photojournalist

AA batteries

Eneloop AA 1.2v batteries and Think Tank 8 AA battery holder.

Back in September 2008 when I returned to the world of freelancing I tried every way that I could think of to cut my ‘cost of doing business’. One of the central ideas was to reduce the number of disposable batteries that I bought and used. I had a number of speed lights and a whole bag full of triggers, transmitters and gadgets almost all of which took AA sized batteries and so I went out and bought a lot of NiCd (nickel cadmium) rechargeables along with three decent quality chargers.

Every-once-in-a-while I would buy a few single use batteries if I was on a job which justified doing so but I kept to my plan and used the NiCd ones where I could. Over time they lost their power and after about four years they were relegated to being used in kids toys and my wireless keyboard. I bought some new NiCds but the way that I used them meant that the dreaded memory effect killed them off more quickly than I would have liked.

For about six months I was lazy and kept buying Duracells (and other brands) but the box I kept the dead ones in filled up far too quickly and I went back to buying and using rechargeable batteries. By this time the nickel metal hydride (NiMH) revolution had pretty much taken place and I started to buy those. It took me a few months to realise that the old NiCd chargers weren’t the best option for the newer generation batteries and so I invested in a couple of new chargers a year or so ago. Slowly but surely and over the course of 18 months I went from NiCd to a mix of NiCd and single use batteries and then to NiMH. The big battery swap-over has now been completed.

The general consensus amongst my peers was that the Eneloop branded batteries (by Panasonic) were the best and so I built up a stock of thirty or so white Eneloops. Very happy with them, they work really well and hold their charge splendidly. One of my colleagues mentioned Eneloop Pro batteries and that upset me – I am always keen to get the best – and so I bought a few of those to see if they were worth the 60% price hike over the standard ones. Well, they are anecdotally about a third better in that they last that much longer under heavy use in Canon flash units. I cannot see any difference in the recycle times for the speed lights and so I had to ask myself whether it was worth paying more in order to have to change batteries a little less frequently. On balance, the answer is “no” but I now have eight of the Pro batteries and so I use them in amongst the set. The big downside of the Pros is that they have a shorter life. They can handle about 500 charge cycles before they lose their potency whereas the standard Eneloop can do around 2000 charges. That makes the Pro quite a bit more expensive than the ordinary one but there will be colleagues out there who are more than happy to pay that extra to get what they need – it’s a personal decision.

Carrying so many batteries around is heavy and cumbersome. I really like the Think Tank nylon case that holds eight AAs and I have a couple of those in my bag in the same pocket as the Think Tank 4x DSLR (Canon LP-E6) battery holder. I hate the idea of running out of power on a job and I have the two DSLR battery holder in my pocket most of the time too.

I saw a couple of reviews of high quality ‘smart chargers’ the other day and so I’ve now invested in new chargers too. That’s made quite a difference and I’m back to being up to date with the technology. It’s cheaper, it’s greener and my flash units are cycling faster. All good!

The third kit fetish

The Phottix 70cm collapsible beauty dish, adapted to fit an Elinchrom Ranger Quadra head.

Everyone knows about the fetish for camera bags shared by most photographers and anyone who has read this blog will know about my own personal one for card readers but there is a third one that has been exercising me of late. I have mentioned it quite a few times over the years and a particular need to have a repeatable set up has led me down this particular equipment rabbit hole once again.

I’m talking about lighting. I’m talking specifically about light modifiers. Those umbrellas, snoots, dishes, soft boxes and hybrid gadgets that you place on the fronts of your flash units in order to control and improve the light.

On our first day in the studio at college back in 1984 we were banned from fixing anything to the lights. Instead we had to place screens and diffusers in the optimum position independently from the light source so that we learned that there was no such thing as the perfect soft box, swimming pool or snoot. By inching a diffuser backwards or forwards by a small margin you could change the quality of the light considerably and you could use all sorts of flags and reflectors to stop the stray light from going where you didn’t want or need it. That was in the studio and that was a very long time ago. As soon as the restrictions about not using ready-made light modifiers was lifted we all sprinted for the big fabric soft boxes and rigid swimming pools and most never looked back.

