and every one of them rests in peace.

So that’s it… the 2013 working year is as good as over and all that’s left to say is thanks to everyone who has read and supported this blog, thank you to all of my colleagues and friends who have helped make 2013 memorable and thank you to my lovely wife for her amazing support.

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.