Neil

Grumpy old photographers’ charter

I do a lot of seminar and teaching work these days and one of my most popular presentations is about professionalism. The talk is aimed at new entrants to the profession but it seems to go down well with photographers who have been around a while as well. I have even delivered the same talk to a group of lawyers because actually replacing the word ‘photographer’ with ‘lawyer’ brings a lot of the meaning around to the central idea that, in many ways, professionalism is the same no matter what you do for a living.

©Neil Turner. March 2009, Bournemouth Beach

The final part of the talk is a bit of a dig at myself and my peers. Those of us who have been in the job for a long time and who might just be getting a little complacent about things. I call this part of the talk “The five worst habits of those of us who should know better”:

1. Harking back to a golden age that may, or may not, have existed

It’s a simple idea really – we all look back with slightly misty eyes at the time a few years ago when things were good and before something new came along to spoil everything. Take your pick from the use of colour in newspapers, the whole move to digital, the adoption of multimedia by newspaper websites and several other developments in the industry. The truth is that when I was just starting out there were a few photographers who complained about the arrival of 35mm film and the loss of their beloved Rolleiflex cameras and even one or two who bemoaned the passing of half plate cameras and dark slides with sheet film. I reckon that every photographer has a ‘golden age’ that they look back at and that you can calculate when that was for each of us using a simple formula which compares how long the photographer has been working with when they got their first big front page and divide it all by the first major change in the industry that they went through. There never was a true golden age was there?

2. Forgetting why we came into the job in the first place

Easy to do this… most of us had a desire to tell stories, create arresting and beautiful pictures and to make the world a better place with our photography. Very few of us did it for the money, not many of us did it so that we could play with ever more expensive toys and only a tiny number came into it so that they could work unsocial hours and have to chase clients for money the whole time. If you take a step back and think about your original motivation and it isn’t there any more you really need to make your mind up about whether this is still the business that you want to be in. The older I get, the more I feel the need to shoot pictures that I want to shoot just to keep myself sane and sharp.

3. Failing to keep up with new business practices

“I’ve always done it that way, why should I change now?” is a common lament from photographers who are in trouble of getting it wrong. From the way you buy and use equipment to the way you store your archive and from the way you word your invoices to the way you put your portfolio together should be the subjects of constant review and possible change. Technology affects every single aspect of who we are and what we do and anyone who decides to stop keeping themselves up-to-date with what is happening is consigning themselves to a parallel dimension where they may get some work but where that might  be a temporary state on the road to going out of business.

4. Throwing money and effort into the latest thing

Exactly the opposite of the last problem really. Keeping abreast of developments and knowing where the market is a good idea whereas automatically jumping on every new idea, fad or fashion is not. So many new developments turn out to be ideas that don’t stand the test of time and too many of us have invested too much time and money chasing them. The worst way to do this is to assume that somebody younger and hipper than you automatically knows what to do – that, in my experience, is rarely the case. There’s always a middle-aged geek who you can ask…

5. Letting professionalism slip

Another thing that is far too easy to do. I know that I’ve done it – mainly through over-confidence. You have to remember the maxim that “professionalism is everything we do, everything we say and everything we produce” in our working lives. You can get too close to clients, you can cut corners in your workflow and you can rely too much on automated systems. This is far from a full list but it illustrates the potential pitfalls when it comes to losing our professional edge.

Being a professional photographer is a fulfilling and interesting way to make a living but we all need to remember that it is a profession and not a lucrative hobby. I’ve been wracking my brains to come up with a clever and punchy pay-off line for this blog post but I’ve struggled. I’ll just content myself with some advice: when things are feeling tough and not all all like the ‘old days’ just remember the five worst habits of those of us who should know better and if that doesn’t help… get some help!

Beach huts in the winter

A few months ago I wrote about shooting a magazine feature about “walking with speed lights” and promised to say a bit more in time. well, a promise is a promise…

There are days when I just want to go out and take pictures. Most of the time it really doesn’t matter what I’m shooting – as long as I can get my teeth into making the pictures as good as they can be. Winter in the United Kingdom can be pretty un-inspiring and if, like me, you love shooting people outdoors it can be a tough job getting people interested in being out in the cold – especially when there’s a strong chance of getting wet and probably having to be wrapped up in unflattering bad weather gear. A few months ago, in preparing a ‘technique” piece for a photography magazine I decided to go for a walk. The thing that made this an unusual walk is that I took some flash gear with me – nothing too heavy, a couple of Canon Speedlights and a couple of lightweight stands in a simple sling bag – and I decided to shoot anything that I thought would look better with the addition of some off-camera flash.

