neil turner

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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Working with Archbishops – act two
Cyril Kobina Ben-Smith, Primate of the Church of the Province of West Africa, Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury and Howard Gregory, Primate of the West Indies in one of the cells at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana used to hold enslaved people before they were loaded onto ships to be taken to the Americas. Photo: Neil Turner for ACO

Towards the end of the summer of 2022 I was lucky enough to be commissioned to spend two weeks photographing The Lambeth Conference. 650 Bishops, 450 of their spouses and a few hundred guests and staff in and around the University of Kent, Canterbury Cathedral and Lambeth Palace made for a fascinating experience and some very interesting pictures. That was act one.

The last eleven days have been act two. This time there are fewer Bishops, fewer Archbishops and a very different location. I’m writing this whilst still in Accra – the capital city of Ghana in West Africa – waiting to go to the airport to fly home. The difference between the locations is vast. It’s hot here and the humidity has been tough on me and almost as tough on my cameras. It’s a developing country with all of the colour, noise and atmosphere you’d expect but with so much more.

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No ‘perfect pictures’ here
©Neil Turner. Office worker on a lunch break. October 2008

A question for my fellow photographers:

When was the last time you finished a shoot, went through the edit and genuinely thought that you really couldn’t have done better?

My answer is that I cannot remember ever having that thought. I’ve come close and been really happy with what I have done many, many times but I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that ‘complete satisfaction’ hasn’t featured in my work.

I have never taken a perfect picture and I have certainly never made one in post-production – but I’m OK with that.

This question was triggered by listening to an artist being interviewed on a radio programme who said that she had gone through something of a crisis of confidence having finished a piece and in that moment thinking that it was perfect. She talked about coming very quickly to hate the idea that she might never achieve that level of mastery of her craft again and that she may well have reached a professional peak at a relatively young age. That was something which her passion for what she did led her to develop a form of depression.

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Thirty-plus year old memory
Sir John Cassels – Chair of a Government Inquiry into post-sixteen education. Photographed at his home in south-west London. May 1991. Photo: ©Neil Turner

When I published this May 1991 portrait on my Instagram feed a couple of years ago I was shocked by the clarity of my memories of shooting it. A year or so after publishing it I was giving a talk to a wonderful group of people at a camera club who had invited me to come and show some work and tell some anecdotes and, once again, I remembered so much detail about the day and the pictures. The power of still images to evoke a time and a place is a wonderful thing. I thought that it would be good to share those memories again here and this is what I wrote underneath the post on Instagram:

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A downside of technology
© Photo Neil Turner.

Anyone who knows me and anyone who has read this blog would probably say that I am keen on technology. I would agree – I’m a geek. Despite my love of the whole digital process there’s one thing about the way that we work these days that I am not so keen on.

What’s that then? I hear one or two people asking. Put very simply, I don’t get to meet or even chat with editorial clients any more. I know that the whole COVID-19 pandemic has put a mighty spanner in the works but even accounting for that I was disappointed and a little bit shocked to realise that I have never actually met any of the folks who have commissioned me to shoot editorial work since well before we went into the first lockdown. Some of that can be explained away by my being based a hundred miles from London where a sizeable proportion of them live and work but even accounting for that I find it really sad that I haven’t got to have a coffee with any of them or even shake the odd hand here and there.

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Looking forward to 2022
Derwentwater, Christmas Eve 2021 © Neil Turner

After another year of COVID-19 restrictions and client hesitancy I just wanted to wish everyone a merry Christmas and to wish you all a happy, creative and prosperous new year.

I doubt that it has been easy for any of us so be safe, spend time with family and let’s all make sure that 2022 is better than either 2020 or 2021.

Some advice on composition
Shaftesbury Avenue long after dark.© Neil Turner November 2014

I often refer to my photographs as “telling a story”. That’s how I look at what I do. Portraits help to tell that person’s story and the rest of my work is all about creating images that either tell the whole story of work with other elements to achieve that goal. Stories don’t necessarily have to have an ending. Many of the best stories ask a question of the reader/viewer and leave them thinking about what they have seen, read or experienced. That, in my opinion, is what photography is about; telling the right stories and asking the right questions and how you choose to compose your pictures is one of the vital elements of visual storytelling.

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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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