opinion

New year’s resolution

We all do it… make promises to ourselves about what we are going to do and how we are going to do it as another year begins. Take more pictures, get more exercise, make more money, be nicer etc etc. You can take it as read that I’m attempting all of those but I thought that I’d talk about the first one – taking more pictures.

©Neil Turner January 2014. Shot using a Fujifilm X20

Time after time in my career I have realised that the more I shoot, the better my reactions are and the more instinctive the operation of the camera becomes. I’m pretty sure that someone could even devise a mathematical formula for it where x is the number of pictures you shoot over a given period of time, y is the number of days over a given period where you don’t take pictures and z is the probability that when you are shooting an assignment you absolutely nail the job. Unfortunately I’m not an imaginative and innovative mathematician so I’m not going to be able to define that formula – if you have the ability, please feel free to finish the task for me but not until you have read the rest of the puzzle:

All of this seems to be rational, don’t you think? There are a couple of flies in the ointment though: If you do too much of the same kind of thing, you can get into a rut and just keep producing cookie-cutter images.

So does that mean that there is an optimal amount of pictures to be taken? Well yes… and no… If you are shooting very different images on each occasion then you can take a lot more pictures and get a lot sharper without becoming stuck in the rut that I mentioned just now. There is a further variable that we need to include in our increasingly complex formula – having the time between shoots to properly edit our own work and to reflect on why and how certain pictures did and didn’t work and this requires a degree of knowledge and of technical and analytical skill.

Now we need to clarify what the formula needs to say:

Take lots of different pictures using different techniques and different equipment.
Don’t take so many pictures that you get stuck in your ways.
Have the time to edit and analyse your work.
Learn from your successes and mistakes.
Make sure that you know why and why the pictures that you like worked and why the rest didn’t.

All of this makes me re-assess my new year’s resolution. It isn’t just to take more pictures – it’s to take more different pictures and to learn as much as I can in the process. If I get time I might even learn a bit more about mathematical formulae too.

So here it is… merry Christmas

©Neil Turner, 2013.

Well today is my last day at the coal face until the new year (unless there’s interesting work and money on offer). Thinking back on the way work has been in 2013, it’s been a funny old year – but I could say that about any one of the last six or seven. Yet again I don’t have any pictures worth entering into competitions but that doesn’t mean that I’m not proud of a lot of the pictures I’ve taken and it certainly doesn’t mean that I haven’t had a lot of fun in the process. There are a few 2014 pictures already in my on-line and hard copy portfolios and my corporate book has had a pretty good year.

I’ve been sticking pictures onto EyeEm and enjoying the work of others on the same platform. I’ve even started to repost some of those images on my Facebook page which is slowly getting more ‘likes’.

Apart from shooting pictures my year has had a lot of great teaching moments and I’m looking forward to returning to the chalk face for one day a week between the new year and Easter.

Blogging has been rewarding and I’ve written a few posts that have been seen by thousands right around the world as well as a few more that only myself and a few regular readers have seen. The highlight of my blogging year was when I wrote about “Photographer B” – a post that was shared and tweeted about more than any other for quite a while. I hope that it made a few people think about what is happening in the world of professional photography.

I tried to resist the temptation of handing out a few awards (no cash, no trophy, just kudos) so, in no particular order here they are:

Best new piece of kit acquired: The EyeFi Prox2 SD card – for transmitting images to my phone, iPad or computer direct from my cameras. The runner-up is the iPhone 5S and an honourable mention goes to the Lithium ion batteries on the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra.

Best piece of old kit: First place goes to my Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS lens. It is 11 years old and just as sharp as ever thanks to one of my other winners. Runner-up is the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra.

Favourite supplier: For the work they’ve done on my gear, for supplying new kit at superb prices and for being some of the nicest people I’ve ever met this award goes to Fixation. I have two runners-up – The Flash Centre and Castle Cameras both of whom treat me very well even though I hardly ever spend any money with them!