©Neil Turner, November 2010 – Bournemouth, Dorset.

I tried lots of different pictures but it was this composition that made me happy. One of my favourite spots growing up was a small headland between Bournemouth and Christchurch called Hengistbury Head where there is a nature reserve and a path to some of the coolest beach huts on the planet. On a wet winters day you meet plenty of people walking their dogs and some very hardy bird-watchers.

Great locations are nice but I could have chosen to do this walk almost anywhere in the country and it would have been possible to take interesting pictures. When I’m in London I often walk the canal toe-paths or wander through Epping Forest to see what I can see. Location isn’t as important as the attitude that “something is going to catch my eye”.

The wooden chalets that line the spit are all painted in different colours and no two are alike. What I had wanted to do here was to use flash to make one hut stand out even more from the rest and so I walked along until I saw a very nice one in a muted yellow.

The “normal” exposure here would have been 1/200th of a second at f5.6 on 200 ISO but the skies would have been washed out and I couldn’t achieve my self-set goal. The trick here was getting enough power from two Speedlights to give me a flash exposure of f11 so that I could let the background and sky go two f-stops under exposed.

I found this hut with something right next to it where I could hide a flash. Just along the beach was a freshly painted blue hut that had its own tuft of grass – which was perfect cover for a couple of speedlights. With two flash units simply sitting in plastic bags on the sand and on ¼ power each I played around with composition and with angling the two flashes at different angles before coming up with one of my favourite images of the day. The exposure was 1/200th at f14 on 200 ISO and that allowed me to pick out the single hut better because the flash units were so close to it. The rules of flash fall-off mean that if something is two metres from the light source, and perfectly exposed, anything else that is four metres away will be exactly two f-stops underexposed which plays directly into the hands of anyone being creative with light.

UK National Symposium on Photography 2012

The fourth National Symposium on Photography takes place this Friday, Saturday and Sunday in London. Timed to coincide with the World Photography Organisation Festival in London, the symposium will feature a very interesting range of debates and events.

I am going to be there, taking part in a panel debate about the future of news photography. The narrative for the debate on the UKNSP website says this:

The ethics of press and public photography, with particular reference to the implications of the Leveson Inquiry. At what stage does photography become harassment? Should there be controls? More broadly, where is the press heading in its use of photography? Should the press, citizen journalists, and members of the public all be treated the same or differently, whether in general or at newsworthy events? This panel discussion features a range of points of view – that of a photographer who gave evidence at the Leveson Enquiry, a leading picture editor and a champion of citizen photography.

It’s going to be a very interesting and maybe even passionate debate. This will be the third time in four years that I’ve taken part in the symposium and I firmly believe that it is developing into and very important event in the UK photography calendar. My fellow panellists are Alan Sparrow, Chairman of the Picture Editors Guild and Executive Picture Editor of Metro UK and Pauline Hadaway, Director of Belfast Exposed Photography and the debate will be chaired by Photographer Andrew Wiard.

The debate starts at 5pm on Friday 27th April at Somerset House in London. Tickets are available from Redeye or from the WPO.

Capture One Pro and other workflows…

One of the subjects that I teach is workflow. I know that I’ve mentioned that before but I thought that I’d remind you of that when I explain why and how I have been learning all about Capture One Pro – the professional RAW conversion, tethered shooting and image enhancement tool from Phase One. I am on version 6.3.5 (the latest available) and this is the first time that I have seen it since version 4 a few years ago.

Principally designed to make the most of Phase One’s own imaging systems, it also works rather well with the whole gamut of professional file formats. I have been using it for quite a few days now and I thought that I’d post some thoughts on here.

