Neil

The light in the garden

I don’t do this very often but, given that so many people are interested in the Fujifilm X20, I thought that I’d share a picture that I took yesterday ‘just for the fun of it’. No story, no real importance – just a bit of fun…

©Neil Turner April 2013. The light in our garden yesterday afternoon.

©Neil Turner April 2013. The light in our garden yesterday afternoon.

This was shot as a RAW file and converted with almost no help using Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop CS6. The camera was in programme mode (yeah I know!) and handled the exposure remarkably well.

1/800 sec;   f/5.0;   ISO 100

New toy in the house… a Fujifilm X20

If you get a few professional photographers together there are a few topics of conversation that you are almost guaranteed to experience. One of those is compact digital cameras – the cameras that they carry around ‘just in case’ and take out when they are off duty. I am certainly no exception and it is always an exciting day when a new camera appears on my desk either on test or (in this case) that I have spent my hard earned pennies on.

Fujifilm X20

Fujifilm X20

I am a very fortunate guy because I get to test, review and play with all sorts of new equipment but it takes something quite special for me to put my hand in my pocket and commit to buying anything. I loved the Fujifilm X10 and I have owned and used a vast array of Canon G series digital compacts but the new X20 seemed to tick all of the boxes. I was never that keen on the way that Adobe Camera RAW (or any other RAW converter for that matter) handled the X10 files and so I held off buying the X20 until Adobe released a version of their RAW converter for Photoshop CS6 that handled the Fujifilm RAW format properly.

I will write more and post lots of pictures when I have truly had time to get to grips with this new camera. So far I have been through the menus, tested a few RAW files with the new Adobe converter as well as the SilkyPix application that comes with the camera. It has only been a few hours but I am really loving the feel of my new toy. I guess that the big change from the X10 is the viewfinder information which has transformed a good idea into a really useable tool.

Another interesting feature is that even if you select the 3:2 aspect ratio in the camera menu, the whole area of the chip is still there when you import the RAW file and so you can easily recompose the frame if you made that tiny error!

Such a geek! More to come soon…

Lighting gels… the best in VFM?

Almost all photographers spend money on accessories, gizmos, gadgets and photo-related odds and sods. Sometimes we waste our money but I wanted to put in a brief plug for the things that constantly amaze me by the amount of “bang for the buck” I get from them. I’m talking about lighting gels. They cost a few pounds each and they last for years if you look after them even reasonably well.

Screen grab from Swatch App

Screen grab from Swatch App

The reason that I am writing this today is that last week I was shooting a job and was slightly embarrassed that the pieces of gel in my lighting kit were looking a bit tatty. I realised that some of them were bought as shared sheets (ie I only had half of a 52 x 61 cm sheet of each) when I was at college in the mid 1980s. I might have added a few more colours and strengths since then but even the newest gel in my bag is five years old. The beauty is that you don’t need to look after them that well really – even a scrunched and screwed up gel is still the same colour and will work. Of course they don’t like extreme heat and they aren’t partial to liquid damage either but at under the boiling point of water and kept dry they are very durable.

When I decided that I needed some new gels I phoned The Flash Centre and they arranged for Rosco to send me some. I have been playing with the iPhone Swatch app for about eighteen months now and it made ordering the new gels rather easy. They arrived rapidly in a strong cardboard tube and all I had to do was cut them down into the right sized pieces to fit into a pocket in my Think Tank rolling case.

This time around I ordered various grades of CTS – that’s Colour Temperature Straw, the gel that changes the light coming out of my flash units to varying degrees of Tungsten right up to the Full CTS which does a very good job of making the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra flash tube into a Tungsten light that very closely matches the Tungsten setting on a Canon EOS DSLR. I also got some ND (Neutral Density) gels and a sheet of a diffuser called ‘tough spun’. I didn’t need to get any effects gels – the purple, orange, red, blue and green gels that I have in the case are fine even if they are old enough to buy alcohol by now.

Comparing the cost of this big batch of new gels to some of the money that I have literally thrown away on rubbish gizmos over the last 30 years I feel very smug. I know that after one single use I will have justified the (tiny) expense and that after the 50th use it will get embarrassing how smug I feel about the VFM (value for money) that you get from quality lighting gels.