Unfortunately I was left with a feeling that every time I used a light modifier I am making some really important and potentially detrimental mistakes. I blame the knowledge that I gained about the subtlety of light modification that I acquired in term one, year one of my formal photographic education for the dissatisfaction that I feel with every convenient and portable accessory that I own – and I own a lot of them. A brief headcount yesterday produced the following:

  • Four translucent or shoot through umbrellas
  • Two convertible umbrellas
  • Three reflective or bounce off umbrellas
  • One umbrella box
  • Two rigid beauty dishes
  • One folding beauty dish
  • Two square soft boxes
  • Two rectangular soft boxes
  • Three hexagonal soft boxes
  • Two strip soft boxes
  • Seven reflectors
  • One snoot
  • Three sets of grids
  • Two sets of barn doors
  • Nine reflectors

I have probably forgotten about some others but you get the idea; too many options, no clear direction and no way to always ensure that I have the right one with me at all times. Therefore the compromise is almost always to bring the two or three most versatile with me and have another three or four in the car before making the best of what I have.

This, surely, begs the question about which is my favourite. The answer is as simple as it is shocking. None of the above. My favourite way to work is often to use lights in a way that doesn’t give the signature look of a soft box or an umbrella. I like to bounce. Walls, ceilings, walls and ceilings or any one of a dozen other types of surface will almost always get my vote if I’m shooting a one-off creative image. I have written about my love of large pale surfaces and of using pretty much anything around as a bounce surface and it has become so important to me that creating a ‘look’ has become something I’ve had to work at. I know that something like 33% of photographers rock up and set up their lights complete with their favourite modifier and get on with the pictures and that another 33% turn up and shoot with available light. Many of the rest base their shooting options on what they find and choose between flash with their main modifiers or no flash at all. I like to think that I’m in a small group who will look around for ‘bounceable’ surfaces and go down that route as a matter of preference.

From my list of available light modifiers you can see that I never give up on my quest for ‘the one’ – the light modifier that will make sense of them all. I bought a new one this week and I’m off to use it today. Let’s hope that it both surprises and delights me and that the surprise and delight lead to being able to ignore some of those 1984 college year one, term one lessons

Moody technique post from the old website

I have been cleaning up some of the behind the scenes stuff on my original dg28.com website and got side-tracked looking at some of the old technique posts (again). I really liked this one from July 2003 which was originally entitled “Choosing a Mood”. Anyway, here is the original post cut and pasted:

©Neil Turner/TSL. July 2003. English, Media Studies and Philosophy teacher in a north London comprehensive school.

©Neil Turner/TSL. July 2003. English, Media Studies and Philosophy teacher in a north London comprehensive school.

Every time you take a photograph you are saying something about what is in the image. It’s impossible to avoid a frozen frame being anything other than an interpretation of that moment so it becomes a mark of a good photographer to make sure that every element of the image (composition, subject matter and light) helps to paint a consistent story. 

The mood required for every image – especially with portraits – is something that you have to consider very carefully.Some lighting guides will tell you that there is a lighting set up for each mood and that it is a simple matter of placing light A in position B and light C in position D to achieve this. I have to agree that there are some obvious starting points for many of the moods that I use, but there are many other factors that have to be taken into account when setting the scene.

Even a short list of variables such as time of day, age of subject, subjects clothing and location mean that there can be no such thing as a standard lighting rig. This portrait of a teacher who feels that he wasn’t prepared during his training for the attitude of pupils needed a lot of thought.

We met at his home in a pleasant London suburb and I was determined to give the whole portrait a real inner city feel. I asked him if there were any dark alleys or heavily graffitied walls near his home but he couldn’t think of any. We got back into my car and went in search of a location, being very careful not to identify the location in the photographs. We found this shady wall with a small amount of graffiti and parked the car. It was an overcast, if bright, late morning by this time so I decided to add to the “street” atmosphere by using a strong side light.

My subject was just about the same height as the wall so I decided that he needed to be crouching or sitting down. I set up a single Lumedyne 200 w/s (joule) pack and head without either an umbrella or soft box on a stand at about sixty degrees from the lens axis and about ten degrees above eyeline. The flash was set to maximum power at a range of seven feet (2.1 metres) which, combined with a 1/250th shutter speed, made the available light unimportant. The aperture was f11 at 200 ISO and I shot a few frames with just the subject and the wall immediately around him. When I consulted my LCD screen I liked the shadow and decided to include it more obviously in the composition.

My subject appeared more relaxed looking out of camera so I asked him to fix his eyes on a point in the distance between me and the flash. I also asked him to rest his head in his hand and this gave the shadow a better defined shape. I shot a few more frames and then changed the composition to include some of the grey sky. The sky at 1/250th at f11 was very dark so I changed the shutter speed to 1/125th and the sky was a better tone.