Before I get down to my opinions on Capture One Pro I need to say that every piece of software that I’ve used has needed quite a long time to get used to and anyone who does “full reviews” based on a few hours of use is kidding both themselves and their readers. I also need to make it clear that I paid for this software and that I have absolutely no ties to Phase One.

I have now used Aperture, Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Canon DPP, Graphics Converter and a few others and Capture One Pro is probably the easiest of the lot to get to like. My knowledge of Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop has been gained over many years and many thousands of edits and it has only taken me a few days to feel almost as comfortable with Capture One. I’m still learning more and the more that I learn the more I like it. That isn’t always true of new software packages – even if you really want to like them…

The workspace that I'm currently using on a 15" MacBook Pro

I like lots of things about the way it works, about the interface and about how good the customer support and instruction manual are. Every time I think that I’ve found a flaw in the feature set of this software I search the knowledge bank or put a note on Twitter and there it is – the answer that tells me that everything I wanted was there all along. That is great but there seems to be one feature from Adobe Camera RAW that I use all of the time that isn’t there with Capture One Pro – good and accurate profiles of all of my Canon lenses ready to apply corrections.

My first impressions of the user interface centred around my inability to find the tools that I actually wanted. I knew that most were there because the literature told me they were and a very brief exchange on Twitter with the workflow genius that is Nick Wilcox-Brown let me know how to find them and add them to my custom user interface or “workspace” as the application calls it. Better still, you can create a range of custom workspaces and save them alongside the suggested ones for dual monitors, simple workflow, black & white or even a replica of the previous version (5) of the software. Being able to customise the workspace is not unique to this application but I believe that they have implemented it really well.

All of the adjustments and all of the options have easily controlled and finely adjustable controls (mostly sliders) and I found myself easing very quickly into the Phase One way of doing things.

Time for a short list of likes:

  • Customisable user interface
  • Easy to learn how to use
  • Extraordinary range of functions
  • Tethered shooting
  • Fantastic image quality
  • Value for money
  • Web contact sheets
  • Output of files to specific sizes

… and dislikes

  • Cannot find profiles for my Canon lenses
  • The sessions menus
  • Applying adjustment “recipes” seems hit and miss
  • The way that it handles IPTC metadata (I know that the sister app Media Pro does that better)
  • Speed of processing batches of files
  • Not recognising the simple tags that I can apply in camera or by using the ‘tag’ function in Photo Mechanic

That is a short list of dislikes and you have to actually use it to decide if you agree about the sessions menus – the way that Capture One likes to create a virtual time bubble for each job in much the same way that Aperture does by default. I may be doing something wrong when I’m trying to create, save and apply “recipes” which are a great idea (again shared with Aperture and others) that allow you to copy all of the adjustments that you have applied to one image to one or more others as well as keeping that set of adjustments for future use/adaptation. Sometimes the recipes worked and other times they didn’t.

My background is in news and editorial photography and IPTC metadata is a fundamental requirement for me and it forms a big part of my own workflow and the personal workflows of people that I work with when I’m doing coaching. Capture One Pro handles IPTC and is compliant with all of the IPTC fundamentals – it just doesn’t do it very well. The same can be said for quite a few image processing applications and I still love good old Photo Mechanic for the speed, accuracy and flexible way that it handles everything except RAW conversions and long term storage.

My final dislike is the speed when processing batches of files. On a two year old Apple MacBook Pro with an i5 2.4Ghz processor, 8GB or RAM it takes 50-60% longer to process a batch of 36 CR2 images from a Canon EOS5D MkII than Adobe Camera RAW inside Photoshop CS5 does. Individual files are shot through in almost the same time but batches are slower. I tried very hard to be scientific when comparing like with like but I am prepared to be proved wrong on this.

This isn’t really a full review – just some thoughts on an application that I am sure to have to teach very soon. Several people have already asked what advantages Capture One would give them over Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop and, to be honest, I couldn’t really name any. If you already use and are happy with either Adobe product for processing RAW files then it doesn’t really make sense to spend more money and get Capture One Pro. BUT (and it is a but worthy of being in upper case) if you are looking at designing a new workflow for news and editorial work from the ground up and you don’t already have licenses for anything else I would strongly recommend getting Capture One Pro and using it in tandem with Photo Mechanic. Between the two you have a solid, reliable and well priced set of options that will, without doubt, deliver the goods. That would leave you in need of an archiving option and for that Phase One’s Media Pro might be a good solution. There are those who’d argue that between the two Phase One applications you have everything you’d need and they would be right but there is no getting away from the fact that Photo Mechanic does what it does so well that it is worth the money and then some. The same goes for Capture One Pro too.