Philippa Gregory – the contact sheet
© Neil Turner/TSL. Philippa Gregory, October 2004

© Neil Turner/TSL. Philippa Gregory, October 2004

I haven’t done one of these contact sheets for a long time and I thought that this set was an interesting example. I submitted this set of sixteen pictures and they are all landscape in orientation. That’s because the slot they were shot for was across two pages and always a squarish landscape image. As I said in the previous post, the whole thing was done in ten minutes on a dull Autumn (fall) day in Hyde Park. That time included setting up and breaking down the Lumedyne light and chatting to the subject. Note that she is clutching her novel in the opening frame. I find that it’s always a good idea to do that if their publicist insists so that you can then go on to get the pictures that will actually get used.

Elinchrom Ranger Quadra Update

What do you call it when something that was already very good gets quite a lot better? Well I guess that would be an upgrade. That’s exactly what happened yesterday when I changed to the new Lithium Ion batteries on my Elinchrom Ranger Quadra kit.

New lithium ion on the left and the old lead gel on the right.

New lithium ion on the left and the old lead gel on the right.

From the picture above, you can see that there is an appreciable size difference – which is always handy but there’s no way that I would have swapped them out just because of that – after all, they weren’t exactly huge to start with. There are four real reasons that I swapped:

  1. My old batteries were over four years old and had stopped holding a full charge – especially in the cold weather
  2. Elinchrom claim a higher capacity of up to 320 full-power flashes per charge for the new battery compared to only 150 for the old ones
  3. Faster recycle times. I’m going to have to believe Elinchrom and my own gut feeling here because you cannot compare brand new batteries to four year old ones in any meaningful way but at full power the recycle time appears to have halved to just over 1.5 seconds
  4. They weigh a lot less – 892 grammes less each. The new battery is 784 grammes compared to the old one which was 1,676 grammes. With two batteries in my kit I have saved a massive 1,792 grammes

Less weight, even in a rolling case, has got be a good thing 99% of the time and I am really looking forward to having to carry less. Of course I have always loved using the pack and battery to weight the base of the lighting stand down when working outdoors. I might have to find a few rocks and bricks lying around to supplement the pack more often that I used to but that’s fine by me.

I’ve only managed to shoot two small jobs with them so far and the speed of the recycling is great – even with my four year old Ranger Quadra pack and S heads. Some portraits yesterday afternoon shot indoors and on a lower power setting had the kit recycling in a fraction of a second which made the job go very smoothly indeed.

I have yet to try out the new Quadra Hybrid pack which promises all sorts of extras that I don’t think that I need. Elinchrom offer an upgrade to packs as old as mine to get the brighter display but my purchasing decisions these days are made on a perceived need rather than on wanting the shiniest and newest kit.

I’ve blogged about this Elinchrom kit before. The first time was in May 2009 when I’d only had the kit a short while. 32 months later I blogged again and, in what has become my most popular posting ever, I gave my considered review of the kit. One of the first comments on that posting alerted me to the new batteries being on their way. It’s taken me twelve months to get around to getting the new batteries and having the small modifications done to the S heads and I’m a happy man.

In the “32 months on” review I mentioned a few other things that I’d like to have seen produced to go with this kit. In the last six months I have become less and less pleased with the Skyport remote system that comes with the Ranger Quadra. The original triggers were prone to falling out of the hot shoe and the controls on the mark two version are tough to see in low light. I know that the whole raison d’être of this system is to be small and lightweight but they went too far with the Skyport transmitter – so much so that I’ve gone back to using Pocket Wizard Plus III transceivers a lot of the time at the expense of being able to remotely control the power.

So, Elinchrom – I hope that some senior managers are reading this… if you really want to make my happiness complete, can you please produce a transmitter that works with the EL Skyport receiver built into my Quadra pack that takes AA batteries, is about the size and weight of the Pocket Wizard Plus III unit with a digital display that has all of the functionality of the small Skyport transmitter but that is easy to use in subdued light, doesn’t require a tough-to-find button battery and that stays in the hot shoe properly. Pretty please?

People in the news bringing back memories
©Neil Turner/TSL. Hilary Mantel, January 2007.

©Neil Turner/TSL. Hilary Mantel, January 2007.

I seem to have a very strong memory for where, when and why I photographed people in the past. When names come up in the news I often think “ah yeah I shot them at such and such a place”. Hilary Mantel, double Booker Prize winning author has been in the news a lot this week. She gave a lecture where she commented on the Duchess of Cambridge and in comparing her to the late Princess Diana (the Mother-in-Law she never knew) called her “precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture.” The lecture was long and talked of many things but the reactions against Hilary Mantel’s views were both harsh and often mistaken.

