Joe McNally

Nov 19

At DLWS, Everything’s Jake!

In Seminars & Workshops at 6:37pm

Just finished another year with my dear friends and family, Moose and Sharon Peterson, Laurie Excell, Kevin Dobler, new addition Drew Gurian, and of course, the chip off the old Moose, Jake Peterson, seen above. Out near Bozeman, Montana, they’ve got this city that is basically the archeology of rural Montana (is it redundant to say “rural Montana?”). This repository of Montana history is called Nevada City. Anybody else think that’s odd?

At any rate, they’ve got old houses, jail cells, water towers, general stores, barber shops, and of course, my favorite, old trains. They’ve even got a historically significant, two story outhouse, which I imagine created some interesting problems if both floors were active at once. Every time I see an outhouse and have a camera in my hands, I think of Rich Clarkson’s story about being on site at some location and the corporate staff photog came over to meet him. He was trying to impress Rich and let him know he was available for freelance work, which is understandable, since Rich is a legendary shooter and editor who shaped talents such as Chris Johns, Jim Richardson, and Brian Lanker back in his days as the DOP of the Topeka Capital Journal.

Rich is a pretty easy going sort once you get to know him, but he presents a somewhat flinty, no nonsense editor exterior, so the meet probably had this poor shooter nervous cause he introduced himself as being “the in house photographer, but I do outhouse work.” Ouch.

I stared for a while at this railyard jalopy. It didn’t move.

But I had a thought, always dangerous. Wonder it would look like if the sun were setting off to camera right? With clouds like this, you can conjure the direction of late light, so I dialed in a little angle of incidence, angle of reflection sunset type of deal.

Spread out 4 SB800 units in a line, designed to fan out warm highlight along the length of the rail car. That did okay. Lit the train up pretty well. Couple of problems occurred, like light spilling immediately onto the ground in front of the flashes, giving away their position. A little gaffer taping, and some artful cropping (What’s the easiest way to get rid of a problem in your picture? Crop!) and it was starting to look okay.

Programmed in minus 4 stops EV into the D3. Yikes! Had never done that before, but it seemed to work. Now I got highlighted train, cool moody sky and a big black hole in the foreground of the picture. Enter Jake.

We swiped his mom’s hat, and his bud Tyler’s jacket, stuffed an SB900 into the Lastolite EzyBox (just like its name, pretty easy, nice light), moved that off to camera left, gave it to a Moose to hold (they’ll do that, its just part of their moose biological instincts) and knocked out a few frames.

Very happy to be a part of DLWS. Great friends, good times, pretty stuff. I mean, being the sort of people oriented, general assignment knockabout photog I’ve been for my whole career, I’d have to bribe somebody or get an editor really drunk to get an actual assignment to go to shoot sunrises and old buildings in Montana. If I asked to do something like this, my editor friends would look at me like I just lost a few more of my marbles. (”No, Joe, no big sky country for you. But we do have something involving people who don’t want to be photographed standing around in an ugly fluorescent lit room!”) Oh well.

DLWS goes to Yellowstone in January. I can’t believe I’m looking forward this much to freezing my ass off.

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Nov 17

Still Bouncing Light….

In Equipment, Lighting, Seminars & Workshops, Stories at 7:24am

Out here still trying to get caught up to my life. Running behind everything, per usual. Hit Penn State on Friday, and did a small lighting workshop in the afternoon, and a lecture Friday night. The program at PSU  is driven by John Beale, veteran photojournalist from the Pitt Post Gazette, and Curt Chandler, who has forged alot of new ground in multi-media, both at the Post Gazette and at the Penn State program. Great school, great students, all of whom benefit enormously from the real world stuff that John and Curt bring to the party. Visit was orchestrated by my wife, Annie Cahill, from Nikon. It’s great to go with her to places where she is so obviously revered and see the fruits of the 80 hours a week she logs, the emails she returns, and her steadfast, disciplined, relentless professionalism. She brings it, 24/7. By comparison, I’m a non-stop goofball.

Nikon supports the Penn State phojo program, so it was fun couple of hours mixing it up with students and small flash. Sarah, a photo/theater arts major was volunteered to be a subject and turned out to one of those smile machines for whom it is impossible to look bad in a photo. Per usual, she was cringing at all her pix, and my standard response to someone as effortlessly wonderful in front of the camera as she is to remark, “Oh, so if you think you take a bad picture what are the rest of us supposed to do? Put a bullet in our brains??!!”

