UK

The constant software update dilemma

Back in the day we used to occasionally try out new chemicals and different printing papers. We used to experiment with new film stock when it hit the market and, on the whole, it was a welcome distraction from the day-to-day work. In the digital era we have to get new cameras a bit more often and we need to keep our IT current but the biggest battle and the largest dilemma is software. Because I teach a bit and because I am a complete anorak** I always have a look at new software packages as they become available.

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Keeping up to date is not cheap. Upgrades are often necessary – especially when none of the software companies make their RAW converters backwards compatible when new cameras and new lenses hit the market. The move by Adobe towards the monthly or annual subscription model is very interesting and brings into very sharp focus the real cost of having the latest software. I have written before about making the business case for buying new gear and the same formula should apply to upgrading software. Every time I talk or write about these kinds of financial decisions, the same piece of music pops into my head… Bruce Springsteen’s song “Cautious Man” where there is a line that says:

“When something caught his eye he’d measure his need
And then very carefully he’d proceed”

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This week, to misquote the wonderful Fast Show, “I are mostly been playing with Lightroom”. To be more precise I have been looking at the new Lightroom 5 beta that Adobe have made available. This comes against a background of having experimented with pretty much every version of Lightroom since it hit the shops back in 2007 and found that I wasn’t entirely sold on the application despite seeing why others love it so much. And that is a huge part of the software conundrum – there are lots of options that achieve pretty much the same end result but get there via very different routes. If, like me, you shoot RAW pictures you need to have a way of editing, captioning, renaming, converting, saving, delivering and archiving your work. This can be achieved using a single application or you can use three , four or five different ones – it really doesn’t matter as long as your workflow is repeatable, flexible, efficient and accurate.

I will write a lot more about Lightroom 5 when I have really used it properly but I have to say that it seems a lot quicker than the previous version and the interface for Adobe RAW Converter is even closer to to the version that I use in Photoshop CS6 than ever – making using Lightroom a lot easier for me. I have also realised that Adobe’s efforts to create a programme for photographers to edit their work in are bearing fruit. The time has definitely arrived when I could easily do without Photoshop altogether and run pretty much everything from Lightroom. Of course that doesn’t mean that I want to… yet.

Fujifilm X20 – the first update

So here is what I’ve decided to do about writing an X20 review: it’s actually going to be a series of short (ish) updates as, and when, I have got something new to say about it.

Typical UK road sign: the weight is given in metric units whilst the distance is in imperial. Are we European or aren't we? ©Neil Turner, April 2013

Typical UK road sign: the weight is given in metric units whilst the distance is in imperial. Are we European or aren’t we? ©Neil Turner, April 2013

I have been shooting with the new camera as much as I can and in as many different situations as I can. I’ve even used it as a third camera on a live commission. Most of the time I have been using the Fuji RAW mode so that I can get the most out of the files and so that I can compare the different ways that you can choose to work with the images. Most people prefer not to have to read long and drawn out musings when they look at reviews – they just want to cut to the chase and so here are a few likes and dislikes in the form of bullet points:

LIKES

  • The colours – straight out of the camera you have clean, realistic and accurate colours. This shouldn’t be a surprise from the company that brought you Fujichrome all of those years ago.
  • Smooth tonal range – at low ISOs the files have a wonderfully smooth tone
  • Handling – the X20 feels good in my hands and it is very easy to hand hold down to some pretty slow shutter speeds.
  • The manual zoom – it is a model of how other manufacturers should be building cameras – enough said.
  • Buttons and dials – related directly to handling but I felt that the way that Fuji have kept the number of buttons down whilst giving you a lot of freedom to customise deserves credit.
  • The optical viewfinder –  it works really well and the addition of shooting information in the viewfinder is a big bonus.
  • Auto Focus – it is good for a compact and tracks moving subjects rather well.

DISLIKES

  • The battery life is not good when shooting with the LCD screen on. It’s a good job that after market NP-50s are so cheap.
  • The Fuji RAW format (.RAF) takes a lot of computing power and a lot of getting used to.
  • Low light performance – I was expecting this camera to be a couple of stops behind a DSLR but I would estimate that it is at least fours stops worse than a Canon EOS5D MkII
  • Video – it is just not that good or easy to use… and don’t get me started on playback!
  • Battery clip – if the small clip that holds the battery in place lasts as long as I tend to keep my compacts I will be surprised.
  • Buil-in flash – it is as weak as consumer models and you have to remove the lens hood if you don’t want horrible shadows across your pictures when shooting flash.
  • Auto white balance – it isn’t that bad actually, except under mixed lighting when it is a bit unreliable.