Get yourself some defaults

©Neil Turner/TSL. London, May 2005.

Surprise, surprise – yet another blog post in response to a question! I was asked “what one single piece of advice could I give to someone who had already read the previous “one piece of advice” blog post on here?”

That’s a really cheeky and rather good question and, having shot myself in both feet by saying that I was a sucker for people who used please and thank you I felt duty bound to answer.

In three words I’d say “default staring point”. What’s that? you ask… “Good question” I respond. It is the notion that every time you go to do something you have two choices: you can mess about working out where to start and what to do first OR you can go to your default starting point and get stuck in straight away.

In photography this takes a wide variety of forms. For example, when I’m shooting a lot portrait my default position for placing a light is parallel to my subject’s torso – imaging that their chest is one line and the front of my light source is another, those two line would be parallel. Another example is “what gear shall I use today” the answer (if you are lucky enough to have sufficient kit that you need to choose) is my default kit: two 5D MkII bodies with 24-70 and 70-200 f2.8L lenses and a couple of 580exII flashes in the bag with a 16-35 “just in case”.

Every part of the job has a default setting. From the preferences locked into Photo Mechanic and Adobe Camera RAW to leaving my cameras on daylight white balance and 200 ISO. Default starting positions. I know that if I start there I can move away as soon as my imagination starts to flow and as soon as I start to get a feel for the situation. Sometimes the defaults get changed with seconds but it is amazing how often they stay a lot longer.

One photographer I explained this concept to a few years ago compared it to putting his left sock on first, followed by his right sock and then his trousers. No real reason why, it just means that you can concentrate on the interesting stuff safe in the knowledge that you have the basics covered.

When you really start to think about it we all have defaults in every area of our lives. Toothpaste onto wet brush, small amount of cold water onto that and away I go. Why would I do it any other way? Off to shoot a portrait, tightish head shots on a long lens first to avoid spooking the subject and then gradually get closer and wider. It makes sense to me and that’s my default.

I could go on with the list but I’m guessing that you have the idea by now. A default starting position for everything just helps you to organise your thoughts and get stuff done. Good advice?

Photographic education… again…

Here I am again writing about photographic education. Every time I’ve started down this road it has been entirely due to one or more conversations that I’ve had with someone unhappy about the way the system is working out for them. This morning I spoke to three students who have ended up on the wrong course. I may come back and write about them another day but the main outcome of those conversations has been to make me think about a wider question.

When you speak to professional photographers about photographic education in the United Kingdom you are very likely to hear tales of second year undergraduates who don’t know what an f-stop is and third years who haven’t had any training in digital workflow. On the face of it, that sounds absolutely indefensible. It doesn’t, however, tell the whole story.

Thousands of eighteen and nineteen year olds go off to university every September to study English and thousands more go to study History. Does anyone bemoan the lack of jobs for writers and historians? Do working authors and working historians complain loudly about the lack of training that these young people are getting in the technicalities of doing their jobs? No. The truth about photographic education is that not all courses are there to train people to be photographers.

A sizeable number of courses are designed to teach photography as more of an academic subject – learning for learning’s sake and mind expansion rather than training for a career behind the camera.

This kind of learning is still a relatively new concept for photography. Our colleagues who are engaged in fine art, the history of art and even fashion are further down the road towards embedding the study of their subject into the world of academe and photography needs to catch up.

I have no doubt that lecturers engaged in teaching photography as an academic pursuit know what they are doing and know what, when and how they are teaching it. The thing that I am a lot less sure about is whether all of the students enrolled on those courses realise that they are pursuing an academic study. In fact, I am convinced that a surprisingly large number don’t realise that until they are well into the first year and that many don’t really wake up and smell the coffee until they are even further into their studies.So as far as I can see we have two separate but parallel problems here:

  • A lack of realisation from the profession that not all photographic courses are there to train photographers.
  • A problem for students who don’t understand that not all photographic courses are there to train photographers.

