photography

The cost of doing business
June 2014 – Lunchtime on the steps of St John’s, Smith Square in Westminster.
©Neil Turner

I was at an event with Canon UK this week. They invited a lot of news and sports photographers to a hotel in South Wales and I was there to share my experience and expertise about all manner of photography and post-production topics. Inevitably conversations drift and different groups spoke about lots of elements of what we do. One short chat about software subscriptions stuck in my mind. So much so that I spent quite a lot of the drive back to Dorset thinking about it and how to put those thoughts down here in this blog post. Here goes.

I pay for the majority of the bits of software that I rely on as subscriptions. Insurances of all sorts are must-haves and I pay for websites, cloud storage and many other things that underpin my business and with that my ability to earn a living. I know that I could cut costs, cut some corners and save myself hundreds of pounds (dollars if you are reading this in the US) a year if I chose to. I already do an annual audit of those many costs and this year’s happened a couple of months ago. I am content (which is two notches under happy on this scale) with what I have and what I pay but I’m always looking to fine-tune this stuff where I can without losing things that are important to me.

Some of them are annual payments and some are monthly. Some are in addition to things that I’d pay for if I weren’t a freelance photographer and some are entirely down to the job I do and the way that I choose to do it. Here’s a list of my subscriptions and insurances;

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Bye bye Alamy
My single most popular image on Alamy: Author Ursula K. Le Guin photographed at a hotel in London. 28th September 1990. Photo: ©Neil Turner

During the Covid 19 lockdowns of 2020 I spent a lot of time scanning, captioning and cataloguing a lot of my old photographs. Batch-by-batch I uploaded them to my newly created Alamy account and watched as I made a few pounds here and there when two or three sold. The figures weren’t big but it became a promising trickle of sales and the amount of time and effort that I’d put in over those months started to feel like it might turn into a reasonable investment.

Three years later I was getting upset about the perceived value of photographers’ images when I wrote a blog post “Pile it high and sell it cheap? Please Don’t” where I said the following:

“Selling a license to a photograph taken many years ago should result in the library and the creator receiving fair recompense but it rarely does. Relying on my back-catalogue to be a substantial part of my pension is looking more and more like a pipe-dream.”

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Celebrating 40 years as a working photographer
A snippet from my 1986 Filofax diary showing the details of the job that went on to be my first colour magazine front page.

This snippet from my 1986 Filofax diary reminds me of a few things about my early career as a photographer:

  1. I didn’t copy many of the details from the written job sheets into my diary. Mistake
  2. I didn’t keep a stock of film to hand and had to pop into the office to collect some rolls of transparency (trannie) film. Another mistake
  3. Trying to get paid was a regular note in the diary for that year and most of 1987. This note referred to a job I had shot for a law firm a month previously
  4. I have no memory of who Bill Piper is or was

I left college with a Higher National Diploma in Advertising and Editorial Photography in June 1986 and I had worked as an assistant for a couple of photographers whilst on the course. I continued to get the odd few days work from them until early September 1986 when I landed a three month contract to cover for one of the staff photographers at Haymarket Publishing who was off on maternity leave. For all sorts of reasons I also got to spend quite a bit of time working in the darkroom there but that was also fine because there was no better way to learn than printing the pictures of more experienced colleagues.

On Tuesday 16th of September 1986 I was sent to take some specific photographs at the London Stock Exchange. It was shortly before the “Big Bang” – the historic day when a high percentage of the share trades done moved from the iconic trading floor to electronic systems. My brief was to get a general view of the trading floor in colour from an observation window overlooking a section of it.

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Another quiet August

Next month I will be celebrating my fortieth anniversary of working as a photographer. For almost every one of the thirty-nine Augusts that I have been in the business I have either been very quiet or have had to fill my time with photography work that doesn’t necessarily involve taking pictures. The bar chart above shows how much I have worked in the month over the years since I have been back in the world of freelancing. The table clearly shows a few anomalies and the main points of those are:

  • 2012: Working on the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games as part of the photo management team
  • 2014: The first year where I made some of my income working as a photo-editor on sports projects
  • 2017: Laid up after some serious back surgery – so no work of any kind
  • 2020: Despite the covid lockdowns I did do some editing and some consultancy
  • 2021: The delayed Tokyo Paralympic Games
  • 2022: Lambeth Conference
  • 2024: Paris Paralympic Games

Some good years and plenty of flat and relatively uninteresting years have passed and August has become a month of trying not to worry about keeping busy whilst enjoying some time off – which is a lot easier when you live pretty near the beach. Of course it isn’t just August; the latter half of July and the first week in September are often much the same.