Favourite piece of software: For the tenth consecutive year, it has to be Photo Mechanic because it makes my workflow and therefore my working life better. The runner up is Photogene4 on the iOS operating system.

Favourite client: Picking one out of the bunch would be unfair – I would like to say a public ‘thank you” to everyone who has used my services this year and it is heartening to be able to say that I haven’t suffered a single problem of non-paying during 2013.

Unsung hero award: For making great kit that just does its job day after day and week after week I’d like to recognise the contribution that Timberland footwear makes to my working life. I wrote about the photographer and their uniform quite a while ago and nothing has changed.

Happily, I don’t have a crystal ball. If I owned one I’d spend far too much time looking forward and not enough time in the moment and certainly a lot less time trying to perfect the ‘decisive moment’. 2014 promises many things – new cameras, better computers, upgraded software and the ever-present pressure to create more pictures, faster and for less money. It feels as if our industry has lost far too many characters and heroes this year. The list is long and distinguished and I hope that each and every one of them rests in peace.

So that’s it… the 2013 working year is as good as over and all that’s left to say is thanks to everyone who has read and supported this blog, thank you to all of my colleagues and friends who have helped make 2013 memorable and thank you to my lovely wife for her amazing support.

Revisiting my workflow

It is impossible to work digitally without having some sort of workflow. Most are a bit better than adequate, some are good and some are blindingly awful. I think that it is important to have a look at the way you do things every once in a while to make sure that yours is as good as it can be and achieves the four goals of being;

Efficient in terms of both time and memory
Repeatable so that the purely functional bits can be done almost on auto-pilot
Non destructive so that you don’t lose valuable RAW files or save changes to Jpegs shot in camera
Able to be short-cut for jobs where time is even more of an issue

I’ve written about my workflow before and I often teach workshops based on the “photographer’s twelve step plan” – a process with 12 distinct stages from camera to client including backing up and having a coffee! In this blog post I’m simply going to go through my basic workflow with a few hints and tips as I go. I normally use Photo Mechanic to import, sort, caption, rename and export my files and Adobe Photoshop CC to convert RAW (Canon CR2 most of the time) files into the required format. The whole process is colour-managed and I do as much as I can in-camera to save myself time when editing. I work on either a MacBook Pro, a MacBook Air or a Mac Mini depending on where I am and what the job is. Anyway, let’s kick off…

Before I insert a card into the card reader I launch Photo Mechanic. This screen grab shows the “general” preferences for the application including what I want to happen when I load a memory card. I have checked the box “Open as contact sheet(s)” which means that as soon as the card goes in I see the images in a standard window. In the past I often used “show ingest dialogue” but I have found that ingesting every single frame doesn’t suit me and that it slows the whole process down drastically. Typically I only want between 25% and 35% of the images and so I go through them using the “tag” function (cmd T on a Mac or ctrl T on a PC) to identify those that I’m interested in or those which have unique content.

Once I’ve been through that card and tagged the images I want I use the “copy” function (cmd Y on the Mac and ctrl Y on a PC) and copy those tagged files to a new folder. I use a simple formula YYMMDD-jobname-RAW for those files and then repeat this process with every card used on that job. Photo Mechanic can be set to automatically open and update a new contact sheet with the copied files. I always eject the cards without deleting anything just in case there are problems during the process and put those cards to one side to be deleted later.

The preview and contact sheet windows are extremely easy ways to look at and select pictures. Once I have my first edit done I apply a generic caption using the Photo mechanic stationery pad (cmd I or ctrl I). At this point I’d like to mention two enormously useful features of Photo Mechanic (available on some other applications too).

