neil turner

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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Workflow… again

Having just finished three weeks editing other people’s pictures at Wimbledon and a further six days doing the same for the Open Championship golf the topic of workflow and getting pictures to look good, be accurately captioned and delivered efficiently wasn’t too far from my mind when a conversation with another photographer prompted me to write this. In the last month (and in the last eleven or so years that I’ve edited other people’s work) I’ve edited files from all of the professional cameras from Canon, Nikon and Sony. On a less intensive basis I’ve edited pictures shot on Leica, Fujifilm and Hasselblad and probably a few others that I can’t recall right now and so anything I say is based on the notion that a good workflow isn’t all that dependent on what types of files you have.

I’ve said it before and I will, no doubt say it again but having a good workflow is absolutely central to the business of photography. In fact, when I speak to colleagues and friends most will excitedly tell me that their personal workflow is as good as it gets and surprisingly few will openly accept that they might just be able to do it that little bit better with a bit of training and practice. Personally I lean the other way; spending way too much time looking at different software, trying different techniques and generally trying to get my workflow a few percentage points better.

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iOS editing update
Screenshot of Lightroom on an iPad Mini.

A couple of months ago I posted the latest update about my long-term quest to be able to do quick edits and add full captions to my Canon images using Apple iOS devices. At the time I was using my iPhone because the apps that I wanted to use weren’t compatible with my old 2017 iPad Mini. Then Apple released a significantly updated version of the smaller iPad and I dived in and bought one (256 Gb wifi + Cellular model).

Bingo.

I am delighted to announce that not only do I have a shiny new iPad but that I have pretty much nailed down my iOS workflow whilst using it. I went for the Mini simply because I like the size. It is easily hand-holdable, is significantly bigger than the largest iPhone and it fits in my Think Tank Press Pass 10 bag which has become a very regular part of my day-to-day shooting kit. It’s clearly not as powerful as the larger and more expensive iPad Pro models but it fulfils my requirements rather well – even when working with the larger files from the EOS R5 MkII.

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On holiday with my compact camera
Venice, Italy, during the Biennale. 09 November 2024. ©Neil Turner

Every time I get a new compact camera (and there have been quite a few) I come onto my blog and talk about it. Just under a year ago I got the Canon Powershot G5X MkII to replace my G7X MkII and took it on a family holiday to Venice. Earlier this month we were back in the same city with the same camera but this time the vacation was all about art. The Venice Biennale and all of the fringe shows that happen across the city are great places to see a lot of good, bad and occasionally indifferent art and, for a photographer, it’s a great place to see people interacting with it.

To save you going back and reading last year’s post I swapped from the G7X MkII for three basic reasons:

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The ultimate compromise lens?


That’s a dramatic headline but, never before having had a lens like this, it’s the most accurate way that I could think of to sum it up. Canon’s RF 100-500mm f4.5-7.1 L IS USM is something of a conundrum. It covers a range of focal lengths that I find extremely useful in a lot of the work that I currently do and, paired with the RF 24-105mm f4 L IS USM, it is a valuable item in my travelling kit bag. I have shot pictures with it that I would simply not have been able to without hauling some incredibly heavy (and expensive) lenses around the world.

Do I love this lens? No. Do I appreciate it? Yes… with bells on.

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Less is more… until it isn’t

Every photographer and every artist you will ever meet has opinions about composition. A mere thirty-eight years into my career and some forty-six years after picking up a decent camera for the first time I have some too. 

The other day I was involved in a very interesting conversation that was partly triggered by the recent portrait of King Charles III by Jonathan Yeo. The man that I had photographed and with whom I was chatting had a wonderful knowledge of painted and photographic portraits going back hundreds of years and we discussed what used to be included in portraits for symbolic reasons and what we now exclude from them for aesthetic ones. I’m sure that it has been around for years and has been claimed by many others but I came up with a phrase that sums up my approach to composing my work… 

Less is more… until it isn’t.

In almost all creative pursuits end results that appear to be simple have an elegance and a beauty that appeals to most people without them necessarily knowing (or caring) why. To create something complex that has impact takes a very different and very real skill.

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That brief…
PE lesson photograph from a school prospectus shoot in Hampshire. ©Neil Turner

I’ve called this post “that brief” because I will never forget an email that came to me from a regular client who simply gave me a name, address, date and time and the words “go do your thing”. That was pretty flattering – they trusted me and were comfortable with how I had worked for them before. I’ll never forget that brief but most of the time I think that I’d prefer a bit more to go on.

Every photograph that I have ever taken was dictated by things that can be controlled and things that can’t. The client’s brief is something that should be able to be negotiated and should always be realistic. In the “contact” section on my main website I say the following:

Commissioning a professional photographer can be a daunting business. My philosophy has always been to make it as painless and as uncomplicated as possible. I believe that this is best achieved by a proper dialogue between photographer and client. We both want the same thing – a set of pictures that achieve and even exceed their purpose. In my experience, the better defined that purpose is, the easier it is to get the photographs that the client needs.

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