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Insuring my gear
The last frame that I shot with one of my cameras before it crashed to the ground and stopped functioning properly. Both the body and lens needed to be sent to Canon UK for repair. Wednesday 01 July 2026. Photo: Neil Turner for ACO

The company that has insured my camera gear for the last eighteen years has just had to pay out for accidental damage for only the second time since I joined them in 2008. When I was looking for a quick phrase about why you need insurance as a creative professional this sentence from their website came up from a Google search:

“Insurance allows you to concentrate on production knowing that your creative assets are protected and you don’t have to worry about the unexpected happening.”

There are plenty of ways to think about equipment and getting some cover for it. A lot has been written on social media in the last few months by my colleagues who have found that some underwriters use some extremely awful and underhand tactics to avoid paying out on what, only a few years ago, would have been cut-and-dried claims for theft. I have no idea what my particular insurer’s angle on theft claims is because I have never made one but, as our American friends say, they are two-for-two on accidental damage.

This time around I was photographing a group of delegates to an International Anglican Church conference as they walked across the Peace Bridge in Derry/Londonderry. It was day four of an eight day assignment in Northern Ireland. I was swapping between one Canon EOS R5 MkII with an RF 70-200 f4L lens to a second R5 MkII with an RF 14-35 f4L lens when I dropped the body complete with the longer lens.

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Feedback is very helpful


By the time I was a teenager I had received enough sports coaching (football and cricket) that I was pretty hardened to being told I was doing something wrong and just the tiniest bit embarrassed and surprised by those rare moments when they told me I’d done well. I will be celebrating my fortieth anniversary as a working photographer later this year. I left college at the age of 22 in the early summer of 1986 and started working for a magazine publisher about two months later. I can’t claim to remember every time my work was picked out for praise but I can remember each and every time it was singled out for being sub-standard, off-brief or just not quite right. Back in the early days criticism, positive or negative, made a huge difference and I’d say that those sports coaches did a good job of helping to prepare me for this career.

I wish that I could remember which of the many dozens (or even hundreds) of authors that I have photographed who said it to a reporter as I sat through another interview but I have never forgotten their words “criticism is the lifeblood of the author”. I’m going to water that down quite a bit and say “feedback is very helpful to the photographer”.

Just recently positive comments have been like the proverbial London bus – nothing for ages and then three come along all at once. There haven’t been any complaints but I have been lucky enough to receive three extremely positive comments about me and my work.

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A busy few weeks
The Revd Paula Hollingsworth, Chaplain to St Paul’s Cathedral leads a Service of Blessing of Pilgrims on their Departure with The Most Revd and Rt Hon Dame Sarah Mullally DBE, Archbishop of Canterbury, before she sets off with her husband Eamonn Mullally and their team. Tuesday 17th March 2026. Photo: ©Neil Turner

It all began with a short service in St Paul’s Cathedral before the Archbishop of Canterbury set off with her husband and a small team on their Pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. That was on Tuesday 17th of March. I photographed the blessing and the first few miles of their 87 mile journey before leaving them at Rotherhithe to go and edit my pictures. A couple of days later I joined them again at Aylesford Priory for a couple of hours and then dipped in and out of the pilgrimage before covering the last couple of miles as they walked from Chartham to Canterbury itself.

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Old dog, new tricks
Photo ©Neil Turner, February 2023

Hands up if you read the release notes when you go to update a piece of software. Anyone? Just me?

My actual answer is “occasionally moving towards regularly”. In photographic terms I am most definitely an old dog and whilst I wouldn’t say that I enjoy learning new tricks I definitely benefit from quite a few of them. I write about them on here from time-to-time as well.

This blog post was triggered because I actually took the time to read the blurb for the two main bits of software that I use day in and day out: Photo Mechanic and Adobe Camera RAW within Adobe Photoshop. Neither update was spectacular but my rabbit hole tendencies made me go back and see what else I had missed in previous updates and I think that I found one or two gems that will be very useful going forward. I’m not going to go through and list everything but I thought that it would be useful to mention a few.

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