I like this camera… a lot. That having been said, I am genuinely disappointed with the files at anything over 640 ISO and there is a build quality question mark on the battery clip – especially as you are going to be swapping the battery out for charging with great regularity. If I needed to, I could shoot some editorial assignments with the X20 and that isn’t something you could say about many compacts. More importantly, I would quite enjoy doing so and that isn’t something you could say about any other compact that I’ve used. Professional photographers talk about their “walk about” cameras and the X20 is certainly my choice for that task. It isn’t the “best” at anything but it does represent a good set of compromises and that, at the end of the day, is what you want from a small camera.

As I said in the opening paragraph, this will be a series of updates rather than a single “this is my opinion” review. At the recommended selling price the Fujifilm X20 is a little expensive but the price is coming down on a weekly basis and once it dips under £400 it will become a well-priced piece of kit.

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New toy in the house… a Fujifilm X20

If you get a few professional photographers together there are a few topics of conversation that you are almost guaranteed to experience. One of those is compact digital cameras – the cameras that they carry around ‘just in case’ and take out when they are off duty. I am certainly no exception and it is always an exciting day when a new camera appears on my desk either on test or (in this case) that I have spent my hard earned pennies on.

Fujifilm X20

Fujifilm X20

I am a very fortunate guy because I get to test, review and play with all sorts of new equipment but it takes something quite special for me to put my hand in my pocket and commit to buying anything. I loved the Fujifilm X10 and I have owned and used a vast array of Canon G series digital compacts but the new X20 seemed to tick all of the boxes. I was never that keen on the way that Adobe Camera RAW (or any other RAW converter for that matter) handled the X10 files and so I held off buying the X20 until Adobe released a version of their RAW converter for Photoshop CS6 that handled the Fujifilm RAW format properly.

I will write more and post lots of pictures when I have truly had time to get to grips with this new camera. So far I have been through the menus, tested a few RAW files with the new Adobe converter as well as the SilkyPix application that comes with the camera. It has only been a few hours but I am really loving the feel of my new toy. I guess that the big change from the X10 is the viewfinder information which has transformed a good idea into a really useable tool.

Another interesting feature is that even if you select the 3:2 aspect ratio in the camera menu, the whole area of the chip is still there when you import the RAW file and so you can easily recompose the frame if you made that tiny error!

Such a geek! More to come soon…

Lighting gels… the best in VFM?

Almost all photographers spend money on accessories, gizmos, gadgets and photo-related odds and sods. Sometimes we waste our money but I wanted to put in a brief plug for the things that constantly amaze me by the amount of “bang for the buck” I get from them. I’m talking about lighting gels. They cost a few pounds each and they last for years if you look after them even reasonably well.

Screen grab from Swatch App

Screen grab from Swatch App

The reason that I am writing this today is that last week I was shooting a job and was slightly embarrassed that the pieces of gel in my lighting kit were looking a bit tatty. I realised that some of them were bought as shared sheets (ie I only had half of a 52 x 61 cm sheet of each) when I was at college in the mid 1980s. I might have added a few more colours and strengths since then but even the newest gel in my bag is five years old. The beauty is that you don’t need to look after them that well really – even a scrunched and screwed up gel is still the same colour and will work. Of course they don’t like extreme heat and they aren’t partial to liquid damage either but at under the boiling point of water and kept dry they are very durable.

When I decided that I needed some new gels I phoned The Flash Centre and they arranged for Rosco to send me some. I have been playing with the iPhone Swatch app for about eighteen months now and it made ordering the new gels rather easy. They arrived rapidly in a strong cardboard tube and all I had to do was cut them down into the right sized pieces to fit into a pocket in my Think Tank rolling case.

This time around I ordered various grades of CTS – that’s Colour Temperature Straw, the gel that changes the light coming out of my flash units to varying degrees of Tungsten right up to the Full CTS which does a very good job of making the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra flash tube into a Tungsten light that very closely matches the Tungsten setting on a Canon EOS DSLR. I also got some ND (Neutral Density) gels and a sheet of a diffuser called ‘tough spun’. I didn’t need to get any effects gels – the purple, orange, red, blue and green gels that I have in the case are fine even if they are old enough to buy alcohol by now.

Comparing the cost of this big batch of new gels to some of the money that I have literally thrown away on rubbish gizmos over the last 30 years I feel very smug. I know that after one single use I will have justified the (tiny) expense and that after the 50th use it will get embarrassing how smug I feel about the VFM (value for money) that you get from quality lighting gels.

