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If you haven’t seen Pixelrights – check it out…

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When friends of yours start up a new business it is natural to wish it well and then forget all about it until you see those friends again. That’s kind of what happened with me and Pixelrights. Shaun Curry, one of the founders is an old mate and when he rang me out of the blue a while ago to explain his new business venture I was happy for him and offered my support as I would with pretty much any of my friends.

A few months later Shaun got back to me and asked to ‘borrow’ a couple of pictures for their development website. Always happy to help I sent him a couple of JPEGs and signed up for email, Facebook and Twitter feeds to remain abreast of their progress. Once more, nothing much happened and then Pixelrights offered to develop the new website for The BPPA and suddenly there I was having an in depth explanation of their ideas complete with a demonstration of what their idea could offer.

Passive supporter becomes active advocate over the course of one afternoon. I love the idea and I really love the fact that these are people doing what they are doing for money AND for the love of what they might achieve. So what is Pixelrights? Here’s a cut and paste from their own concept page:

Working in photography and the visual arts ourselves, we wanted to create something that we would not only use, but also enjoy using. We saw the need for simple, functional yet sophisticated portfolios which would serve photographer’s interests and needs, in an honest manner with no marketing trickery.

Pixelrights provides a secure, simple, classically-presented choice of website designs, backed up with state-of-the-art technology, all for a single price. There are no hidden charges to remove branding, no divisive price plans and no subscription fee traps.

What it actually provides is a portfolio of the simplest form with good image protection and the option to allow carefully controlled and monitored sharing. There are quite a few design options and there will probably be more by the time the current “Beta” phase is completed. I have three folios on my pages and I have a range of hidden galleries which are invite only so that clients can go and look at images that I have uploaded for them to Dropbox making use of a cool and simple interface. The whole point of a beta phase is to gather opinions of users and make things even better and that’s exactly what is happening.

I’d strongly recommend that you go and check out Pixelrights for yourself and the best way to get there is via my members page. Make sure that you look at the features and the pricing because this is a good idea from good people with an awful lot of backing from working photographers.

Performing the ritual of “The Selfie”

For as long as I can remember I have shot pictures of my wife and I on holiday with a compact camera at arm’s length. I have examples in the family album dating back to 1984 and, whilst I’m not claiming to have invented “The Selfie”, it really isn’t anything new in our house. We started doing those pictures just because there was never anyone else around to take the picture for us and so it was very much a second best picture. Slowly and over the many holidays that we have enjoyed together it became something of a tradition to do at least one of those arm’s length couple pictures but we always liked to get a passer-by to do the picture if we could. It is a phenomenon that I am fascinated by and I often shoot pictures of people as they perform the Ritual of the Selfie.

Olympic and Commonwealth Gold medallist Laura Trott posing with riders on The Mall in a break between media interviews during the Freecycle event - part of Prudential RideLondon. 9th August 2014.

Olympic and Commonwealth Gold medallist Laura Trott posing with riders on The Mall in a break between media interviews during the Prudential RideLondon Freecycle event. ©Neil Turner, 9th August 2014.

I was prompted to compose this blog post because I suddenly realised why it works so well. One of the media team working with Prudential RideLondon had offered to take the picture and the three young women dutifully posed but their faces didn’t come alive until they rescued the phone and performed the ritual of the selfie. There seems to be a confidence and a joy in taking your own picture of yourself and your friends or, in this case, you, your friend and an Olympic and Commonwealth champion. Is it because these days that can see themselves in the screen and only shoot when they are happy with what they see? I believe that there’s an element of that in it but the sense of self-reliance is just as important as far as I can see. There is a joy in The Selfie that is missing from a perfectly well taken group photo. Time after time we all saw people enjoying taking self portraits during the event and that’s the case almost everywhere almost every day.

Where I depart from the celebration of The Selfie is where media outlets and PR companies encourage people to do it and post them as part of marketing campaigns. For me the innocence and joy of the ritual gets lost when it is prompted like that. Where I also have an worries about it is when people do it dozens or even hundreds of times a day. I had a link request on EyeEm the other day from a guy who have over 6,000 images on his account and, from what I could see, they were all of himself.

I don’t object to The Selfie at all. In fact I indulge in the ritual myself from time to time. All I’d ask is that marketing people without another great idea stop trying to make something from them that isn’t really there. Photography is about a lot of things and fun is right up there as one of the most important.

The one "selfie" that I do like of mine - under water at the beach in Bournemouth in the summer of 2013. ©Neil Turner.

The one “selfie” that I do like of mine – under water at the beach in Bournemouth in the summer of 2013. ©Neil Turner.

