London

Feedback is very helpful


By the time I was a teenager I had received enough sports coaching (football and cricket) that I was pretty hardened to being told I was doing something wrong and just the tiniest bit embarrassed and surprised by those rare moments when they told me I’d done well. I will be celebrating my fortieth anniversary as a working photographer later this year. I left college at the age of 22 in the early summer of 1986 and started working for a magazine publisher about two months later. I can’t claim to remember every time my work was picked out for praise but I can remember each and every time it was singled out for being sub-standard, off-brief or just not quite right. Back in the early days criticism, positive or negative, made a huge difference and I’d say that those sports coaches did a good job of helping to prepare me for this career.

I wish that I could remember which of the many dozens (or even hundreds) of authors that I have photographed who said it to a reporter as I sat through another interview but I have never forgotten their words “criticism is the lifeblood of the author”. I’m going to water that down quite a bit and say “feedback is very helpful to the photographer”.

Just recently positive comments have been like the proverbial London bus – nothing for ages and then three come along all at once. There haven’t been any complaints but I have been lucky enough to receive three extremely positive comments about me and my work.

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I chose the MacBook Air M5 for my work
My new Apple MacBook Air M5 arrives on launch day. 11 March 2026. © Neil Turner

A few months ago I wrote a blog post about the replacement cycle that I have been through since my very first laptop arrived in 1994. It’s complicated because for the last fifteen or so years I have always had at least two laptops on the go at any given time. That has tended to mean a “full-sized” MacBook Pro for the serious editing sessions and a MacBook Air for lugging around with me on jobs. Supplement that with a desk based computer and I’ve always been pretty well equipped.

About six hours after I posted which M4 chipped MacBook I was going to get Apple announced the M5 series of processors and I decided to wait a little while before committing my hard earned cash. I’ve watched the reports about the various configurations of M5 MacBook Pro models but in the end I decided that my need for a lightweight Mac was greater and ordered an M5 powered MacBook Air for delivery on the first day they became available. That was a couple of days ago and so far (and it really is early days) I am delighted with it. I opted for a 13″ M5 10‑core CPU, 10‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine model with 24Gb of RAM and a 1TB hard drive and, as you can see from the photograph above, I opted for the silver finish over the other options as it looks less conspicuous.

After setting it up from a Time Machine backup on a fast SSD external drive and going through and swapping licenses around to enable everything to work my new Mac was ready to roll. “So how is it going?” I hear at least one of you asking…

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Calm, confident and in control

Dame Janet Baker operatic mezzo soprano. January 2008. ©Neil Turner/TSL

In my career (39½ years and counting) I have shot a lot of portraits and probably as many headshots. I’m not going to go back over my definitions of either or the subtle differences between them right here but when I point my cameras at the subjects there’s one question that I get asked. A lot.

“How should I look?”

For the first bit of my career I didn’t have a stock answer so I would often turn the question back on them: “How do you want to be seen?” It worked sometimes, occasionally failed miserably but mostly solved nothing. “Just relax and pretend that there isn’t a big bloke with a big camera and a few lights pointing at you” was never going to become the simple and snappy response that I required. It didn’t even worked on the few occasions that I tried to inject some humour with it.

I started to make mental notes about who asked the question, what kind of person they were and one thing started to become really obvious – those who had been photographed professionally a few times before rarely asked whilst those who hadn’t often did. Not entirely surprising, but interesting nevertheless.

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The laptop cycle

I’ve had laptops since the mid 1990s and I have used each of them until they were no longer capable of doing their job quickly and efficiently. Most of that work has involved editing photographs and the vast majority of the time those edits have been completed away from the office. The title of this post is “The laptop cycle” and I called it that because my needs from a laptop vary over time. Things are changing again and it appears that I am just rotating into a period where I am doing a lot of editing on the road.

For the last couple of years I have either been uploading direct from my cameras and then doing a considered edit when I am back at my desk or doing some very simple and quick edits on my 2021 M1 MacBook Air. I bought it as a back up for a fully loaded 2017 MacBook Pro and to have as a lightweight travel companion. In 2022 I invested in an M1 Mac Studio for the office and the older MacBook Pro (which still works fine) was relegated to being a back up itself. The 2017 machine which felt relatively lightweight when I bought it now feels pretty cumbersome and so I haven’t carried it on a job since early in 2021.

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A moment in time that I doubt I will ever forget
Photo: © Neil Turner for Lambeth Palace.

For well over two years I have been carrying out assignments for various institutions within the worldwide Anglican Communion. I have blogged before about a couple of the events and trips but mostly I have been carrying out the work quietly and very much enjoying it. I’ve lost count of the plane journeys taken, countries visited and extraordinary people that I have worked with and met but it was a simple service earlier this month that might just be the one that remains in my memory for the longest.

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He’s making a list…

He’s checking it twice… and so on. Yes, Santa Claus is coming to town very soon.

There’s a serious point here, though. As a self-employed freelance photographer working with and for your clients you really cannot afford to forget anything. We’ve all done it and I have been a little more than fortunate because it has never ruined an assignment. When I was younger I used to be amused by the number of lists that my wife would produce both for work and in our home life. I learned my lesson and now lists form a big part of my existence too. If anything is part of an assignment then it has to appear in at least one list.

From the obvious shot lists that clients give me outlining what they need through packing lists for clothing and toiletries to the duplicate lists of equipment and serial numbers or the even more bureaucratic (and expensive) carnets that customs in so many different countries require (thanks Brexit) I have come to rely on lists to make my jobs go smoothly.

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Canon EOS R5 MkII – one month in


A couple of months ago I mentioned that I was due to take delivery of my first Canon EOS R5 MkII camera body. They are in great demand and the waiting lists at just about every retailer are pretty long and so I was delighted when mine turned up a little over a month ago. When work permitted I got down to the nerdy business of getting to know everything about it. Of course the menus were very familiar to my other Canons but different enough that they needed a few hours of study. The layout is also similar enough to my much-loved EOS R6 MKII bodies that the camera worked ergonomically from day one, hour one and pretty much minute two.

Having two different formats of memory card in the same camera has never been ideal and once again we have SD plus CF Express B and so it took a few minutes to decide how I was going to shoot making the best use of the two cards. In the end I opted for JPGs to the SD card and RAW files to the more robust (and larger capacity) CF Express card. Pretty much every other function is set up to match my existing cameras but it was the way that you set up and use FTP direct from the camera that took the longest to get my head around and become happy with.

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Another look at editing on iOS mobile devices

Back in February 2018 I concluded that I had failed to develop a decent workflow for the iPad or iPhone and that if I had the time I’d come back and continue with the quest. Since then I’ve occasionally used versions of my previous workflow and have dabbled with new options as they have come to my attention. Some six and a half years later I bring good news if you shoot with Canon and don’t mind paying for useful applications on subscription.

With the help of Canon and Adobe I think that I have now got a usable and developing workflow for importing, editing, captioning and transmitting images from my iPhone. All of this is currently only possible on my phone because my iPad is a bit out of date and cannot load one of the key applications. Apple announced a new version of the iPad Mini this week which prompted me to post this update.

Let’s talk about what has changed to make me so positive about what’s now possible:

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