Editorial

Older than old school…

Equipment and my equipment choices tend to evolve pretty slowly. Way back in the 1980s I was using a lot of off-camera flash on location and that meant either owning and running a lot of extension cables with my Elinchrom mains powered units, buying (or renting) a Norman system or using some basic flashguns (the term speed light hadn’t really entered common usage by then, other than as part of a Nikon model name) to do the job. I came across the Lumedyne range (old school) in the mid 1990s, although they had been around for a while by then. Before that I spent many happy years with my cobbled-together battery powered flash kit which was based around the already long-in-the-tooth Vivitar 285 system. I call it a system because there was a ton of accessories that you could get for it and it had some common connections that meant you could pair it up with almost anything you wanted to.

I mention all of this because I stumbled across a pretty much complete Vivitar 285 kit when I was looking for something else in my many boxes of disused and “may-come-in-handy-one-day” kit. In the box were: (more…)

Tinkering with my folio

I spent a long time working as a photographer specialising in education and I spent as long as the rest of you in full-time education as a pupil and a student too. I think that those two facts combine to make me feel that “new year feeling” in September as the kids go back to school and the not-so-young ones go away to university. January is the new year of course and April sees the beginning of the financial year but September feels like to ‘work new year’ to me.

And it is at this time of year I start to think about getting out there with my folio looking for new and interesting work and, at the same time, I like to have at least a minor refresh with my on-line folio too. (more…)

LG 27″ Ultrafine 5K Monitor

I have been wanting to get a new monitor for a wile now. I waited for a few months to see if the new professional monitor that Apple were planning to release was going to be any good. They finally put flesh on the bones of the rumours this week and, I have to say, the monitor looks like it will be great. Great but at a very high price, great but not for a few months yet and great but it will be too big for my desk at home. I have had lots of monitors over the years and I have tried many more whilst installing them for friends and colleagues and so my decision to go with the LG Ultrafine 5K will probably surprise quite a few people.

The days when everything we did was aimed at print are gone. We have to produce images for a very wide range of uses these days and so I decided to go with a monitor that has excellent colour, brilliant flexibility and a simple (very Mac friendly) interface. This LG fits all of those requirements with ease. When these monitors first appeared in the Apple Store there were a lot of negative comments and I was pretty dismissive of them myself when I saw one. Over time I have grown to like them and now that Apple’s own professional monitor cannot tick my boxes I decided to place my order for the LG. (more…)

Location lighting half day workshop in London

Thursday 23rd May at the wonderful Cherryduck Studios in Wapping.

For anyone who remembers that far back my www.dg28.com website started out as a vehicle for me to post updates about the work that I was doing along with some technique examples that I rather pompously called “photographer education”. Well, that was in 1999 and a couple of years later I started doing occasional workshops and lectures about my use of portable flash on location. I have done a lot of talks over the years including a couple on behalf of The BPPA to coincide with exhibitions that were held on the old SS Robin at Canary Wharf. SS Robin attendee Steven Frischling said

“He’s good folks… totally worth the price of admisssion, got off the plane and went right to work with what I learned from you within hours”.  
(Steven had flown from Pennsylvania and was en route to Germany!) (more…)

Using NeoFinder as an image catalogue

Like most photographers my workflow has developed over the years and there are some bits of it that are more to do with convenience and habit than they are to do with efficiency. Cataloguing my archive is definitely something that I haven’t given enough thought to. Well that’s not entirely true; every time I look at Lightroom one of the things that attracts me to it is the cataloguing function that it brings with it. The idea of having an application that does so much and that is effectively free (as I subscribe to Photoshop CC anyway) is a good one but every time I have given it a go, I have decided that it isn’t as convenient at Media Pro as a catalogue. I have had Media Pro in its various forms for a very long time now and it has served me well. Phase One’s decision to stop supporting it has made me look around for an alternative.

Being a long-time fan of Photo Mechanic I have been holding out and waiting for them to bring out a new version of the application that forms the core of my workflow with a cataloguing function. Camera Bits have been saying for years that “it is coming” but  I have decided to look around for other options.

A few months ago I was reading a thread on a Facebook photographers’ group that mentioned NeoFinder. I thought to myself “how come I have never heard of it?” A quick search on the web brought up their site and I realised that this was a newer name for the old CD Finder application that I tried and quite liked half a dozen years or more ago. They offer a free trial and I had some time on my hands and so I downloaded and installed it. I made a quick catalogue from about 20,000 old images and I was shocked by how easy it was to use and how good the searches it allowed were. The question popped into my head “why keep trying to make Media Pro work when this is available?” All of my pictures have their metadata intact and I have tried hard over the years to get my captions and keywords as good as I can make them. Moving from Media Pro to NeoFinder was a doddle. The developers even offer a “sidegrade” discount for people making this transition. (more…)

How big do you want them?

This chart is for one “average” photo and represents a comparison for that picture as a guide. Closed image file sizes vary widely due to their content. The photo in question is an environmental portrait taken with a Canon EOS5D MkIV.

Sometimes I post blogs which describe how I do things and others are intended to be conversation starters and thought promoters. This one falls directly into both camps but it was originally written to start discussions.

How we deliver images to our clients is a subject that photographers can debate until the cows come home or until the technology changes and the debate has to start all over again. For the kind of work that I do most of the time (editorial, PR and corporate) there are a huge number of compromises to be made – most of which are dictated by a small number of factors:

  1. Does the client have a digital asset management system?
  2. Will the client want to do anything to the pictures before sending them out?
  3. Who are the end users and what will they want?

Once you start to gather the answers to these questions you can start to discount a lot of options that, as photographers, we would like to see. Ninety-nine percent of the pictures that I deliver are in JPEG format. It isn’t the best format for quality but it is almost universally recognised and it offers the ability to compress the files. It makes sense to us to save our images at the highest quality available and to deliver the pictures in a way that allows for that quality to be maintained but a surprising number of clients simply don’t want or can’t handle that. A modern DSLR with a 24 megapixel chip produces very large files – even as JPEGs; Too large to safely email. Too large for them to be stored easily unless the client has a decent server or at least a method of storing (and retrieving) a lot of data. (more…)

The Workflow Nerd strikes again

On January 22nd in London I’m going to be running a workshop for photographers who want to expand their knowledge of the various options for speeding up the IPTC captioning part of their workflow. We will be drilling right down into autocomplete, code replacements and variables and even using more than one of them at the same time.

Most of us use the techniques that we know and tend to keep using them until we are persuaded to try something new. This is an opportunity to come and find out what I know and see if you can improve your own workflow at the same time.

If you are interested, the booking is open through Eventbrite and the standard price is just £25.00 with a £15.00 concessionary price for members of The BPPA.

Theresa May MP – July 2000 portrait

The fifteen frame edit supplied to the newspaper from a seven minute portrait shoot with Theresa May who was the Conservative front-bench spokesperson on education in July 2000. © Neil Turner/TSL

When I published my piece last month about the arrival of the Kodak DCS520 cameras I included an interesting portrait of Theresa May MP taken just over eighteen years ago. Several people – including some picture editors – got in touch and asked to see the whole shoot. It was the second time that month that I had photographed Mrs May which, given that I was working for a group of education titles, wasn’t that unusual back then. As always the interview overran and the time for pictures was severely curtailed. The inside of a Member of Parliament’s private office is rarely interesting and so I went tight with what little time I had. (more…)