Image rescue software

sandsk_rescue_proI just thought that I’d post a very quick note about the free one year licenses that I got with two new Sandisk compact flash cards that I bought today. As someone who relies on their cards for a living it’s great practice to replace and update your cards so every few months I buy a couple of new ones.

Since I went freelance and got to start making my own purchasing decisions almost six years ago I’ve been buying ever larger and ever faster Sandisks. I don’t always buy the fastest or biggest but they tend to be faster and/or bigger than the last batch. Anyway, you get the idea.

This time it was a couple of 16 gigabyte 120 mbps CF cards that work nicely with the Canon EOS5D MkIII cameras each of which came with a one year license for the Rescue Pro Deluxe software. I was prompted to get a couple of new cards because my last one year license for the software expired a week or so ago. It struck me that this is quite a good way for Sandisk to keep me loyal and for me to keep up to date with the software. Every twelve months I need to buy at least one new card and by doing so I keep the software running. By buying two new cards, I now have two computers with valid licenses!

Everyone is a winner.

The joke here is that I haven’t ever had a Sandisk card go wrong on me. I have rescued a card belonging to a colleague (Transcend Card) and I have had some fun ‘rescuing’ a few very old and very small retired cards of my own.  Earlier today an ancient Lexar 512 Mb card threw up some images shot on a Canon EOS1D in 2003 and some more shot on a 1D MkII in 2005. A 2GB Sandisk card went through the process a few minutes later and that had some personal stuff from 2008 along with a couple of jobs from the same year. If I can find the right card reader in the loft, I also have a PCMCIA card dating from 1998!

This could become addictive…

One that didn’t make the folio
©Neil Turner/TSL. June 2008, Hertfordshire.

©Neil Turner/TSL. June 2008, Hertfordshire.

When I was putting a massive “long-list” of photographs that I was considering putting into one of the galleries on my portfolio website I looked at this picture and couldn’t make my mind up one way or the other. I was aware that I already had a lot of images from schools – which isn’t surprising when you consider that I have worked in over 3,500 of them in 15 different countries – and that it didn’t add anything to the mix.

I like this picture a lot because it is simple, demonstrates the use of good composition and shallow depth of field as well as reminding me of the kind of work that still makes me want to get out of bed in the morning and go and shoot pictures. These days most of my school based work is shooting for their prospectuses and websites with the odd news story thrown in from time to time but this remains the kind of picture that has a lot of uses and draws the most comment from those who are commissioning the work.

The truth is that almost anyone could take an acceptable picture of primary school children on a scavenger hunt in an enclosed copse. I hope that it also proves that it takes a lot more to produce as good as this on a miserable and rainy day early in the morning when the light is awful and the gear is getting wet. I have kept a few photographs that didn’t make it to one side and I intend to publish a few of them here on the blog with a bit of the background to why I like them along with a bit of the story.

 

Techie Stuff: Canon EOS1D MkII with a 16-35mm f2.8L lens at 16mm. Canon CR2 RAW file 640 ISO, 1/90th of a second at f2.8 on daylight white balance and converted using Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop. At the time it would have been ACR in Photoshop CS3 but the file was re-worked using ACR in Photoshop CC.

Portfolio features now updated
©Neil Turner/TSL. April 2005. Kabalega, Uganda.

©Neil Turner/TSL. April 2005. Kabalega, Uganda.

The funny thing about updating the features section on my portfolio website is that I have a section called “portraits” and another section that should be called “not portraits”. That isn’t a  particularly elegant way to categorise the thirty plus images featured in that particular gallery but I have yet to find a work that sums it up. Features is as close as I seem to be able to get.

Anyway, it’s a big relief to have finished the refresh and the last of the design updates for now. When I was looking through the huge folder of images that were under consideration I was struck by the picture above of a teenaged Ugandan boy who was part of a group helped to think about issues that were affecting their lives by an art teacher who had visited the United Kingdom where he had picked up this technique. They were an interesting set of images of a fascinating project and I’m really glad to have been able to include this picture in the new folio – even if the picture was shot nearly nine years ago.

The new “features gallery” is now on show at www.dg28.com/folio/features/ and I hope that you have some time to have a look.

How long does gear last?

When I teach new photographers the business studies element of what it is to be a working photographer I go through a whole exercise which adds up the cost of the gear and then divides that cost by the number of working days that it might be expected to last before you need to replace it. My formula was mentioned in a previous post and I try to be realistic about the life span of the principle kit that we need. Camera bodies, for example, last somewhere between two and three years on average whereas lenses last four, five or even six years. It’s a simple idea and when you add it all up you come out with a figure that represents the amount of money it costs to be a photographer based on working a fixed number of days per year. For most photographers that’s around the £45 – £60 mark.

