photography

Thirteen quick portraits using unfamiliar gear
Husnah Kukundakwe – Ugandan Para Swimming athlete, photographed at the Athletes Village ahead of the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games. Monday 26 August 2024. Photo: OIS/Neil Turner

I hope that most people reading this are aware that my photography career has lots of elements to it. I have shot pictures for some 38 years now but for the last ten years I have also worked as an editor on large sports projects with Bob Martin and his team. One of the best parts of that work is going to Olympic and Paralympic events with the Olympic Information Service and this year we went to Paris to provide some coverage of the Paralympics and to work as mentors for eight young photographers. Bob Martin, Joel Marklund and Adrian Dennis did a great job as their photographic mentors and Sammie Thompson, Joe Toth and I guided them through our live workflow giving them a chance to get to grips with working as live editors for a couple of days each as well as sorting out their images. You can see what the team produced here.

(more…)

The ultimate compromise lens?


That’s a dramatic headline but, never before having had a lens like this, it’s the most accurate way that I could think of to sum it up. Canon’s RF 100-500mm f4.5-7.1 L IS USM is something of a conundrum. It covers a range of focal lengths that I find extremely useful in a lot of the work that I currently do and, paired with the RF 24-105mm f4 L IS USM, it is a valuable item in my travelling kit bag. I have shot pictures with it that I would simply not have been able to without hauling some incredibly heavy (and expensive) lenses around the world.

Do I love this lens? No. Do I appreciate it? Yes… with bells on.

(more…)

That brief…
PE lesson photograph from a school prospectus shoot in Hampshire. ©Neil Turner

I’ve called this post “that brief” because I will never forget an email that came to me from a regular client who simply gave me a name, address, date and time and the words “go do your thing”. That was pretty flattering – they trusted me and were comfortable with how I had worked for them before. I’ll never forget that brief but most of the time I think that I’d prefer a bit more to go on.

Every photograph that I have ever taken was dictated by things that can be controlled and things that can’t. The client’s brief is something that should be able to be negotiated and should always be realistic. In the “contact” section on my main website I say the following:

Commissioning a professional photographer can be a daunting business. My philosophy has always been to make it as painless and as uncomplicated as possible. I believe that this is best achieved by a proper dialogue between photographer and client. We both want the same thing – a set of pictures that achieve and even exceed their purpose. In my experience, the better defined that purpose is, the easier it is to get the photographs that the client needs.

(more…)

Light modifiers
When this was shot this was my favourite type of catchlight. The shoot through translucent umbrella partnered with an oblong light panel to reflect a bit of light back in. I have changed my mind a hundred times since then.

“What is your favourite light modifier?” A question from a photographer who has followed my blogs over the last twenty-plus years got me thinking. Spoiler alert – I probably don’t have a favourite but I do have a few that I use all of the time.

First things first, let’s define “light modifier”. As part of their explanation of modifier Wikipedia describes it as the following:

Tools or accessories employed in photography and videography to shape, control, or direct light emitted from a light source. These modifiers serve to alter the quality, direction, and intensity of light, thereby enabling photographers and videographers to achieve specific effects or moods in their images. Light modifiers come in various categories and types, each with its own unique characteristics and applications.

Seems simple enough but when you start to examine those different categories and types life can get pretty confusing. Thinking about it I realised just how many different soft boxes, umbrellas, reflectors, dishes and domes I own. In fact, the inventory doesn’t even end there because there are so many sub-sets and shapes that it could all get the tiniest bit confusing for me if I hadn’t used each and every one of them so often over the last forty or so years. The fact that I have sold a few here and there and thrown and given so many more just adds to my knowledge of what does and doesn’t work for me and the work that I do – which in itself changes over time.

(more…)

Juxtapose and exaggerate
Not the original note to self but I have added it to a lens wrap for old time’s sake

A few days ago I was at an event in Manchester run by Canon UK. While I was chatting with one of the many talented young photographers that they had invited I remembered something about my early career that I am pretty sure helped me more than I could have known at the time.

In the later 1980s and early 1990s I had a light grey Domke F1X camera bag. I loved that bag and I loved working from it. I also loved that every time I lifted the top flap there were two words written there with a marker pen:

  • Juxtapose
  • Exaggerate

They were written there because the legendary photographer Terence Donovan gave a talk at my college in either 1985 or 1986. When asked by one of my classmates about taking better pictures, he explained that by juxtaposing our subjects with backgrounds, secondary subjects and other compositional elements we could give our pictures a depth that told stories more effectively. By exaggerating things such as light, angles, perspective or even the contents of our images we could, again, tell those stories in different and possibly better ways. I scribbled down those two words in my almost brand new Filofax, underlining both multiple times.

(more…)

Another year almost over
A knitted Bishop is one of the decorations on the Christmas tree at the Lambeth Palace Library . ©Neil Turner. December 2023

As 2023 draws to a close I just wanted to look back at what has been a great year for me professionally. Since badly damaging my spine in 2017 and being diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2020 I have been spending as much time working as a photo editor as I have taking pictures but the latter half of 2022 and the whole of 2023 have changed all of that. I am fitter than I was and the cancer appears to have been soundly defeated and I have been able to take on way more work as a photographer than I have done for many years. On top of that, it has been nice work to do and so I’m a happy chap. I have no intention of ditching the editing work and so I am just a lot busier.

Back in December 2013 I wrote my last blog post of that year looking forward to a family Christmas and commenting on how my year had gone. I offered up my selections of “best of the year” for want of a better title. I’m not going to list the best of 2013 here but here’s a link if you want to go and have a look for yourself. Borrowing much the same categories, here is the best of 2023:

(more…)

Muscle memory, match fitness and second nature

Whatever you do for a living, for fun or out of necessity the general rule is that the more you do it, the better you get at it. Like a very large number of people I have been doing what I normally do a lot less through the COVID-19 pandemic and I have found that has caused me to stop and think a lot more.

I haven’t been into a single school for almost a year and a half and I haven’t shot a large set of corporate headshots for almost as long. I haven’t been asked to photograph retail spaces, conferences or the work that takes place inside hospitals. That’s a massive chunk of my core photography work missing from my life and the relatively few editorial and news jobs that I’ve done certainly haven’t made up for any of the regular commissions.

(more…)

Here we go again – version 9.0 of my folio

When I went freelance again in the summer of 2008 I knew that having a strong web-based portfolio was going to be important. I had already been publishing websites for over nine years by then so, on day one, I published something that I thought looked good and which was entirely built by me using Dreamweaver. A few days later I made some substantial changes following feedback from friends, colleagues and a couple of clients. For the next six years I made major design updates at least once a year until I switched to Pixelrights in 2014. Between that point and today I had only done one major overhaul because their system offered exactly what I needed and so it feels rather sad to have had to migrate neilturnerphotographer.com to the Adobe Portfolio platform. Welcome to version 9.0 of my folio.

The move has happened because I wanted speed and features that Pixelrights don’t currently offer. I have kept the old site sitting there in the background just in case they leapfrog Adobe again allowing me to swap back. I looked at so many others before opting for the Adobe option and I feel happy that I have the best one for me at this time. It won’t suit others – especially those who have a need for online sales or storage. For me, this is just a shop window and, in that limited way, it really looks like it is going to work. (more…)