What should we do? Two parallel problems with a single solution: Better PR. Photographic education needs better PR. Looking towards schools, colleges, parents, students, the public and the profession all courses – especially the academic ones – need to make it clear who they are and what they are doing.

Photography should be studied as an academic subject; its cultural presence and power is worthy of research and study. Its history and even its technology are topics equally as valid as others that are understood and accepted as legitimate subjects in a way that photography is struggling to be.

Photography is also a vocation and courses that set out to train students for a career behind the lens need to make it clear that that is their goal and set about doing it to a standard that the industry requires and the students deserve.

We need two distinctly different approaches to photographic education and we need the courses following each route to be confident, open and clear about what they are doing. Courses that attempt to steer a course between the two and produce graduates who haven’t had a proper academic workout or whose technical knowledge and creative talents haven’t been optimised and refined are failing everyone. Let’s get behind photographic education and let’s help to get the courses to get their PR right.

Elinchrom Ranger Quadra – 32 months on…

Most of the camera equipment reviews that you read are written after using the kit for a few days – or even a few minutes in extreme cases. I know. I’ve done several two or three day reviews myself. I was looking at my kit the other day and thought that it would be very useful to write a few lines about my Elinchrom Ranger Quadra system which I have been using for very nearly three years and which has been used on hundreds of assignments.

Build Quality:

When I wrote my first “mini-review” about the system in June 2009 I had only been using it for a couple of weeks but, after years of using the similarly specified Lumedyne Signature and Classic outfits, I can safely say that the Elinchrom fitted straight into my way of working very quickly. Back then I decided to talk about build quality first:

MAY 2009: The first point is to re-emphasise just how small and light this kit is compared to most other portable flash equipment – even Canon and Nikon Speedlights with external battery packs aren’t that much bigger or heavier.

The second point is that being small and light doesn’t appear to make this gear any less robust or well made than anything else. As a long time user of Lumedyne kit I can vouch that the combined weight of a Lumedyne Signature pack and head is almost identical to the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra. The Elinchrom pack, however, seems infinitely more robust with it’s rubberised edges and properly weather resistant control panel whilst the head is both simple and tiny. Connecting the two is a sensible and nicely made piece of cable with easy to use fittings. I have just been and tried the “heavy winter gloves test” and can report that it is very easy to attach and detach the cable with them on.

At this point I had better introduce a small criticism, lest anyone think that I’m doing a PR puff for the manufacturers. I like to attach my packs to the stand to give a bit more stability in the wind and the Lumedyne packs had very functional ‘D’ rings at either end that allowed you to attach a strap and anchor the pack to the stand. The Elinchrom Ranger Quadra pack has well made but small eyelets through which you have to slot either a large split ring or the small karabiner type ring that was supplied with my kit. Neither is a good solution and I will be on the lookout for a better way of attaching a small strap.

Whilst I’m doing the criticism thing, I have an admission to make: I wasn’t all that keen on the battery catches when I first got the kit. I found them to be stiff and not easy to use. Something has happened and I’m now completely fine with them. Maybe they have loosened off a touch or I have just worked out my technique. Probably a bit of both, but the end result is that the batteries come on and off nicely now and I withdraw my earlier criticism.

Now in 2012, to be completely honest, my opinion has barely changed. The battery clips have eased a little more and the ‘D’ rings still bug me. The screw caps that cover the two power lead sockets have survived all this time and still work very well and are still attached. I know that Elinchrom have made a few design changes since I got my kit but these three things have not changed at all.

The size and weight of the heads was flagged up as a potential issue by a couple of early reviewers but I can honestly say that 32 months on I have not had any problems other than a bad drop of a head which buckled the small ‘spill-kill’ reflector to the extent that I had to replace the reflector. No damage to the head, the flash tube or the modelling light. I had early reservations about the strength of the stand adapter on the heads and for a while I chose to remove the swivel completely and replace it with a brass stud which then fitted into a Manfrotto Light-Tite. In the end, my worries abated and I went back to the original tilt mechanism.