Philippa Gregory – the contact sheet
© Neil Turner/TSL. Philippa Gregory, October 2004

© Neil Turner/TSL. Philippa Gregory, October 2004

I haven’t done one of these contact sheets for a long time and I thought that this set was an interesting example. I submitted this set of sixteen pictures and they are all landscape in orientation. That’s because the slot they were shot for was across two pages and always a squarish landscape image. As I said in the previous post, the whole thing was done in ten minutes on a dull Autumn (fall) day in Hyde Park. That time included setting up and breaking down the Lumedyne light and chatting to the subject. Note that she is clutching her novel in the opening frame. I find that it’s always a good idea to do that if their publicist insists so that you can then go on to get the pictures that will actually get used.

Saving an author’s life

This is not a claim to any act of great heroism, it’s not even a particularly accurate heading but I’ve been wanting to tell more ‘stories behind the pictures’ for quite a while and I’ve decided to give them all pretty eye-catching headlines. This portrait of the author Philippa Gregory has a story behind it that I have enjoyed telling many times over the years since I took it in 2004.

©Neil Turner/TSL. Philippa Gergory, October 2004.

©Neil Turner/TSL. Philippa Gergory, October 2004.

I was shooting a lot of portraits of authors and academics at the time and I was given the job of meeting Philippa Gregory who had just written “The Other Boleyn Girl” and shooting her portrait to accompany an  interview in one of the magazines that I worked for. No problem, run of the mill? Well… yes and no. The location that I was given was rapidly becoming an issue.

Let me explain: in the three or four years leading up to this particular job I had been sent to shoot three portraits of authors at a particular hotel in central London favoured by one or two publishers as a place for them to stay if they needed a hotel or as a great place to hire a private room for interviews and photography when they were on the publicity trail promoting new books. Once again, pretty run of the mill stuff. Except. Except the three previous subjects that I had shot at this particular venue had all died within a few months of having their picture taken by me. I’m not superstitious. I live at No13 and I couldn’t care less about black cats crossing my path. I have a healthy respect for ladders and I try to avoid blindly walking under them – that’s a mixture of common sense and the fact that my Father once dropped some turpentine on me when he was painting our house when I was about six or seven years old. Superstitious I am not but I did have a 100% record of people that I photographed at this hotel being dead pretty shortly after having their picture taken.

This presented me with a few issues.

  1. I didn’t know how well I would be able to put the idea of another ex-author on my hands when shooting if I decided to ignore what was rapidly becoming a curse.
  2. If I wanted to go elsewhere, how was I going to explain that idea in mid-October to the author and her publicist?
  3. Where else could I go and how far should I be away from the hotel to avoid worrying?
  4. What would the reporter who was doing the interview think?

Driving to the location I decided to try my best to get the subject away from the hotel. Hyde Park was only a couple of hundred yards away and  it shouldn’t be too tough to get her to cross four lanes of fast moving traffic in heels just to have her picture taken under the trees. Well, I arrived nice and early and I spoke to the publicist about atmosphere and about getting a picture that nobody else was going to get. I laid on what little charm I have and we agreed that a short walk (using the underpass rather than running across the road) was going to be OK. I got in before the interview, Philippa Gregory seemed happy to get some fresh air and we had ten productive minutes under some trees shooting a pleasant set of portraits. I even delivered her safely back to the hotel-of-doom in time for the interviewer to do her bit.

Now I’m not claiming to have actually saved the author’s life as such. I don’t even believe in curses or even in extended coincidence and the real truth is that all three of the authors that died were in their late 80s and 90s when I took their pictures. I was telling this story to an author’s agent the other day and she asked me what I would do if I was sent back to the same hotel to photograph an elderly author who was, for argument’s sake, wheelchair bound and it was a day when it was bitterly cold? Tough question…

For those amongst you who always want to know about gear and settings:

  • Canon EOS1D MkII with a 70-200 f2.8L IS lens at 145mm 
  • 1/22nd of a second at f5.6 on 100 ISO
  • Lumedyne Signature Series flash kit with 32″x24″ Chimera Softbox

Elinchrom Ranger Quadra Update

What do you call it when something that was already very good gets quite a lot better? Well I guess that would be an upgrade. That’s exactly what happened yesterday when I changed to the new Lithium Ion batteries on my Elinchrom Ranger Quadra kit.

New lithium ion on the left and the old lead gel on the right.

New lithium ion on the left and the old lead gel on the right.