Used white light flash with incandescent balance to push the look into the cool realm, given the blue seats. Used overhead 3×3 Lastolite and fill bounce off the gold reflector sheet that comes in the Lastolite kit. Zapped a backlight snooted courtesy of Honl. Simple. Fun. About a ten minute portrait or so, with all our yakkin’. Michelle Bixby, another student lens lugger (who was just published in USNWR) volunteered as a subject, which was great cause she gave the folding theater seat a run for its money the way she kind of did a transformer type thing to get all her legs and arms into the frame.

The big upside for us of course, was that John swung a couple of shooting credentials for the Penn State-Indiana football game on Saturday, which, given the blue and white football fever of State College, Pa., is kind of like dialing up a couple of front row seats for Obama’s inauguaral. It was way cool. I hadn’t shot a football game in about 20 plus years, so the rust was pretty thick, plus the fact that even when I was doing it as part of my living I wasn’t very good at it.

Last time I shot, of course, it was all manual focus stuff, and the dividing line between the men and they boys (and trust me, I was one of the boys) was the ability to follow focus. I was a contract shooter with SI at the time, and I saw up close magicians like John Biever, Walter Iooss, Heinz Klutmeier, Johnny I, and Manny Milan just knock it back game after game. You could hang these guys upside down with one eye closed and a bug in the other and they would still be able to fine tune the focus on a 400 or so. Biever especially, had radar. (I think he might have had a contract on the side with Lockheed, when they were developing stealth systems.)

The lenses sucked, too, by comparison to what we have now. I had a 300mm f4.5 that was sharp when you shoved it to critical focus and all, it just took about a week or so to get it there. I put it to my eye once and watched a critter make its way across one of the interior lens elements. It looked like a little inchworm, swear to God. Called NPS and told ‘em there’s something alive inside my 300 and they said it wasn’t just possible, it was highly likely. I used that puppy in the rain constantly, and there was no aqua-techie, Kata raingear and stuff like that. I didn’t want to use it after that, cause with my imagination I kept seeing this eyeball sucking, multi-fanged squiggly thing like the ones in Aliens poppin’ outta my eyepiece, boring its way into my skull and chewin’ up all my inside wiring. Yecchhh!

Anyway, did all right as a first timer in a long whiles. Was shooting the 200-400 f4 which is a non-stop wonder of a lens. The D3 fears not the rain and the gloom cause ISO 1600 looks like frikkin’ Kodachrome. The shot above is a ISO 3200 frame, cropped in half. Crazy. Nice fillip on the D3 is you can program DX crop into your function button, so if the action is on the other side of the field you can add reach to the lens with one flick.

Me and my honey at the ball game. Annie manages to pull off radiant, beatific, even, in a downpour wearing a garbage bag. My face looks like they just used it for punting practice.

Photo courtesy of John Beale…

INNOVATIVE USE OF A C-STAND!

On the way home, over the sounds of the rain drumming and Faith Hill on the country station, we heard…. the sound of a tire rim on concrete? Oh, yeah, Annie’s Honda was skating all over Rt. 80 for a minute while we pulled over, to find that Honda made their jack a tad too short! Wonderful. Maxed out, I still needed another at least half inch to push on the spare. Hmmmm…..no wood block. If I was still shooting a Nikon F, I coulda used that, but wasn’t gonna get medieval with one of my D3’s, and then remembered I had a c-stand! Pulled out the turtle base, put the jack on it, and changed the damn tire.

One of the reasons the blog’s been up and down is I am crashing, late of course, the final writing on my new book, The Hot Shoe Diaries, Big Light From Small Flashes. It’s been kicking my ass. Almost done though, and should be out in about a month or so.

In it, we’ll cover…BRIDES IN THE WOODS! YIKES!

FATHER PRE-FLASH!

As Donald said that day, “Joe, where the hell is Israel?”

LOW GLOW! OR, DEALING WITH PEOPLE WHO WEAR BALL CAPS!

GOIN’ GLAM!

AND THE EVER SENSITIVE ISSUE OF TRIGGERING TTL FLASHES IN TOUGH TO GET AT PLACES!

SHOULD BE FUN! MORE TK…..

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Nov 11

And Now the News…

In Uncategorized at 5:16pm

OBAMA VISITS BUSH!

WALL STREET TANKS!

MCNALLY SHOOTS LANDSCAPE!

In Montana, at DLWS, even I can shoot something pretty. Mongo like sky!

ARENA POSTS LUCID HIGH SPEED SYNC ARTICLE!