This made me wonder if my view of the situation and the criticism is in any way tainted by having met her, by having admired her books and by actually listening to what she said when I watched the extended highlights of the lecture on YouTube. Of course I cannot really be sure but my memory of meeting Ms Mantel is pretty strong. I can remember her apartment and I can remember her hospitality. I can remember her reluctance to have her picture taken and having spent a lot of time chatting before ever getting a camera out of its bag. I can even remember getting to the location with a lot of time to spare and I can even remember the chat that I had with a chap walking his dog along the street where I parked up and waited in the chilly January air.

Without having much to say, I thought that I’d share my favourite frame from the job. It was shot in colour like the rest of the set but I felt the need to convert it to black and white and submitted two versions to the Picture Editor. I wasn’t surprised when they ran it in colour but I have a very strong memory of being mightily disappointed.

For the many techies who read my blog, it was shot on a Canon EOS1D MkII with a Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS lens at 1/250th of a second at f4.5 on 100 ISO. It was lit with a Lumedyne flash with a shoot-through translucent white umbrella deliberately set up to lose as much of the ambient light as possible.

Rubbish on Oxford Street

I was having a rare day off on Saturday and after a fantastic lunch in London’s China Town I walked up to Bond Street underground station to get a tube train back to where I am staying in Mile End. I usually carry a compact camera with me (still using my venerable Canon Powershot G9 most of the time) and just outside the station I saw this amazingly full and overflowing rubbish bin. It’s not often that I capture a compact camera picture that goes beyond the family album…

©Neil Turner. Oxford Street, London July 2012.

I took the picture “just because” but the more I looked at it, the more I realised that things like litter and other urban issues that don’t make the headlines absolutely fascinate me. My next thought was that images like this fill stock libraries and that I really should make more effort to shoot good generic images and submit them.

I’m no great fan of Westminster City Council who run this part of London but I admit that they have a tough job and you can see that the vast majority of the waste is fast-food wrappers and packaging. There probably isn’t an easy answer – they are fighting an uphill battle there and very little of the waste is dropped by local people. It’s a tourist area and a shoppers’ area and you might draw the conclusion that those two groups of people are less invested in keeping the place tidy.

I actually thought about labelling the post “off topic” but the  I decided that as it’s my blog, I get to choose what the topic is!

Three months off from the day job.

It’s Monday morning and I’m sitting on the 06:25 train from Bournemouth to Waterloo for the first of many such trips over the next three months. I have decided to put the ‘day job’ aside and I’ve accepted a contract working in the Main Press Centre at the 2012 London Olympic Games.

When I’ve told people, the mixture of reactions has been very amusing. Ranging from the most common “how exciting!” via a liberal sprinkling of “are you mad?” to the rather predictable “can you get me some tickets?” The answers are, in turn: “I hope so”, “ask me in September” and “NO!”

Like most press photographers, I greeted the news that London was going to host the 2012 Olympics with a mixture of anticipation, horror and fascination. What would it mean for non-sports specialists like me? Would it mean anything beyond endless building works and some even-heavier-than-normal traffic? Until March of this year my only contact with the Games was to photograph a group of children whose school is right next to the Stratford campus in the Spring of 2008. Beyond that, I was expecting to have next to nothing to do with the biggest event to come to the capital in many years.

So what exactly will I be doing for the next 13 weeks? My job title says “Team Leader, Photographers Workroom, Main Press Centre” which is a posh way of saying that I will be there setting up and helping to run the vast work area at the main Olympic site set aside for visiting sports and press photographers. Customer service with a smile and a lot of empathy for the needs and deadlines of the 1800 or so accredited photographers that will be passing through the Olympic and Paralympic Games between now and the middle of September.

I’m excited – albeit in a slightly sluggish way having had to get up at 05:15. I am apprehensive too: this is a new departure for me in a career in photography that started way back in the mid 1980s. I’m genuinely looking forward to the experience and I hope, where possible, to say a few words every now and then about how things are going. If you are working at London 2012 yourself – please come and say “hello”. I expect that you’ll recognize me – I’ll be the one wearing the uniform, spinning plates, juggling press-packs and looking as if they know what they are doing.

My train is approaching London Waterloo and I’ve got to stick the laptop back into the bag for now.