The first is variables. These are simple ways of automatically adding information to your captions or filenames. Many are derived from the EXIF data applied in the camera. These include time, day and date as well as other shooting data. Some cameras allow you to set copyright information in the camera and others apply GPS location data too. Other variables might include camera serial numbers, original filenames as well as items that you can add yourself from pre-loaded drop-down menus. I have every county in the United Kingdom loaded as well as a large number of towns and cities and I also have some specific locations where I work regularly pre-loaded. By choosing a specific city from one drop-down menu you can use variables to add it to relevant other areas of the IPTC automatically. You can see some examples of variables in the caption below.

pm_stationery_pad

My main caption starts with {city}, {state}. {iptcday0} {iptcmonthname} {iptcyear4} which will then become something like Brighton, East Sussex. 12 December 2013 if I have all of the right information ready to go. If there are more details to add to the generic caption it is easy enough to do those in batches using the stationery pad.

Variables can also be used in the renaming of files.

This requires you to add the IPTC caption before you rename the files because using the {headline} variable automatically includes the headline you have used in the filename. I find this to be very useful and very good for saving time. In practice Photo Mechanic will sequentially rename 100 files in about ten seconds using this method.

The other really useful feature that Photo Mechanic has for helping with captions is code replacement. The idea is similar to variables except you create your won shortcuts. Sports photographers use this a lot and it saves a great deal of time. Imagine a football (that’s soccer to everyone in north America) team with 22 squad players – many of whom have unfamiliar and difficult to spell names. Using code replacement you can preload a text file with the teams before the game using shirt numbers. The England team, for example, would have numbers from EN01 to EN22 with the names of the players set against those numbers. Using code replacement you would type \EN08\ and the software would immediately recognise that as 8 Wayne Rooney or whatever you have set it to say. I use it for political figures so \dcam\ automatically becomes The Rt Hon David Cameron MP. I can add a second part to that if I so wish \pm\ would add Prime Minister.

I also use code replacement for shooting musicians and bands. It is really easy to create a text file with the names of all of the band members and then use the shortcuts to add the relevant people to each frame. You select the shortcuts yourself and the long versions yourself. Once you get the hang of code replacement, it becomes a central part of your workflow.

At this point I’ll often do a second tighter edit. I’ll keep all of the RAW files that I have copied over from the cards but only convert and send the best to the client. For some news jobs that is only 6-10 images and for other editorial assignments anything between a dozen and thirty. Some of the corporate jobs I shoot end up with a couple of hundred files and working on those proves the efficiency of this workflow because it is scaleable and repeatable.

Once I have my RAW (CR2 or RAF) images selected, captioned and renamed it is time to highlight them all and open them in Adobe Camera RAW in Adobe Photoshop. There are a number of great RAW conversion options out there and whether you use Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, Capture One or any of the others you need to make sure that the one you use doesn’t strip your carefully added caption information during the RAW conversion process.

This is what the Adobe camera RAW window looks like. You can select a number of images from the strip down the left hand side and apply the same adjustments to all of them. I don’t want to run a complete ACR tutorial here but I would like to mention the straighten, sharpen, crop and lens correction adjustments as well worth learning. Of course those are secondary to the basic correction options such as colour temperature and tint, exposure, contrast, highlight and shadows etc. I find that I rarely need to open an image into Photoshop itself simply because all of the things that I’d normally do to a picture can be done right here in Camera Raw. Every few frames I will highlight those that have been corrected but not yet saved and save them. A decent computer with enough RAM will happily save the adjusted RAW files into whatever format you choose in the background whilst you continue to work on the rest. Once I have hit the “save” button on the last files I then click on “done”. Most of the time I am saving files at their default size as high quality Jpegs with some sharpening into the same folder as the RAW files. Photo Mechanic then updates the folder to show the RAW and Jpeg files together (you can separate them if you wish to) with a thumbnail from the newly saved Jpeg.

One of the best improvements between Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop CS6 and Photoshop CC is an improved and expanded “save” dialogue window. You now have the option to set a target size, target amount of compression and apply a set degree of sharpening. With modern cameras producing pictures of over 60 megabytes and many of my clients wanting their photographs to be considerably smaller than that I am now using the target size more and more. My default setting is 4800 pixels along the longest side and with a maximum compressed file of 3200 kilobytes.