©Neil Turner. March 2014. My Elinca branded lighting stand that is at least 21 years old

©Neil Turner. March 2014. My Elinca branded lighting stand that is at least 21 years old

Some gear, such as tripods and equipment bags last a lot longer and there’s good evidence to say that a Pelican case is for life as long as it doesn’t get stolen. I was looking at some kit this morning and making sure that I had everything that I needed for a two-day job over the weekend when one of my lighting stands came apart. That got me thinking about how much this stand had cost me on a ‘per day’ basis since I bought it somewhere between 1990 and 1993. I won’t go into how I can narrow the dates down but let us say that it is at least 21 years old. At today’s prices this stand would probably cost about £70.00 (but probably cost me a lot less) and by dividing that by 21 you can see that it has cost me £3.33 a year. That’s a meagre £0.26 a month or, if I work 150 days a year that’s £0.02 per working day.

I have used lighting stands every single working day since then and, whilst it hasn’t always been this one, my preference for a specific brand seems to be justified by the way that they take a battering. That brand is Manfrotto – even though this one is labelled “Elinca SA” it is clearly a version of an older Manfrotto 052 model (not the same as the current 052 or 1052) because it is almost identical to another stand that I have which is labelled “Manfrotto 052”. I also have a pair of identical lighter-weight stands where one is branded Manfrotto and the other is branded Lastolite and a pair of tiny stands where one is Manfrotto and the other is Bogen. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that one manufacturer was/is making them and that they were/are being sold under many labels.

Going back to the stand itself, when I say “fell apart” what I mean is that this stand came apart at one of the connections. When I had a good look it was obvious that it had lost a bolt and nut that tightened around the metal tubing keeping it in place. Three minutes later, I’d found a suitable replacement amongst the bits and pieces in my garage and the stand was fixed and ready for a lot of action over the next weekend. So that’s a lighting stand of extreme professional quality that costs me two pennies a day – what a bargain! Of course I have forgotten to add the maintenance costs – £0.12 for the bolt that I fitted today plus my labour at a maximum of ten minutes.

For the record, I have three Manfrotto tripods (all with Manfrotto heads), three Manfrotto monopods and a case full of their accessories (Super-clamps, suction clamp, low-level stand, quick release adapters, a boom and so on). I reckon that I have about £1,000.00 worth of Manfrotto gear in total – most of which is over ten years old and some of which is over twenty years old.

Manfrotto haven’t paid me for this blog post, nor have I spoken to anyone from the company or any of their distributors or retailers. I just think that their kit is pretty good value for money. Of course, if they want to offer me a retrospective bribe…

My Fujifilm X20 – the final word?

It’s amazing how often a casual conversation or a quick exchange on a Facebook group can spark a train of thought. Earlier today a comment by a friend and fellow photographer about how a photo sharing site had made him look around him and start taking pictures for the love of it again. I agreed whole-heartedly and began to think about uploading a few more pictures here. That moved my train of thought onto the various reviews and updates that I’ve written on this blog and elsewhere about the Fujifilm X20 that has been my almost constant companion for the last 11 months. So what I decided to do was to say a few words to summarise my experiences with this camera and add some pictures shot in the last couple of weeks.

©Neil Turner, March 2014. The photographer's shadow forms part of the scene as an elderly couple walk along South Bank of the River Thames in London.

©Neil Turner, March 2014. The photographer’s shadow forms part of the scene as an elderly couple walk along South Bank of the River Thames in London.

In general, my opinions about this camera have barely changed since I posted the first update back in mid April 2013. Given the product cycle that Fujifilm seems to gallop through the X20 is probably about to be superseded anyway but I thought that I’d offer some advice to make this camera (that I still like very much) better if they want to bring out an X30.

  • The battery life has to improve. Despite doing everything possible to limit power drain I get through two batteries a day when shooting with ordinary SD cards and up to four batteries a day when I’m using one of my Eye-Fi cards. This makes a cool and convenient camera a lot less convenient and pushes up the cost of ownership – even if you go for third party spare batteries.
  • Start-up delay. About once in every third time I switch the camera on it takes three or four seconds to adjust and get the exposure correct. The first picture is often three or more stops over-exposed.
  • Autofocus at the telephoto end of the range. My camera sometimes refuses to auto focus when the lens is zoomed all the way to the 112mm equivalent end of its range.
  • The review time options for looking at images you have just shot are too restrictive. There are no options between 1.5 seconds and zoom (unlimited).
  • The built-in flash isn’t compatible with the lens hood – you get shadows and so to use that function you need to remove the hood.
  • The video isn’t great – but I didn’t buy this camera to shoot video.

