equipment

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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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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Mirrorless here I come

It’s surprising how much of the work that we all do could be done a little easier and with a little less stress if our cameras were silent. I have been shooting inside a Cathedral quite a bit over the last couple of weeks and I have been shooting in a conference much of the rest of the time. The combination of that recent experience and the news that next year’s tennis at Wimbledon will be DSLR and shutter sound free have made me decide that it’s time to give the whole mirrorless experience a proper go.

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Mac Studio arrives…
The Apple logo on top of my Mac Studio. ©Neil Turner, June 2022

A couple of months ago I wrote about the amount of power that I perceived that I needed in a computer in order to efficiently edit images. Shortly after that I saw a Mac with an M1 Max processor in action converting batches of RAW files and I decided that I’d order a Mac Studio a couple of days later. I went for the base model with a 512Gb SSD and 32Gb of RAM for two reasons; the first of which was that it was easily going to be powerful enough for even the chunkiest RAW files and the second was that it was the only model that had any chance of being delivered in time for the heavy batch of editing that I am now in the middle of.

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Computer speed and power in my real world

When Apple announced their new desktop Mac – the Mac Studio – I watched the keynote address and was very interested in what this new bit of kit had to offer. Starting at £2000.00 including VAT it looks like a veritable speed machine. I have read some reviews and looked at test bench scores which are supposed to give us real world performance data so that we can compare one machine against another. With all of that in mind, it looks really good. But… what do those score mean for me?

In the editor part of my working life I often end up editing 200, 300, 400 or more RAW files from different cameras a day. When I am shooting my own pictures it is rarely that many and, of course, the files will all be from my own cameras and therefore not varied set of RAW formats. The most power hungry work will all be inside Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) and I want to know what time savings this new Mac will actually give me. Having watched several reviewers (mostly high-end video editors) talk about what has frustrated them in their workflow I started thinking about the relatively few times I find myself waiting for things to happen in ACR.

The truth is that there aren’t many things that take time and frustrate me with my ageing 15″ MacBook Pro but here are a few:

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How not to choose a new camera
©Neil Turner

Please accept my apologies. This post starts with a short rant.

Every time I read an opinion about which of the many utterly superb cameras that are on the market produces the best colours, my heart sinks. When the writer gives their opinion on the colours or the contrast that this or that model produces I know that I can safely ignore them but I also know that others listen. They often sound convincing because what they say has some small foothold in reality. I find it unbelievable but some people actually base their selection of equipment on how they perceive a camera model to render colours using the factory settings and often under conditions over which they have little control. Even worse; others actually allow the opinions of these short-sighted and wildly ill-informed folks to influence their purchasing decisions.

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Apple MacBook Air M1

Ten years ago I bought an 11″ MacBook Air. It went everywhere with me because it was so portable, so useful and did the job that I needed it to do. Four years ago I tried really hard to find a way to use an iPad to do the same sort of on-location quick edits that the small laptop had been so good for but I never really made it work. I kept the rapidly ageing laptop in service for longer than I should have and carried my 2017 15″ MacBook Pro on more jobs that I would have wanted to. When Apple released the M1 powered 13″ laptops earlier this year I thought that I might finally have found a solution and the reports coming from other photographers about how good they were helped me make my mind up to invest in one.

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