Once I have my images all saved I return to Photo Mechanic and copy the Jpeg files into a new folder ready to send to the client. More and more that folder is a Dropbox one and I will give the link to the images to the client. For news jobs I can simply FTP the images (having saved them at a smaller size) and for some commercial clients that means burning the pictures to a DVD or CD. However they are delivered, the images are correctly sized, nicely prepared from the RAW files and properly captioned and renamed. All of this is done quickly and efficiently without damaging any originals.

When the urgency of the edit is over, I copy the files to a RAID drive in my office, to a portable drive that lives in my car and to a third drive which is away from my office ‘just in case’. I might then treat myself to a coffee…

Anyone remember the “old dg28”?

Starting in 1999 I posted over fifty technique samples on my website. These days, hardly a month goes by without a photographer telling me that they read them over and over again and that they learned to not fear using flash by experimenting with some of the ideas that I talked about. Those technique pages used to get some serious traffic!

I’ve been looking back through them in connection with another project that I’m working on and I picked (almost at random) one of the old pieces to post here. It was originally posted in the summer of 2001 and I find it quite interesting that agree with everything I said. I clearly remember the shoot as well; the subject was the same age as me (37 at the time) and he was retraining as a plasterer. I’m now 49 and my career has also changed. Looking at this set of pictures I wonder whether plastering worked out for him. The words are unchanged and all I’ve done is to upload a new version of the picture.

©TSL/Neil Turner. 37 year old retraining as a plasterer in July 2001.

When most people tai their first steps using lights they try to make the photographs shadowless. The ability to do this is very useful, but sometimes it’s better to place your own shadows exactly where you want them. Some subjects need to be given a distinct treatment.

This portrait of an award winning student was crying out for an unusual image and it was obvious that he would do pretty much anything I asked. The college where he had been studying plastering was a large space divided up into small rooms that the students then practiced their craft in. It was dark and dull coloured with no reflective surfaces so it was pretty much an ideal location for me to work in (apart from the dust).

I quickly spotted a whole series of arches and windows that would serve as a perfect frame to the photograph and set a Lumedyne light up inside the small room.The beauty of working with battery powered kit is that you don’t have to find power points, which were few and far between in the workshop area.

I first tried to shoot with a softbox on the flash unit, but the dull colours and the subjects plain T-shirt made it a pretty boring shot so I decided to shoot without any form of light modifier and removed the softbox in order to get the hard shadow.

The flash exposure was f5.6 at 200 ISO with the softbox in place, but this leapt to f13 with just the metal reflector in place. There was so little available light that everything not lit by the flash was in total darkness. This effect was perfect for the shot. The subject had turned up with few tools and the shot needed a prop or two so we borrowed some plasterers tools and got him to hold them in a way that seemed to relax him. When you are photographing people that are not used to having their picture taken professionally you often need to work as hard at relaxing them as you do in getting the technical bits right. Having some familiar props (teddy bear substitutes) to hand can make all the difference.

I worked hard with this image at getting the composition right by using the arched frame, I tried a couple of other shaped holes too, but this was the best. Getting the shadow in the right place is nothing more or less than trial and error, but using the LCD on the back of a digital SLR helps to shorten that process. I started the shoot working with a 28-70 lens but graduated to a 17-35 pretty quickly. Getting closer to the arch gave me a larger area inside the room to work with and having a six foot tall man, his shadow and some plasterers tools I needed that space.

I think that this photograph helps to demonstrate just how useful adding extra elements into a portrait can be. The props and the shadow help to tell the story as well as making the whole image that little bit more interesting. In the end the picture ran in the newspaper in black and white and the contrast provided by the shadow really helped.

©TSL/Neil Turner. July 2001

2013 update and technical footnote:

The camera used was a Canon/Kodak DCS520 with 1.9 megapixels with a Canon 17-35 f2.8L lens. The lighting was a Lumedyne Classic flash system with a 200 w/s pack and a basic head. The DCS520 was great for certain jobs and this kind of lit work suited it down to the ground. The Kodak software was really good and it made it easy to interpolate (upsize) the images by a substantial amount – sometimes as much as 400%.