From the picture above, you can see that there is an appreciable size difference – which is always handy but there’s no way that I would have swapped them out just because of that – after all, they weren’t exactly huge to start with. There are four real reasons that I swapped:

  1. My old batteries were over four years old and had stopped holding a full charge – especially in the cold weather
  2. Elinchrom claim a higher capacity of up to 320 full-power flashes per charge for the new battery compared to only 150 for the old ones
  3. Faster recycle times. I’m going to have to believe Elinchrom and my own gut feeling here because you cannot compare brand new batteries to four year old ones in any meaningful way but at full power the recycle time appears to have halved to just over 1.5 seconds
  4. They weigh a lot less – 892 grammes less each. The new battery is 784 grammes compared to the old one which was 1,676 grammes. With two batteries in my kit I have saved a massive 1,792 grammes

Less weight, even in a rolling case, has got be a good thing 99% of the time and I am really looking forward to having to carry less. Of course I have always loved using the pack and battery to weight the base of the lighting stand down when working outdoors. I might have to find a few rocks and bricks lying around to supplement the pack more often that I used to but that’s fine by me.

I’ve only managed to shoot two small jobs with them so far and the speed of the recycling is great – even with my four year old Ranger Quadra pack and S heads. Some portraits yesterday afternoon shot indoors and on a lower power setting had the kit recycling in a fraction of a second which made the job go very smoothly indeed.

I have yet to try out the new Quadra Hybrid pack which promises all sorts of extras that I don’t think that I need. Elinchrom offer an upgrade to packs as old as mine to get the brighter display but my purchasing decisions these days are made on a perceived need rather than on wanting the shiniest and newest kit.

I’ve blogged about this Elinchrom kit before. The first time was in May 2009 when I’d only had the kit a short while. 32 months later I blogged again and, in what has become my most popular posting ever, I gave my considered review of the kit. One of the first comments on that posting alerted me to the new batteries being on their way. It’s taken me twelve months to get around to getting the new batteries and having the small modifications done to the S heads and I’m a happy man.

In the “32 months on” review I mentioned a few other things that I’d like to have seen produced to go with this kit. In the last six months I have become less and less pleased with the Skyport remote system that comes with the Ranger Quadra. The original triggers were prone to falling out of the hot shoe and the controls on the mark two version are tough to see in low light. I know that the whole raison d’être of this system is to be small and lightweight but they went too far with the Skyport transmitter – so much so that I’ve gone back to using Pocket Wizard Plus III transceivers a lot of the time at the expense of being able to remotely control the power.

So, Elinchrom – I hope that some senior managers are reading this… if you really want to make my happiness complete, can you please produce a transmitter that works with the EL Skyport receiver built into my Quadra pack that takes AA batteries, is about the size and weight of the Pocket Wizard Plus III unit with a digital display that has all of the functionality of the small Skyport transmitter but that is easy to use in subdued light, doesn’t require a tough-to-find button battery and that stays in the hot shoe properly. Pretty please?

People in the news bringing back memories
©Neil Turner/TSL. Hilary Mantel, January 2007.

©Neil Turner/TSL. Hilary Mantel, January 2007.

I seem to have a very strong memory for where, when and why I photographed people in the past. When names come up in the news I often think “ah yeah I shot them at such and such a place”. Hilary Mantel, double Booker Prize winning author has been in the news a lot this week. She gave a lecture where she commented on the Duchess of Cambridge and in comparing her to the late Princess Diana (the Mother-in-Law she never knew) called her “precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture.” The lecture was long and talked of many things but the reactions against Hilary Mantel’s views were both harsh and often mistaken.

This made me wonder if my view of the situation and the criticism is in any way tainted by having met her, by having admired her books and by actually listening to what she said when I watched the extended highlights of the lecture on YouTube. Of course I cannot really be sure but my memory of meeting Ms Mantel is pretty strong. I can remember her apartment and I can remember her hospitality. I can remember her reluctance to have her picture taken and having spent a lot of time chatting before ever getting a camera out of its bag. I can even remember getting to the location with a lot of time to spare and I can even remember the chat that I had with a chap walking his dog along the street where I parked up and waited in the chilly January air.

Without having much to say, I thought that I’d share my favourite frame from the job. It was shot in colour like the rest of the set but I felt the need to convert it to black and white and submitted two versions to the Picture Editor. I wasn’t surprised when they ran it in colour but I have a very strong memory of being mightily disappointed.

For the many techies who read my blog, it was shot on a Canon EOS1D MkII with a Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS lens at 1/250th of a second at f4.5 on 100 ISO. It was lit with a Lumedyne flash with a shoot-through translucent white umbrella deliberately set up to lose as much of the ambient light as possible.