I shot quite a few variations after this, including some safe images without the obvious flash but this was my favourite frame when I came to do the edit an hour or so later. The mood was about right, it conveys the slightly dark theme of the article and screams “street” at you. I’m very pleased with end result, although this wasn’t the frame chosen for the paper!

Technical Note: Canon EOS1D with Canon EF 16-35 f2.8L lens. 1/250th of a second at f9.5 with Lumedyne Signature Series flash.

The Photographers’ Summit 2017
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A graphical breakdown of the types of work that I do these days and where the images end up.

I do quite a few talks and lectures throughout the year and I don’t normally discuss the specifics here on the blog because they are rarely open to a general paying audience. This one is different. The National Union of Journalists here in the United Kingdom invited me to run a couple of one hour workshops at a very interesting event they are running in London this Saturday. Titled “The Photographers’ Summit 2017” the day includes the following:

  • Improve your videography skills.
  • Rights & restrictions: how privacy and property laws affect photographers & videographers.
  • Using copyright law to make sure you don’t get ripped off.
  • Moving from staff to freelance photographer.
  • Innovations in photography — 360degree filming and other developments.
  • New models and ways to make money.

The good news is that you don’t have to be a member of the NUJ to attend and it looks likely to be an interesting day.

My part in the proceedings is to do two identical one hour sessions which I have given the working title of “Making a living with the skill set of a press photographer”. OK, so it isn’t particularly catchy but it does sum up what I’ve been tasked with delivering. What I am trying to do is to say to people with press photography skills that they can take those skills and use them elsewhere within the wider photography industry given that the market for news pictures has been shrinking and changing for many years and given that the world still has a massive appetite for photographs. We’ve all had to accept that a relatively small percentage of those pictures come from professionals but it is my contention that as we reach saturation point for the quantity of images the only place to do go is to do something about the quality. Press photographers have the skills to be part of that change and we just need to do something about applying those transferable skills to the task.

As a quick preview of what I’m saying I have done an updated pie chart (yes, there will be pie charts) based on the one that I did for this blog a few years ago when I wrote about where the work comes from. The changes aren’t too big but it’s worth going back and reading the original article to see how this chart came about.

The 2015/2016 financial year's version of the pie chart.

The 2015/2016 financial year’s version of the pie chart.

Now these are only two of the 20+ slides that I am currently planning to use and for the whole explanation there’s no substitute for being there. These are only a one hour sessions (I’m doing the same one twice) and the material that I have had to condense down normally takes about twenty hours to deliver. Ours is a complex business and it would be childish to promise to distill the last eight and a half years worth of freelance business experience down into a few catchy subtitles but I have had a go, so my talk will feature the following in reverse order;

  • Seven vital skills to learn or develop
  • Six things that press photographers have going for them
  • Five things that press photographers need to know
  • Four assumptions we can make about the industry
  • Three facts about me
  • Two distinct parts to the session
  • One major piece of advice

Christmas is long gone and so there won’t be any partridges in any pear trees (at least in my sessions) and if any Lords turn up they will be asked to restrict their leaping to the breaks. I’m hoping that the whole day will be both fun and informative and that we’ll all get a chance to do some serious networking in the breaks.

If you are interested, there were still a few tickets available at a cost of £35 each for non-members and £15 each for members.

170211-nuj_workshop2

Hands and portraits
John Redwood MP, photographed during an interview in January 1994. © Neil Turner/Insight.

John Redwood MP, photographed during an interview in January 1994. © Neil Turner/Insight.

It’s January 2017 and like most photographers I am looking forward to the year with a mix of excitement and trepidation. What kinds of challenging and interesting projects are going to come my way in the next eleven and a half months? How is my work going to develop? Am I going to get enough work to pay the bills? Big questions that add to the roller-coaster of emotions that being freelance brings out.

One of the things that I always try to do is look back at some of last year’s work and compare it to older stuff and try to come up with some thoughts that help me to understand my own style better and to make sure that I don’t get tripped up by the same old mistakes. There’s a question that pops into my head about this time every year and it is one that I think that I am finally happy to answer:

What do you do with hands in editorial style portraits?