I used to shoot between 8 and 10 commissions a week and that involved driving an average of 30,000 miles a year. I had an Apple Powerbook G4 and I filed my pictures either using the ISDN line at my flat or using a PCMCIA card with a mobile phone modem built into it. The files that came out of the camera were a native 5.7Mb and generally compressed down to somewhere between 300K and 600K.

I hope to post a few more of these on the blog soon.

Poor old Photographer B

There is a heated discussion about the winner of this year’s Taylor Wessing Portrait prize on a photographers’ forum at the moment. Some people love Spencer Murphy’s picture and other’s don’t get it – which makes it a perfect demonstration that personal taste is a major factor in “liking” an image. One thread of the debate is the winning photographer’s use of large format film and The Guardian having quoted him as saying “I chose to shoot the series on a large format film, to give the images a depth and timelessness that I think would have been hard to achieve on a digital camera.” Hard to achieve? Hard for whom?

All of this prompted me to expand a little on something that is happening in photography right now that frustrates me: To make myself clear – I applaud photographers who find ways to make an overcrowded and homogenised market work for them and I applaud the way that they are using different methods to enable them to “see” better.

The idea is gaining momentum that just because something is shot on film it somehow has greater validity and greater truth. This really angers me.

If Photographer A likes the way that they work with film and that there is a market for that work then Photographer A has found a niche and I’m happy for them. Photographer B on the other hand creates great work without resorting to film but potential clients who have bought into the myth about the validity of film are already starting to question why Photographer B isn’t going with the fashion and using Photographer C who is happy to take the money but doesn’t work better on film. Basically, we are in a situation where the means of production could overtake the end result as the goal of the commission. Nobody wins – especially photographers D-Z.

The place where this is most frightening is in our colleges and universities where the small resurgence of film is being leapt upon by lecturers who are miles out of their depth in the digital world supported by managers who are desperate to validate their investments in silver based facilities and avoid having to spend on up-to-date digital ones. We have a generation of students being equipped for professional life in the 1980s based on the achievements of a tiny number of photographers achieving critical acclaim by “seeing differently” and then talking nonsense about it to a small clique of art lovers who lap up all of this stuff so that they can repeat it at Islington dinner parties and sound as if they know what they are talking about.

I come from a newspaper background where there is a good deal of nostalgia for shooting film. Happily most of us who wish to can indulge in this kind of work as part hobby and part self-expression. Each to their own and vive la difference and so on. We owe it to ourselves and each other to take the utmost care that our professional lives are not going to get hijacked by a notion that film – or “heritage media” as I quite mischievously like to call it – is better. After all, there’s a lot of truth in the old saying “be careful what you wish for.”

For the record I like Spencer Murphy’s work and I don’t blame him for mining the niche that he has helped to create. Portraiture should be about telling the subject’s story and not about how we shot the picture. I’ve been guilty on many occasions of shooting pictures where you notice the “how” before the “who” and the “why”. Photographic portraiture is as difficult as you want to make it. Spencer Murphy suggests that he has made a virtue out of simple by shooting with what is in truth a complex medium. My head hurts…

Monochrome and me

I was asked by a good client of mine to have a look at a set of black and white photographs that a new photographer had shot for them. They quite liked them but couldn’t see why they weren’t enthused by them because they fitted the brief. My answer was that if they had been in colour they’d have been seriously dull but that in black and white they were elevated to mediocre because black and white has impact. I tried to find the words to say that for monochrome to work really well you needed the light to contribute to the finished picture in an even more compelling way than it has to for good colour images. That wasn’t to say that great light doesn’t make for great colour pictures – far from it – but by this time my explanation was foundering and I was starting to sound less than coherent. At that point I cut my losses and simply said “to sum up, the light isn’t very interesting and without colour all you have is light and shade”. Wow… nailed it right at the end!

