Neil

I need people in photographs

Children play football with an improvised ball in the Copperbelt of Zambia. ©Neil Turner/TSL.

Like most members of the photographic profession, the bottom has dropped out of my business and any and all photography bookings between the first week of March and the end of July have been postponed or cancelled. Not my fault, not my client’s faults either so I’m being pretty calm about it and getting used to being in lockdown. Lots of my news photographer friends are out there day after day coming up with fabulous picture to illustrate the only story that anyone is interested in – the Coronavirus Pandemic – and I applaud them warmly. That applause goes for the health workers, retailers who are at work, the emergency services, delivery drivers, refuse workers and every other key worker who is there doing their jobs to keep society ticking over and, more importantly, safe.

Again, like most members of the photographic profession, I am looking back through old images of mine to remind myself what it is about the job and making the pictures that I love so much. I’ve also been looking through some of the hundreds of photographic books that line the shelves in my home and it has taken almost no time at all to re-affirm what I already knew: (more…)

Theresa May MP – July 2000 portrait

The fifteen frame edit supplied to the newspaper from a seven minute portrait shoot with Theresa May who was the Conservative front-bench spokesperson on education in July 2000. © Neil Turner/TSL

When I published my piece last month about the arrival of the Kodak DCS520 cameras I included an interesting portrait of Theresa May MP taken just over eighteen years ago. Several people – including some picture editors – got in touch and asked to see the whole shoot. It was the second time that month that I had photographed Mrs May which, given that I was working for a group of education titles, wasn’t that unusual back then. As always the interview overran and the time for pictures was severely curtailed. The inside of a Member of Parliament’s private office is rarely interesting and so I went tight with what little time I had. (more…)

August is a strange month

Throughout my 32 years as a photographer August has been something of a “silly season” with little freelance work on offer and very small editions of the papers where I was employed and because of that there has been a lot of soul-searching and career planning done in the height of the English summer.

As July turned into August this year I had been really busy – mostly with editing work but with the odd commission here and there too but as soon as we passed August 1st it all turned quiet again and the annual time for career reflection had begun. This year the plan is a very simple one: to continue to get fitter and to make sure that my regular clients are kept up-to-date with that progress.

One year ago in August 2017 I was in hospital having had some major spinal surgery. Whilst in hospital I spent a lot of time trying to work out what I was going to do for the rest of my career. Of course there was really only one option and that was to get back to freelancing as quickly as possible. (more…)

Adobe Camera RAW – big (ish) changes

 

I sat down to edit a set of pictures this morning and went through my normal routine before actually touching the RAW files:

  1. Calibrate monitor
  2. Check for application updates
  3. Restart the computer

All went well, I had a cup of coffee and then opened the set of pictures as a contact sheet in Photo Mechanic. I went through, added the relevant IPTC captions and then imported the selected images into Adobe Camera RAW and then I noticed that a new icon had appeared in the tools on the right hand side of the screen. A small ‘film strip’ had appeared in Camera RAW 10.3 and below that a new ‘treatment’ option was sitting there offering me the choice between Color (surely they mean Colour?) and Black & White with the choice of profile sitting there in a much more convenient place than it ever has been before.

Change is good. Isn’t it? (more…)

Clamshell mode

A good workstation for editing pictures is something that all photographers should have. For quite a few years now I have favoured having a good monitor married to a fast laptop. I have tried using an iMac and I have owned a couple of desktop computers but having a high end (MacBook Pro) laptop and a quality monitor has provided me with a very flexible set up that allows me to grab the laptop and work on that if I need to be away from home without the complication of having multiple computers. Well, that’s sort of true; I do have multiple laptops and use the MacBook Air when I am travelling light and on longer trips I take my spare MacBook Pro along to either use as a makeshift server or as a back up “just in case”.

My home office is a relatively small one and so my set-up is somewhat dictated by that. I am always evolving what I use and the way that I use it and my current monitor is a three year old 25″ Dell Ultrasharp (now discontinued) which has not only served me well but has been packed up in a flight case many times to go with me on trips where I have been working as an editor. When I’m at home the monitor is wall-mounted so that I can get it as far away from me as I can and give me as much desk space as possible. It is connected to a dock and so there is only one Thunderbolt 3 cable that needs to be plugged into the MacBook Pro. (more…)

iPad workflow part four

Screen grab from Transmit for iOS on my iPad showing a twelve image upload in action.

There are so many ways that I deliver images to various clients these days that I feel that I’m bound to leave something off of this list. The great news for users of the iPad or iPhone to do quick edits of their work is that every single option that I use on the desktop machine is also available on iOS devices;

  • FTP– I use Transmit on the iPad and iPhone. I also have FTP options inside FSN Pro and Shuttersnitch that can all do a good job but Transmit does it all better.
  • Email – adding large numbers of attachments on the iPad isn’t my favourite way to send pictures but it works.
  • Dropbox – The iOS Dropbox app means that I can easily add files to folders on the cloud service and send links to those folders before, during or after the job. It has a very simple interface and works really well.
  • WeTransfer – I wasn’t very happy when the WeTransfer iOS app went over to functioning as “Boards” – making it a very different user experience from the ever-so-simple desktop version but I’ve got used to it and it works really well.
  • Photoshelter – The professional image sharing platform has a dedicated iOS app which is fairly easy to use and very functional.
  • Third Light – This is a niche Digital Asset Management platform used by two of my corporate clients and the iOS app does its job well.

(more…)

AA batteries

Eneloop AA 1.2v batteries and Think Tank 8 AA battery holder.

Back in September 2008 when I returned to the world of freelancing I tried every way that I could think of to cut my ‘cost of doing business’. One of the central ideas was to reduce the number of disposable batteries that I bought and used. I had a number of speed lights and a whole bag full of triggers, transmitters and gadgets almost all of which took AA sized batteries and so I went out and bought a lot of NiCd (nickel cadmium) rechargeables along with three decent quality chargers.

Every-once-in-a-while I would buy a few single use batteries if I was on a job which justified doing so but I kept to my plan and used the NiCd ones where I could. Over time they lost their power and after about four years they were relegated to being used in kids toys and my wireless keyboard. I bought some new NiCds but the way that I used them meant that the dreaded memory effect killed them off more quickly than I would have liked. (more…)

RGB and me

I get involved in a lot of discussions about the finer points of photography both online and in person. One of the most common this year has been the about choosing which RGB colour space we should all be working in. The truth is that there are a number of variables which, between them, should point you in one direction or another. There are plenty of RGB colour spaces but the main two are Adobe RGB and sRGB – mainly because these are the options you have when shooting with most DSLR cameras. There are a couple of others (Colormatch and ProPhoto) that offer wide gamuts and some real technical advantages but, as I hope to explain, this isn’t necessarily helpful. More isn’t just a waste, it’s a potential problem.

Ideal Worlds

In an ideal world we would have cameras, viewing and reproduction systems that gave us every tiny subtle variation in colour that the human eye can see on a good day in great light. We don’t. Yet. (more…)