Almost every time that I shoot a portrait I try to give the client/editor as much choice as I can. Tight head and shoulders only portraits are one thing but what about wider compositions where the subject’s arms and hands start to feature? How should I get people, who don’t do it naturally, to pose? I quite like to keep some pictures as tight as I can and so folded arms are really useful because they bring the hands and arms higher up the body allowing me to frame the photographs that bit tighter. Nine times out of every ten that you ask someone to fold their arms you end up having a conversation about body language and lots of corporate types have been told by their PR people that folded arms look defensive. If only all things were that simple: folded arms bad/hands in pockets good just doesn’t work in photography. Folded arms in pictures can appear defensive but they can also appear as positives – they can be friendly, strong, loving, confident, feeling cold and so many other things. On the negative side they can appear aggressive, angry, lacking in confidence and forced. If you put “body language folded arms” into your favourite search engine you’ll get a few thousand articles written from a few hundred different perspectives telling you that folded arms can mean a number of different things and that context matters. Like so many things in life, it is a matter of judgement and skill and in the photographic portrait it is definitely a matter of getting the relationship between the folded arms, the composition and the facial expression right.

I can understand why PR people are wary of folded arms because they can go hideously wrong but you should never rule out a fantastic photographic tool just because it can be misused.

What about hands in pockets?

I’ve already mentioned hands in pockets. This, by the very fact that the hands are further away from the face, gives a wider composition and some people look great when relaxing hands in pockets whilst others look awkward. That’s where the skill of the portraitist comes into its own; working out who does what well and getting them to trust your judgement when photographing them that way. The difference between lazy and relaxed isn’t that great and you need to train yourself to distinguish between the two.

Over the last twelve months I have been asked to shoot a lot of pictures where the subject has their hand on their chin/lips/ears/hair (mirroring one of the least appealing ‘selfie’ trends appearing all over social media) or where they are cupping their face with their elbows on a table or the back of a chair. It isn’t something I would naturally ask someone to do but if they naturally do it themselves then I will often work with it and see if it makes the picture. Sometimes it comes off but it mostly looks contrived and, quite frankly, a bit naff. Did I say a bit naff? I meant a lot naff.

What else can you do?

One of the most useful ways to shoot portraits is to do it when the subject is talking to you or to someone else and gets a bit animated. Hands suddenly move away from being a potential problem to be a massive asset. Again you have to be a bit careful about what kind of gesture because we all know that pointing fingers, waving two fingers or forming a fist can be misinterpreted very quickly but, if you are in the business of portraying someone as they really are then their subconscious hand movements are a very useful way of getting there quickly.

Jacqueline Wilson receives up to 400 letters from young readers each week and does her best to answer as many of them personally as she can. © Neil Turner/TSL

Jacqueline Wilson receives up to 400 letters from young readers each week and does her best to answer as many of them personally as she can. © Neil Turner/TSL

Back in the mid 1990s I even shot just people’s hands on several occasions. Lots of people were exploring the same idea and several photographers did it far more assiduously and successfully than me. It is, however a great exercise for two reasons: the first is that it gets you notice that people have character in bits of their body other than their faces and the second is that shooting their hands can help to relax more nervous subjects.

Of course you can get the subject to clasp their hands gently on front of them or behind their backs. Hands on hips works about 2% of the time and almost always requires a smile

You may have noticed that I’ve used words like useful and often and sometimes a lot in this short post. That’s deliberate because there really are very few hard and fast rules in good portraiture. Getting people’s hands into the frame is something that I love to do (not a January 2017 revelation) and portraying people as themselves is a primary goal (probably a January 1987 thought). Great portraits rely on a number of factors working together and getting something that is a lot stronger than the sum of its parts.

My January 2017 goal for the year is to get better at the way hands appear in my portraits. I’m not going to shy away from folded arms, hands on hips or anything else but I’m not going to ask anyone to touch their lips or in any other way pose as if they were a teenager doing a selfie that they’ll regret in six months time.

Want to see more? My portraits portfolio can be seen here.

First impressions of the EOS5D Mark IV wifi
5d4_close_up

The Canon EOS5D Mark IV – the first professional DSLR from Canon with a fully functioning wifi capacity built-in.

When Canon announced that they had added a wifi capability to the new EOS5D Mark IV I was simultaneously surprised, delighted and apprehensive – emotions which have in turn given way to a sense of relief. Wifi was a feature that many photographers had asked manufacturers to implement over a number of years and we had always been told that there were technical reasons why it couldn’t be done and that most buyers simply didn’t want it. The rise in popularity of limited wifi in consumer and ‘prosumer’ models told a different story and Canon did the right thing by including it in this latest release.

The surprise element came because very few of the rumours that preceded the announcement of the Mark IV mentioned wifi at all. A lot of those people awaiting the new camera had resigned themselves to another generation of cameras with bolt-on accessories to handle rapid image transmission.

