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Paying it forward

I don’t actually remember the first time that I heard the phrase “pay it forward” but I know that it accurately summed-up something that was there in my mind from quite a young age. I had two parents who both loved to explain how to do things and both of them took enormous pleasure in “paying it forward”. Both of my older brothers either consciously or subconsciously echoed our parents attitudes as well. In fact, if you look around, it’s happening all of the time and it is to be appreciated and celebrated.

I can remember watching a film actually called Pay It Forward which came out in 2000 and that, despite it’s rather cheesy nature, it definitely helped to put a name to what I had already been doing for many years.

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An update on my mirrorless journey…

It’s hard to know where to start when talking about the changes that shooting with mirrorless cameras have made. In the absence of anything profound I think that I will start with something that has been said by others but which I need to express very strongly. So much so, I’m going to make it a quote:

“Canon got everything right when they introduced the EF to RF converter”

Why did I feel the need to say that in quite such strong terms? I hate changing systems. Back in the day (1995) when I swapped from Nikon F4S bodies to Canon EOS1Ns, and had to swap all of my lenses as well, it was tough. Nothing was familiar apart from the rolls of film I was slotting into them. Changing everything in one hit meant that I had to get my head around half a dozen different things all at once. This time around, swapping from Canon EF to RF I got to keep my familiar (and much loved) lenses whilst I got used to the new bodies and their wildly unfamiliar viewfinders. Eventually I will swap out all of the lenses too but there really is no hurry. The converters aren’t perfect but, looking back over the last few weeks, they have been such a help in making the transition.

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Mirrorless here I come

It’s surprising how much of the work that we all do could be done a little easier and with a little less stress if our cameras were silent. I have been shooting inside a Cathedral quite a bit over the last couple of weeks and I have been shooting in a conference much of the rest of the time. The combination of that recent experience and the news that next year’s tennis at Wimbledon will be DSLR and shutter sound free have made me decide that it’s time to give the whole mirrorless experience a proper go.

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No ‘perfect pictures’ here
©Neil Turner. Office worker on a lunch break. October 2008

A question for my fellow photographers:

When was the last time you finished a shoot, went through the edit and genuinely thought that you really couldn’t have done better?

My answer is that I cannot remember ever having that thought. I’ve come close and been really happy with what I have done many, many times but I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that ‘complete satisfaction’ hasn’t featured in my work.

I have never taken a perfect picture and I have certainly never made one in post-production – but I’m OK with that.

This question was triggered by listening to an artist being interviewed on a radio programme who said that she had gone through something of a crisis of confidence having finished a piece and in that moment thinking that it was perfect. She talked about coming very quickly to hate the idea that she might never achieve that level of mastery of her craft again and that she may well have reached a professional peak at a relatively young age. That was something which her passion for what she did led her to develop a form of depression.

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Computer speed and power in my real world

When Apple announced their new desktop Mac – the Mac Studio – I watched the keynote address and was very interested in what this new bit of kit had to offer. Starting at £2000.00 including VAT it looks like a veritable speed machine. I have read some reviews and looked at test bench scores which are supposed to give us real world performance data so that we can compare one machine against another. With all of that in mind, it looks really good. But… what do those score mean for me?

In the editor part of my working life I often end up editing 200, 300, 400 or more RAW files from different cameras a day. When I am shooting my own pictures it is rarely that many and, of course, the files will all be from my own cameras and therefore not varied set of RAW formats. The most power hungry work will all be inside Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) and I want to know what time savings this new Mac will actually give me. Having watched several reviewers (mostly high-end video editors) talk about what has frustrated them in their workflow I started thinking about the relatively few times I find myself waiting for things to happen in ACR.

The truth is that there aren’t many things that take time and frustrate me with my ageing 15″ MacBook Pro but here are a few:

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Masking in Adobe Camera RAW
Subject masking in ACR 14.2

Spending a lot of my working life as an editor means that I get very worked up about changes to the software that I use. A couple of months ago I mentioned the fact that masking in Adobe Camera RAW 14 had become simultaneously better and more complicated. I have been asked to talk about what I mean and about why it is better.

In the past you could pick a linear gradient or radial gradient straight from the tool box and apply those relatively simple options to an image really quickly. You could also use a brush to painstakingly paint a mask onto an image in order to carry out local colour, tone or contrast corrections to the masked area. The two most common functions were quick and simple whilst the more complex functions were, well, complex. I grumbled about why you couldn’t have the best of both worlds because the method for selecting the simpler ones had changed from a single mouse-click to three mouse-clicks.

It turns out that in ACR 14.2 you absolutely can.

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A downside of technology
© Photo Neil Turner.

Anyone who knows me and anyone who has read this blog would probably say that I am keen on technology. I would agree – I’m a geek. Despite my love of the whole digital process there’s one thing about the way that we work these days that I am not so keen on.

What’s that then? I hear one or two people asking. Put very simply, I don’t get to meet or even chat with editorial clients any more. I know that the whole COVID-19 pandemic has put a mighty spanner in the works but even accounting for that I was disappointed and a little bit shocked to realise that I have never actually met any of the folks who have commissioned me to shoot editorial work since well before we went into the first lockdown. Some of that can be explained away by my being based a hundred miles from London where a sizeable proportion of them live and work but even accounting for that I find it really sad that I haven’t got to have a coffee with any of them or even shake the odd hand here and there.

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Looking forward to 2022
Derwentwater, Christmas Eve 2021 © Neil Turner

After another year of COVID-19 restrictions and client hesitancy I just wanted to wish everyone a merry Christmas and to wish you all a happy, creative and prosperous new year.

I doubt that it has been easy for any of us so be safe, spend time with family and let’s all make sure that 2022 is better than either 2020 or 2021.