On top of all of that it would be great if the focal range went from 24-120, the camera had two SD slots and if there were lens correction options for Adobe Camera RAW because at the 28mm end there is the slightest barrel distortion.

This is a great camera and I love using it. I am seriously tempted by the X100S too. Having borrowed one for an extended period, I would very much like to own one. Fujifilm have done a great job with their X-series cameras and they should be very proud of the effect that their cameras have had on a lot of very old and very picky professionals (like me) who all grin like idiots when using the kit. So now, without further ado, here are a few more recent X20 images for you…

So there you go Fujifilm… bring on the X30…

The term photographer is no longer enough

Just under two years ago I wrote about the definition of the word ‘photographer’ and about how everyone is one these days. I have become more and more interested in the definition and I have come up with the following question:

Can you use the word ‘photographer’ in isolation any more?

What I’m asking there is whether there is anyone out there whose work, hobby or pastime is sufficiently vague that you can just say photographer? I’m probably not the best example but I have my permission to talk about me so here goes; I use a combination of editorial, corporate, press, documentary, portrait, features, PR and commercial in front of the word photographer depending on what I’m shooting, who I’m talking to and where I am. I also use photojournalist from time to time but never ‘just’ photographer without qualifying it.

This got me thinking a bit further. When I teach photography I often compare it to driving. I talk about when you first got behind the wheel of a car and had to think hard about which pedal was which and where the gears were and how some of this was already there because we had been passengers for the preceding 17 years of our lives and we had probably driven go-karts and played computer driving games. The same goes for becoming a photographer. Handling the camera takes a lot of thought at first but it becomes second nature after a while and 99% of us had already been in pictures, used a simple point and shoot as well as doing drawings and getting the basics of composition.

This lead to the thought about the similarities between the word photographer and the word driver. Rarely do you hear ‘driver’ without something more specific in front of it – bus driver, lorry driver, train driver or racing driver amongst many others. I have to wonder whether this is just a natural human need for more information or a desire to stick people and what they do into convenient boxes. I am certain that there are a lot of photographers out there who would rail against being pegged as one kind of photographer and I’m equally certain that there are probably an equal number who would delight in being thought of as completely specialised. Of course there is a group in the middle like me whose descriptor changes on a daily or even hourly basis.

I find it quite amusing when I come across photographers who latch on to genres of photography that either make no sense or that are deliberately elitist or confusing to anyone other than the ‘in-crowd’. I have mentioned my dislike of ‘wedding photojournalism’ before. It is perfectly descriptive but it makes no sense. Wedding photographers are hired by the family or the couple getting married and, no matter what style they shoot in, they are not in any real way acting as journalists using photographs. What they are is wedding photographers using a photojournalistic style. It’s too late to reign it back though. Language is a dynamic and moveable thing and the word photojournalism has already become something different in this context.

When I was first thinking about how I was going to write this post I had just shot a whole series of photographs at a large secondary school where there was a rule that the academic staff were “teachers first and subject specialists second” which meant that nobody working there was a Geography Teacher or a History Teacher or even an English Teacher but were instead a Teacher of Geography or a Teacher of History or a Teacher of English. I spent a while trying to see if I could make that idea work for photography – the idea that we were photographers first and specialists second. Who would prefer to be called a “Photographer of Fashion” or a “Photographer of Sports”? Those work but “Photographer of Portraits” and “Photographer of Corporate (stuff)” don’t really do it for me.

At a dinner party recently I was asked by someone that I’d never met before the obvious “so what do you do?” question. I answered “Editorial & Corporate Photographer” and got a blank look back. The gentleman was an intelligent chap and a local government official but he had to ask me to dissect what an editorial and corporate photographer was. By the end of the conversation I realised that it would have been easier to say “self-employed photographer” and give him the option of digging deeper – so that’s my new tactic at dinner parties.

That incident, the thoughts about teachers and drivers and my general confusion about explaining who I am and what I do have left me pretty much back at the start of this mildly philosophical blog: Each and every time you need to define yourself as a photographer you need to select the appropriate descriptors and adjectives for that particular context. There doesn’t appear to be a solution to this problem that I can see.

I need to go and prepare for tomorrow’s session where, if I were to use my driving analogy, I’m going to be the driving instructor. I suspect that the comparison between photography and driving has many miles to run…