The delight was that I was looking at finally getting cameras that could not only talk to a smart phone or a computer in the way that the Canon EOS 6D already could but to be able to send pictures using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) which is what the majority my clients want and need without the cumbersome WFT units or the increasingly flaky Eye-Fi cards.

The sense of apprehension was that I was worried that Canon would have done half a job and implemented a solution that didn’t do everything that I wanted and needed it to do.

Having had the camera in my hands for five days now I can finally talk about my sense of relief. It works.

Not only that but it works really well.

Over the last few days I have done some unscientific but real-world testing of the wifi built into the EOS5D Mark IV and compared it to the EOS5D Mark III and EOS7D Mark II both using the WFT-E7 transmitters that have been am almost permanent feature in my working life for the last couple of years. Put simply and in ‘normal’ use the FTP transmissions from the Mark IV are as quick and as reliable as the older cameras with their £600 bolt-on transmitters. Setting up FTP on the Mark IV is in many ways a lot quicker thanks to the excellent touch-screen option on the camera and getting the wireless operating from getting the camera out of the bag is way quicker.

One of my big fears with the new set up – based on various manufacturers telling us that metal bodied cameras might block the signals too much – was that the range of the transmitter would be too short and so I went to a place where there would be a lot of wifi congestion and ‘pollution’ to test it out. Coffee shops in busy shopping centres have loads of wireless traffic at lunchtime – especially when the students roll in and so I went to one with no fewer than twenty-three different wireless signals and I set the cameras to transmit over my own Netgear 4G mifi unit.

With the mifi in my pocket and the camera in my hands, there was no discernible difference in signal or time sent to send images between the Mark IV and the WFT-e7 equipped 7D MkII whereas the 5D Mark III was a little slower as always which I have always chalked up to the slower USB connection to the transmitter.

I tried the same test connecting each camera to my Apple iPhone both using it as a personal hotspot and to transfer pictures to the phone in the direct mode and, again, there was no real difference that I could see.

When I got back home I tried to see what the maximum range was to get a good signal between camera and 4G mifi and here I found a difference. The Mark IV range was completely effective up to about 2.5 metres whereas the 5D Mark III with the WFT-E7 was around 4 metres. The plastic top plate on the EOS6D was supposedly there to allow greater wifi range and in my admittedly un-scientific tests it appears that you do get a little more range.

At this point it might be worth remembering that the Mark IV is fully compatible with the WFT-E7 (as long as you update the firmware in the transmitter) should you need the extra capabilities – which include greater range, more preset FTP channels and the built-in Ethernet. All of that, when added to the WFT-E7 having it’s own LP-E6 battery, make it worth considering having the separate transmitter for those odd occasions when you need them. I already own three of them and so will definitely be keeping one or two for those very eventualities.

Having conducted all of the mobile testing with a three year old iPhone 5S I took delivery of an iPhone 7 part way through the week and the speed with which connections are made and images transferred with the new phone is dramatically better which is worth keeping in mind if your work involves transferring pictures to the phone and/or controlling the camera through Canon’s smartphone app.

Close up of the main menu screen that allows you to choose which wifi function you want.

Close up of the main menu screen that allows you to choose which wifi function you want.

Exactly how you set your system up for rapid transfer of images from the camera over wifi can make quite a bit of difference to how it performs. Most of my quick transmissions are for various corporate and editorial clients to get my pictures onto their social media and web platforms almost as quickly as they can when shooting pictures on their own smart phones. For that they need medium sized JPEGs at best and so I tend to set my cameras up to write the RAW files to the Compact Flash card and medium size/quality JPEGs to the SD card and then transmit only the JPEG with basic IPTC metadata attached.

Whilst most of my usage for the wifi built into this camera will be based around various FTP servers I will be using the direct transfer to smartphone, tablet and computer options a fair bit too. I’ve had a fair bit of experience with Canon’s apps over the last few years and I’ve decided that the best way to use the phone and tablet apps is to set the apps up to display images based on their rating rather than having to scroll through hundreds of images on a phone screen to find the right one. By using the ‘Rate” button on the camera to add a single star to selected pictures I can shortcut the whole searching on the phone process greatly. When I review the pictures on the camera’s LCD screen (and the screen on the Mark IV is beautiful by the way) I can use the rate button to tag them as I go through. Once connected to the phone those tagged images are right there at the top of the page saving me loads of time. I find that I only need one-star or no-star options to make this work really well too.

I discussed the idea of getting images away quickly on a blog post last year https://neilturnerphotographer.co.uk/2015/08/24/getting-pictures-away-quickly/ and having the Mark IV just adds to my choices. It takes the WFT-E7 if I need the extra features and it accepts Eye-Fi cards although I don’t see any need for them any more.