I drove home thinking about my own long and chequered history with shooting black and white: from the first frames I ever shot as a young kid through the exercises in light and shade, focal length and depth of field and movement that I did as a student to the hundreds of rolls I shot as an emerging professional photographer I have never been all that pleased with my ability to consistently shoot interesting black and white images – ones that I didn’t privately think would look better in colour.

Photographic heresy alert – I’m a better photographer in colour and so are 90% of my fellow photographers.
Photographic jealousy alert – I envy those who can just “see” in terms of black, white and shades of grey
Photographic honesty alert – I have decided to do something about it, 27+ years into my professional career

Thinking long and hard about monochrome and me has been an interesting experience. I’ve found myself examining the way images look through the viewfinder and asking whether the picture I’m about to take relies on colour, light, both or neither. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a clipboard or a mental checklist to hand – it’s just a momentary thought that pops up a few times on each job. I’m definitely making progress. I’ve been shooting a lot of events during the Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival over the last three weeks and on more than one occasion I knew that some of my pictures were destined to be monochrome, better in black and white.

©Neil Turner, September 2013. The vesry first frame I shot during the Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival 2013 - a man reading the programme a few minutes before it all started.

©Neil Turner, September 2013. The very first frame I shot during the Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival 2013 – a man reading the programme a few minutes before it all started.

©Neil Turner, October 2013. Mark Kermode playing bass with The Dodge Brothers at the Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival

©Neil Turner, September 2013. Violinist Jack Maguire warming up in his makeshift dressing room

It isn’t that I’ve never shot anything good in black and white it’s just that most of the time I wasn’t ‘seeing’ without colour. The market for black and white isn’t huge right now anyway and I haven’t had to develop myself in that direction. The funny thing is that it is the explosion of social media and sites like Instagram and EyeEm that have made me experiment more and, more importantly, it has been my love affair with the Fujifilm X20 that has pushed me into shooting pictures that bear little resemblance to the suff that I do for work – often monochrome fits that bill rather well.

Monochrome and Me… it’s been a long and weird relationship. I like to think that it is maturing nicely and that it is now entering something of a golden era. There’s still no money in it but that isn’t really the point.

©Neil Turner, September 2013. Pensioners walking out of the Pleasure Gardens, Bournemouth

Cleaning glass

I was looking through a few pictures from this summer this morning when I decided to post this picture just because I liked it. The young man in the photograph is a nephew who has just started his own window cleaning business in the Bournemouth area using filtered water and a long pole instead of ladders, squeegees and chamois leathers. I hope that it takes off and I hope that he gets around to putting this on his website. It was taken with my Fujifilm X20 when I was working at the kitchen table on some pictures that I needed to get to a client and the X20 was the camera that I had to hand.

One thought this morning led, as they inevitably do, to another when I read a posting on a Facebook group by a photographer who has never cleaned their own lenses or their own digital camera chips. Cleaning lenses is too easy to go to the bother of driving to a service centre and parting with money. Obviously if you are at a major sporting event and Canon or Nikon are there you’d be a fool to not take up their offers of free cleaning and checks but beyond that you should learn to do it yourself. I say that as someone who never uses filters on a day-to-day basis as protection and as someone whose home is over 100 miles way from the nearest Canon approved service centre. I also say it as someone who used to be a staff photographer based in London with an employer who picked up the tab for pretty much everything and got quite lazy there for a while! I tend to use the Eclipse solution designed for camera chips along with either a very old quality cotton handkerchief or a soft cloth designed for spectacles. Once I’ve done the glass I usually give the outside of the lens a quick wipe down too – there’s no sense in having dirty gear.

