The year is rapidly drawing to a close and everyone is looking back at 2025 with the familiar mix of joy, regret and thankfulness. We all have high hopes for 2026 and that goes for both our personal and professional lives.
So how has 2025 been for me and my work? Well – a mixture of joy, regret and thankfulness sums it up surprisingly accurately. It has been quieter than the previous three or four years with a little less travel and fewer peaks of excitement but my clients both new and old have presented me with moments that I will treasure and memories that will stay with me for a long time.
The joy of being out there, cameras in hand and doing what I love to do is just as real and just as strong as it ever was. Combine that with the joy of seeing my work used well and widely it’s been a good year.
Whilst doodling around on the internet the other day I was looking at a few reels on Instagram. Now it probably won’t come as much of a surprise that that my Instagram feed is filled up with great photographers and so it will equally make sense that the all-powerful algorithm serves me up photography related content most of the time. One of the reels was from a relatively young and relatively inexperienced photographer proclaiming that he had discovered a new technique. It went on to show a technique that is, to me, as old as the hills. Dragging the shutter to create a deliberate blur.
I was just about to type something that gently and constructively pointed out that this wasn’t anything new and that an old hand like me rarely (if ever) sees anything that’s truly new when I decided to see what other viewers of the reel had commented first. Sure enough, there was a small number of constructive and supportive comments but the vast majority of them were not even remotely constructive and way too many were downright dismissive. I breathed a huge sigh of relief that I hadn’t been that person – the one who sought to boost their own sense of self-importance by squashing the joy and enthusiasm of someone who had discovered a potentially exciting technique that was new to them.
I’ve had laptops since the mid 1990s and I have used each of them until they were no longer capable of doing their job quickly and efficiently. Most of that work has involved editing photographs and the vast majority of the time those edits have been completed away from the office. The title of this post is “The laptop cycle” and I called it that because my needs from a laptop vary over time. Things are changing again and it appears that I am just rotating into a period where I am doing a lot of editing on the road.
For the last couple of years I have either been uploading direct from my cameras and then doing a considered edit when I am back at my desk or doing some very simple and quick edits on my 2021 M1 MacBook Air. I bought it as a back up for a fully loaded 2017 MacBook Pro and to have as a lightweight travel companion. In 2022 I invested in an M1 Mac Studio for the office and the older MacBook Pro (which still works fine) was relegated to being a back up itself. The 2017 machine which felt relatively lightweight when I bought it now feels pretty cumbersome and so I haven’t carried it on a job since early in 2021.
A couple of months ago I wrote about the increasing number of RAMS (risk assessment and method statements) that photographers are having to submit. As is often the case, that prompted a question from someone who’d read the piece asking about a similar matter. This time it was NDAs or non-disclosure agreements. Oh boy! That opened up a can of worms. Some colleagues claiming that they always refuse to sign them, others saying that they often edited them before signing and others, like me, realising that they’ve become a fact of life and barely skimming them before adding their signature.
Before 2008 I genuinely don’t remember ever having had to sign an NDA. I always took it as read that if some confidential information was shared with me, it stayed confidential (I guess that would be unless there was some illegality involved but that never came up). A lot of my work was (and still is) editorial and releases are often embargoed – a system that I have always respected and abided by.
I signed my first NDA in late 2008 and ever since then the number, frequency and length of the documents has grown considerably. My first one was about half a sheet of A4 paper in a reasonably sized font. Some of the more recent ones have been two, three and four pages of tightly packed A+ legalese. Times change and lawyers get to dictate a lot of the changes.
Having just finished three weeks editing other people’s pictures at Wimbledon and a further six days doing the same for the Open Championship golf the topic of workflow and getting pictures to look good, be accurately captioned and delivered efficiently wasn’t too far from my mind when a conversation with another photographer prompted me to write this. In the last month (and in the last eleven or so years that I’ve edited other people’s work) I’ve edited files from all of the professional cameras from Canon, Nikon and Sony. On a less intensive basis I’ve edited pictures shot on Leica, Fujifilm and Hasselblad and probably a few others that I can’t recall right now and so anything I say is based on the notion that a good workflow isn’t all that dependent on what types of files you have.
I’ve said it before and I will, no doubt say it again but having a good workflow is absolutely central to the business of photography. In fact, when I speak to colleagues and friends most will excitedly tell me that their personal workflow is as good as it gets and surprisingly few will openly accept that they might just be able to do it that little bit better with a bit of training and practice. Personally I lean the other way; spending way too much time looking at different software, trying different techniques and generally trying to get my workflow a few percentage points better.
A couple of weeks ago I shot some portraits of The Bishop of Salisbury, Rt Revd Stephen Lake, in the grounds of Salisbury Cathedral. The first few frames were for part of a release to the press along with an extended caption explaining a conference he had hosted that was exploring the relationship between the Church of England and Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. I also shot some of the outdoor activities that went along with the event.
The rest of the images of The Bishop were for stock and I really enjoyed shooting them. He and I had met before, we are almost exactly the same age and grew up just a couple of miles from one another and so it is no surprise that we got on pretty well. As we chatted I shot pictures. What you see above is fifteen of the edited frames including a much needed headshot but as I carried on shooting I got closer and closer to what I really wanted to achieve – which is the frame below.(more…)
I’ve been blogging now for over a quarter of a century. I’m not directly aware that it has brought me much work as a photographer but it has definitely led to some interesting teaching gigs and quite a bit of consultancy too. Most importantly, it has given me an outlet for what I want to say, a great deal of satisfaction and a profile within the industry far higher than I would have ever had without it.
Back in the year 2000 I didn’t know that I was blogging because I had never heard the term. The word ‘blog’ entered my consciousness during a discussion with a good friend of mine who couldn’t understand why I hadn’t monetised my monthly posting of technique and opinion pieces on my website. He pointed out that other people were doing it and asked why I wasn’t? That would have been in, or around, the beginning of 2004. There were a couple of reasons; the first was that I didn’t own the copyright to the images that I was posting and was only able to run the website with the permission of my then employers. The second was that I didn’t want commercial factors to influence what I posted and when I posted it – something that I imagined would take the fun out of it.
The website had evolved from something that I had started using members.aol.com webspace and a very basic web design application that they provided free of charge. That would have been in early 1999 and every month I was uploading between six and ten of the most interesting images that I had shot in the previous twenty-eight days. I learned quite a bit of html coding and moved to some professional web design software, my own domain and some rented web space as dg28.com was born in a very different form than it exists today.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I have raved about the various incarnations of the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra and Quadra ELB 400 flash units that I have owned and used for fifteen or more years. At the end of 2023 I named it as “my favourite piece of old equipment” and in 2013 I wrote that the development of the lithium ion battery for the Ranger Quadra was one of the best things that had ever happened to my kit.
Those things are still true. I still use the gear on an almost daily basis and even a quick outing with some very nice Profoto kit didn’t make me want to switch. I used capital letters for the word BUT in the title of this post because I am really disappointed with Elinchrom.
I have used their gear since I left college 1986 and I have always appreciated their service and the way that they supported old equipment. It hurts to have to call them out on this point but less than seven years after buying my last Quadra ELB 400 pack and battery they no longer sell, service or even support the Lithium Ion batteries that the whole system depends on.
Neil Turner Photographer 