There are already dozens of reviews talking about image quality, video capabilities, auto-focus, speed of use and the new button on the back of the camera and I’m not going to add to those except to say that in another blog post I described the Canon EOS5D Mark III as the best camera that I have ever used for the work that I do. That statement is no longer true. The Canon EOS5D Mark IV has superseded it in every way that I can think of.

32 Months with the MkIII
SHM: The Vitality London 10,000

Lily Partridge of Aldershot Farnham and District crosses the line to win the women’s race. The Vitality London 10,000, Monday 30th May 2016. Photo: Neil Turner/Silverhub for Vitality London 10,000

Whenever you read about a camera the reviewer has usually had it in their hands for a few days and taken a few hundred frames with it. I’ve done it myself with all sorts of kit and I find it interesting that one of my most popular blogs  (a review of the original Elinchrom Ranger Quadra) was written when I had been using the kit for 32 months. As luck would have it I have been using Canon’s EOS5D MkIIIs for 32 months now and as the announcement of it’s widely leaked successor is only a week away I thought that now would be an excellent time to blog about my long-term opinion of these interesting cameras.

By the time my first MkIII arrived I had been shooting for almost five years with its predecessor – the Canon EOS5D MkIIs. I had grown to love the MkII despite its many quirks and faults and I knew them inside out and backwards. I had owned three of them at various times (never fewer than two) and had shot somewhere near half a million frames with them. In some professional circles that would qualify as barely worn in but when you don’t do bursts of three, four and more it takes a while to clock up that many pictures. I was quite excited by the announcement of the MkIII and blogged about it at the time saying that I would reserve judgement until I’d used one.

I need to say this: I have loved the 5D MkIII and almost everything about it pretty much from day one. It wasn’t just a little bit better than the MkII (which is what I had expected) it literally did everything better. From the far less annoying shutter sound (yes, really, the MkII shutter noise bugged me intensely) to the greatly improved layout of controls and from the vastly superior auto-focus to the improved image quality everything about the MkIII was an improvement. To this day, and having worked with files from just about every serious camera on the market, I find the image quality of the Mark 3 wonderful and the CR2s easy to work with in post-production. It may not have the highest pixel count and it may not top any tables designed to excite pixel-peepers but the files are a joy and the image quality displays subtleties and that indefinable je ne sais quoi that makes me smile. A lot.

Please don’t get me wrong, the EOS5D MkIII is not perfect. There are a couple of recurring build quality issues that Canon should have addressed during the product cycle rather than waiting to fix them with a new model. Almost every professional user of the MkIII that I know has had the disc on the mode dial with the various options on it fall off and/or lost the plastic multi-controller on the back of the camera. Neither should have been as easy to lose or as flimsily built as they were and having either replaced wasn’t cheap. Beyond those two niggles, on the odd occasion I put the camera into continuous shooting, I was never impressed by the 3.5 frames per second top speed and the 1/200th of a second flash synch has always been a disappointment. The LCD screens on mine have never felt that accurate and they have always looked very different from one another.

Beyond that I have always found that the camera fits beautifully into my hands and it is a joy to use – especially with smaller and lighter lenses. The MkIII is a versatile camera that fits into the range well and after four years on the market it can still hold its own – selling well and coming up on the used market a lot less often than most of its rivals.

The upcoming MkIV has an interesting list of features. Most of them are evolutionary (USB3, more megapixels and better video) and one or two will need to be explained to me when the announcement is official.

Just as I said when the MkIII appeared I will need to do the mathematics and decide whether buying a couple of these new cameras will be cost-effective for my business because there’s a distinct possibility that the advantages won’t make me any more money. Built in wifi and GPS are a good idea but I have the WFT-E7 which gives you so much more than the built-in wifi on a camera such as the EOS6D – a camera whose GPS has been switched on to see how it works, realised how much it drains the battery and switched off again.

Having used an EOS1DX MkI for a few days I have high hopes for the implementation of the communication settings on the MkIV. We have fed lots of information back to Canon over the last couple of years and I hope that they have listened. I am also looking forward to what they are going to do with their bundled software. EOS Utility is crying out for some easy improvements and I hope that this new camera will be shipped at the same time as na better application to aid setting it up and maintaining it.

We are all different and we all want subtly different things from our gear. I am quite excited about the EOS5D MkIV but whether or not excitement will turn into ownership is a whole other matter.