Cleaning camera chips is a whole other matter. Getting it done professionally every once-in-a-while makes sense but at up to £50 + VAT per camera I don’t want to get my chips cleaned as often as I want to get my windows at home done. Of course the “self-cleaning” mechanisms built into today’s cameras really help. In the past it was common to get sizeable amounts of dust on the chip which needed to be removed. These days most of the loose stuff goes away with one or two cycles of the built-in cleaning option. Much of the rest can be loosened or removed using a decent air blower (the rubber bulb type) and if all else fails you can buy the right chemicals and sensor swabs to do a thorough job. If I get an offer of a free clean or I’m having a camera serviced then I always get the chip cleaned too. Canon build in a small sticky strip to catch and keep the dust shaken loose by the piezo-electric motors that do the automatic cleaning every time you turn the camera on and off. The service centre replaces that strip when you take your kit in for an overhaul or repair and it is useful to bear in mind that the strip is only truly effective if a) you have the camera with the baseplate pointing to the ground when the cleaning is in progress and b) the strip gets changed regularly.

Because of the distance I live away from the major repair and service centres I find myself cleaning camera chips using the Eclipse solution every couple of months. It definitely has an effect because I then have to re-calibrate the white balance shifts on the cameras. The end result is that I save a bit of money, a lot of time travelling to and from the service centre and an awful lot of time in post-production not having to remove dust spots. When I travel for work I always take some cleaning kit. I was in India a few years ago now and the dust in my ‘weather sealed’ EOS1D MkII cameras had to be removed on an almost daily basis. I’d hate to think how bad it would have been after a week there without having the kit to do my own cleaning.

It doesn’t have to stop with lenses and chips either. Laptop screens, computer monitors and keyboards are all easy to keep looking their best if you take ten minutes to do so. I used to throw my Domke F-series camera bags into the washing machine (which is how my beautiful grey F1X ended up salmon pink thanks to a stray pair of red socks) and these days I get the vacuum cleaner into my camera bags a couple of times a year.

Five years of freelancing

It’s quite hard to believe that I’m celebrating five years of freelancing this week. I hinted at it when I wrote about anniversaries a couple of weeks ago and I thought that it might be a good time to think about how things have gone and how things are going.

The first thing that comes to mind is that I still adore being a photographer. I hope that anyone who has read any of my blog posts since 1999 would have worked that out for themselves but I wanted to get that in first just in case anyone is in any doubt.

The second thing is that the timing of my move into self-employment couldn’t possibly have been worse: the economic meltdown in much of the developed world was pretty much at its zenith in September 2008 and I’m pretty sure that life would have been considerably easier had I left the staff job a couple of years earlier. That’s life.

Thirdly I want to mention the way that our industry works. Every photographer, picture editor and buyer of photography will tell you about a golden era. I really think that no such thing actually existed. That’s not quite right; I think that the invention of photography spurred a “silver” era which is still in progress and that there may have been a few golden spikes in that time. The industry has been in a constant state of change for well over a hundred years and it will continue to react to social and technological changes as long as the need for imagery exists.

So how has the last five years actually been for me? Ups and downs, feast and famine, peaks and troughs are all phrases that readily come to mind. One week I might work one day and the next I have four or even five days work. Sometimes it’s all editorial and others it’s all corporate. I’ve calculated that I’ve made 88% of my income taking pictures and the other 12% either writing about photography, teaching it or doing some consultancy work. I’ve learned the importance of having a portfolio ready to go and I have recently spent a lot of time getting my online presence to work smarter for me.

I suspect that none of the above is new to you and that none of it comes as a surprise. To be honest, I am pretty content with my new life and the only things I actually miss about being a staff photographer are:

I now have to buy my own car and camera gear
I have to do my own paperwork
I’m no longer an integral part of a big team.

The variety of assignments has been great, the travel has been interesting and getting to spend a lot more time at home has been wonderful. My hair has lightened to an even lighter grey but that is probably more to do with age than stress and I now have to wear glasses a bit more often than I did but that’s probably due to my age as well.

I’m not the only one who has made the move from staff to freelance and I’m certainly not the only one who did so due to newspapers and magazines reorganising and doing away with staffers. There was a discussion a few days ago about the pros and cons of being freelance and the general consensus was that it suits some people more than it suits others. I miss the team, I miss shooting every single day and I’d love to have someone there to buy me some new gear but apart from that I’m looking forward with child-like excitement about what comes next.

Neil Turner Photographer, the Facebook page

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