Not long after buying the kit I experimented with ways of attaching a soft box without buying the Elinchrom adapter. You can see my best attempt in the picture to the left. It was a complete fluke that the spill-kill reflector wedged directly into a blank Photoflex Speed Ring and I still use this IF I need two soft boxes on a single shoot. In the end I gave in and bought it and I now feel rather silly that I didn’t do it straight away. The adapter is a decent option and it works very well with my Elinchrom and Chimera soft boxes.

Thirty-two months down the line and the kit still looks great and works like new. I have looked after it, kept it in decent bags and cases and always put it away properly. The few times that I have used it in the rain, I have used plastic covers made from heavy duty PVC and freezer bags to keep the rain off. There are a few bits of paint missing on the pack and the batteries. The one exception, and the main reason that I chose to write this now, is that the two batteries are starting to lose power. I have no idea how many charge cycles they have been through but it is a large enough number for me to start to think about replacing them. Three years is a good life for this kind of batteries and I’m not going to hold any loss of capacity after that time against Elinchrom. The cables are tough and well made and all of mine are still OK.

In Use:

After a few months I fed some thoughts back to Elinchrom via the folks at The Flash Centre in London and those were:

  1. that the digital display was hard to see in bright light
  2. that lining up the power leads with the sockets was difficult in low light
  3. that the Skyport triggers needed a locking ring so that they didn’t keep popping out of the camera’s hot shoe.

I wasn’t the only person making these suggestions and in an upgrade they fixed the display issue and the Skyport trigger issue as well. But what else did I think back 32 months ago?

MAY 2009: That’s the construction out of the way. What about actually using them? I have read through the manuals for the head, pack and Skyport remote trigger system and it is all pretty logical. If you buy this kit, I would strongly recommend that you go through a few practice sessions before going live because some bits of the menu system are not too obvious without the book. Changing stuff like the duration of the beep that signifies that the pack has recharged or whether the readout is in f-stops or watt/seconds isn’t too much of a problem but switching Skyport channels for the first time isn’t all that easy. Getting the hang of how the asymmetrical flash output works with two heads attached to one pack isn’t something is obvious either.

The manual is well written and it doesn’t take long to master these functions once you know what goes where and which button to press first. It isn’t second nature yet, but that will come soon. Much excitement has been generated by the LED modeling light and the idea that it can double as a video light. I have a pair of Canon EOS5D MkII bodies and am starting to shoot some video with them. The amount of fill light that these LEDs put out is very useful and I would argue that they give the Elinchrom a really strong market advantage over other systems. The real joy of this system is the light that it puts out.

The light quality is great in every measurable way. Every flash at a given setting gives out an identical amount of light and the colour of the light doesn’t change when you dial the power up or down. The colour temperature of the tubes seems to be about 5300K and so I have set up a custom balance on my cameras for that. The only light modifier that I’ve used with it so far has been an Elinchrom 40″ (100 cm) shoot through umbrella and my gut feeling is that I will use this combination a lot over the next few weeks. The maximum power output is 400 w/s and for my money that figure is accurate. More importantly, it seems to be more than 1 f-stop more powerful than my old Lumedyne 200 w/s outfits. There could be any number of reasons for this but the outcome remains that I have more power at my disposal than I had before. Having the audible charge indicator is great and being able to turn it off is also a bonus. I have already made use of that function on more than occasion. The recycle time is a little slower than the Lumedyne 200 w/s kit and I found on the first couple of shoots that this was a possible issue. It has gone away now and I am getting used to the extra half second delay – especially when using the audible indicator.

The final point that I wanted to make was about the Skyport system. The pack has a Skyport receiver built-in as well as a synch socket (3.5 jack) and an optical slave. My kit came with a single skyport trigger and I have bought a second one along with a receiver that will work with either a Canon speedlight or one of my old Vivitar 285s. The system seems to work very well and I am not missing my Pocket Wizards enough to get them out of the boot and connect them up. My only criticism of the Skyports is that the transmitters don’t lock into your hot shoe and can be knocked out relatively easily. I’d like to see a transmitter with a lever style lock on the market from Elinchrom so that the system is foolproof rather than just very good.

