equipment

One month in with the Canon EL5 flash
The oldie but goodie 600 EXII RT on the left meets the EL5 on the right.

Many months ago I wrote about my experiences with the top-of-the-range Canon EL1 flash. It was heavy, bulky and expensive but in almost every other way I found it to be very, very good. At the time there was a rumour of a smaller, lighter and cheaper alternative coming from Canon but it took a while to come out and a good deal longer for me to get my hands on not just one but two of them.

EL1 versus 600 EXII RT wasn’t really a great comparison and I found myself matching the big Canon flash against my Elinchrom One which was only ever going to be a contest when using them on stands and with light modifiers because there really isn’t much out there that can be compared to the EL1. The EL5, on the other hand, is a much more direct match for the older 600 EXII. They are much the same size (the EL5 is fatter at the head and I’ll cover that in a bit) and the weight difference isn’t too great with the 600 EXII coming in a 555g with 4 x AA Eneloop batteries loaded and the EL5 tipping our kitchen scales at 601g complete with the same LP-EL battery that was so impressive in the EL1. Both work perfectly with my much-loved ST-E10 speedlite transmitters and that’s where the similarities end.

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Good light and the click-bait rabbit hole
An old favourite: Flash plus ambient – my favourite way to shoot. © Photo Neil Turner, May 2011

OK, I admit it – when the mood takes me I follow links on the internet and find myself down some pretty odd/infuriating/entertaining rabbit holes. The other day I was suckered-in by a full-on click-bait link on Facebook with the oh-so-inviting headline “Is this the biggest lie in photography?” It started out saying that photographers who believe that expensive lights give better light than cheap ones aren’t correct. It started out with all the hallmarks of something controversial but quickly fizzled out but not before I had started to compose a bit of a rant of a comment to add to the growing conversation on the Facebook page from a few others who hadn’t bothered to read to the end before getting on their hobby horses either.

Five minutes later, and having read the whole thing, I stopped, copied what I had agonised over writing, and pasted it into a note on my computer with the idea of doing exactly what I’m doing now; turn that rant into a blog post featuring better reasoning and more detail.

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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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Live pictures
This photograph of The Most Revd and Rt Hon Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury walking from Lambeth Palace to Westminster Abbey accompanied by another Archbishop and seven Bishops taking part in the Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III was transmitted from the camera as I walked backwards over Lambeth Bridge. ©Neil Turner. 06 May 2023

Before I ask you to imagine a scene, I’d like to point out that (for the avoidance of any doubt) this has never actually happened. There’s a big group of clients and potential clients staging a demo with placards and a megaphone with the chant

“What do we want?”

“Great pictures!”

“When do we want them?”

“As fast as the technology will allow!”

News and sports photographers are all very well versed in supplying pictures really quickly. These days that mostly means transmitting directly from the camera or, as a fall back, moving images via their smartphone or tablet or even sticking cards into a laptop every few minutes during the event to upload from there. I’ve talked a lot about FTP from the camera and have even made a couple of tutorial videos about exactly how to do it with the various Canon cameras that I’ve used. Obviously the concept is exactly the same with Sony and Nikon as well as some of the latest Fujifilm bodies.

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An upgrade already

It was only last summer that I made the jump to using Canon EOS R6 bodies for the majority of my work and now I’ve swapped to the R6 MkIIs. I had listened to my own wisdom for a few months and calculated that I couldn’t make the business case for going for an upgrade so soon. Then I got to play with a MkII and I changed my mind.

There wasn’t one thing that made me make the swap – it was a list of little upgrades here and there that made my mind up for me.

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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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Working with mirrorless – a problem solved…

Last summer I jumped into the world of Canon mirrorless cameras with a blend of caution and enthusiasm. I recognise that many of my colleagues made the DSLR to mirrorless switch way before I did but, being the anorak that I am, I was determined to make the swap work for me. Having used Canon SLRs and DSLRs for over twenty five years it was always going to be an interesting time and it has taken me five months to iron out all of the niggles. The funny thing is that 90% of the change was painless and happened in under a month. It has been the one part of my work that I was always well known for that has taken me an age to completely master.

Flash.

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