In practice, 400 watt/seconds is quite a lot of power. Whether it is enough for every eventuality is debatable but in 32 months I have only found it wanting (by a stop or two at most) on two occasions and even then I made it work. Most of my work is portraiture and most of that is lit with this system and I have a real confidence in the kit that makes doing my job a lot easier.

If I were designing this system from scratch I would probably have not bothered with the complete miniaturisation of the heads. I think that I would have gone for a larger head with the standard Elinchrom bayonet fit and a stronger tilt mechanism. Of course that is based entirely on the way that I work and what I use the kit for. I have got used to the tiny heads and, for me, it would make sense for Elinchrom to bring out a version of the head built into the larger Ranger housing as well as this small version. That would eliminate any issues with adaptors as well as maximum umbrella size. It would also remove the need to only use Elinchrom’s own narrower shafted umbrellas.

The newer version of the Skyport trigger solved one problem and introduced a different one. It now stays in the shoe nicely but the words are now moulded in instead of being painted on which makes actually changing some settings quite tricky in low light. I’d also prefer a slightly larger version of the trigger with easier to change channels, a battery level indicator, AA or AAA batteries and at least 50% more range.

In my 2009 review I was confident that I would learn all of the functions and not need to bring the manual with me. I was WRONG. I have never completely mastered the menu system and I have a paper version of the instructions in the case as well as a PDF version on my iPhone. I don’t need to consult it often but when I want to do something in the menu it is helpful to have the manual there with me.

Conclusions:

In May 2009 I was “a happy bunny”. Not much has changed there. Actually, nothing has changed there.

I have some minor niggles but I still love using the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra and I would still advise any photographer in the market for a portable battery powered system to strongly consider it. In value for money terms, it is hard to beat. In light quality terms it is excellent and it passes the most important test of all – it is portable enough to actually take with you, even if you are a photographer working alone and a long way from the car.

If the folks at Elinca came to me with their notebooks and asked me to advise them where to take this system next, I’d be very happy to talk to them. This is a 9/10 product for the kind of work that I do. I have even used my own kit a dozen times when teaching location lighting courses with groups of six to eight people and nobody has managed to break it. I’m glad that the version two pack is better than my nearly three year old one which makes it even easier for me to recommend. There are half a dozen accessories that I would find useful – ranging from an adapter to be able to use a Canon or Nikon Speedlight with the Elinchrom bayonet mount accessories to a properly fitted rain jacket for the pack and a mains AC battery eliminator for when I am using the kit indoors for long periods.

Think Tank Hydrophobia

Ever since I managed to soak one of my Canon EOS5D MkII cameras at an outdoor event last summer where it rained hard and non-stop I have been meaning to get my hands on a Think Tank Hydrophobia rain cover. I finally managed to get around to it just as one of the longest dry spells (work and weather) hit but I have finally given it a run out. The job actually meant using a tripod quite a lot and, whilst the Hydrophobia wasn’t actually designed for this, it all worked out well.

As predicted, I got a proper soaking (cold, wet rain) and I got very cold but my camera stayed dry and kept on working. The version that I have is designed to be used with a 70-200 f2.8 sized lens and it has small sleeves for your hands to fit inside the cover. There’s an option to have a flash unit attached too on the version that I have and so this is a very well designed piece of kit.

A word of caution

Even the best designed kit has a few features that you need to be aware of. The Hydrophobia does a great job and it worked flawlessly but I’d love to see a big sign included in the package telling you to have a few practice goes at fitting the cover before trying to use it on a job in front of clients and/or other photographers. Fitting it for the first time was a fairly frustrating process. Happily I had the sense (too many bad days with soft boxes and tents) to try it first in the warm and dry confines of my kitchen. The second time was in the car and it was actually my third go at fitting the cover when I had to do it in the dark and the rain in front of others. I was still a little ham-fisted but fitting it for the fourth time today so that I had a few pictures to accompany this piece was a (relative) breeze. Practice does indeed make perfect.

What else you can actually say about a piece of kit that is essentially designed to keep your gear dry than “it kept my gear dry” is beyond me. If it came in a tin, it would do exactly what it said on that tin!

So… marks out of ten? For doing its job it gets 10 but for ease of use I’d give it a 5 out of the packaging rising to 7 after four uses and an even higher mark with lots of practice.