Between David Hobby and Syl’s new article on hi speed sync, the mystery is gone. Quick examples here on the fly……

200th at F8…

800th at 2.8

Hi speed sync has never been easier. Read this piece by Syl…top to bottom explanation….dive into David’s archive. Fast light at fast speeds….More tk….

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Nov 11

Speed of Light….

In Friends, Lighting, Seminars & Workshops at 2:56am

Wish I could move that fast. In Montana currently, still catching up to my life. Did a shot tonight as a class demo of Tyler Miller, Jake Peterson’s bud at MSU and a photo student there. He’s out with us on DLWS helping out in between college classes. Jake is helping out to. Take a look at his work. Like father, like son. Nuff said.

Shot TTL with one SB800 flash into a Lastolite Ezy Box softbox light. Man, have they turned the corner on this light source by putting the interior baffle in it. They are flying off the shelves, rightly so. Small, light, collapsible, it is one of those things now that is always in my bag.

Also shot Kevin Dobler (aka Flyboy) today, by a creek somewhere in Montana. One hard, unbaffled (unlike me) SB900 my assistant Drew was trying to hold while fighting off some crazy bush growing out of the rocky hillside leading to the creek. Frikkin’ thing was like that plant in Little Shop of Horrors, but he hung in with the light.

Like the pic…gotta talk to Kev about wardrobe.

So in the words of the song, how did I get here?

Blew outta PPE on the last day, leaving NY, the Javits Center, my money and my credit cards in the men’s room when I changed, heading for Newark Airport and then Stockholm. The cc cards were recovered and entrusted to Mike Corrado, my blood brother at Nikon. Dunno about Mikey havin’ my Amex. When I come back and get my bill I might have to explain a bunch of questionable movie rentals to Annie.

Hit Stockholm Sunday am, and knocked back some zzzz’s, then hit it hard on Monday with the first day of our Nordic lighting tour. The whole tour was ponsored by Nikon Nordic, and put together with great effort by an assemblage of Nikon personnel in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. Great folks. Had a blast in Sweden, our first stop, even though my pictures were pretty average. We did try a few things and opened a few doors for folks, like using an SB900 from about 70 feet away, as in this shot of Katerina, a Nordic champion body builder.

Saw this elevator in the back of the room and just had to try it. I always wander, ya know, and the people who organize this stuff start getting elevated blood pressure. (“He’s supposed to stay on stage, not in the lobby!”) Oh, well, what’s a WT-4 for anyway? I was working wirelessly with Nikon’s transmission system, which was pretty cool, except when I got to the edge of the transmission area, which made the battery operated unit work really hard and thus overheat. I could always tell cause I had that sucker in my pocket, and I would, you know, get that warm, fuzzy feeling. It was comforting.

Wish I coulda finished this one. There was promise here. On stage, Katerina and I had fun, but I was dealing with a light sponge of a backdrop, and fought that puppy all day long. At the end, I’d call it a draw, but that’s probably over generous to me.

Made a new bud. Lars, the Nikon PMTR for Sweden and points north, is a great guy, incredibly knowledgeable about Nikon stuff, and a real good clock watcher. With typical Scandinavian precision, he tried to keep me on topic and on schedule, which is de facto impossible, so we engaged in  week long banter that stopped just short of a Rowan and Martin schtick. I would ask when I was supposed to be done, and he would deadpan back to me something like “one minute and 45 seconds.” Hah! What a kidder!

Actually, he was serious most of the time. I had to create several lighting scenarios in two one hour blocks, so it was time to rattle the photons and forget about the finishing touches. Did okay, though. Got this, with Nicklaus, an incredible leaper.

Just hadda keep my head in the game and keep working out solutions. Just like being on location. Not a lot of time, and too much to do. A real shoot, in other words…..

Leapin’ Nick was shot with a 3×6 Lastolite Skylite Panel from camera right and slightly above him. We tried spotlighting the background, which was a dangerous move on my part, especially with the spot flash being hand held by an audience member. Oh, well, what could go wrong? Lots, trust me:-)

Onto Finland! Went from the stage in Stockholm to the airport to Helsinki, arriving late at night.

Hit the stage the next day, getting there early, well before the gear, the grip and the lighting. Took a look at the giant schmatta hanging in the middle of this large, beautiful white wall, and said, okay, that’s gotta go. (I of course, had asked for backdrops at each locale, but, photographers, ya know? We change our mind all the time.) Created a pretty large central aisle through the audience so I could get long lens stuff cranking. Worked a lot of wide angle in Sweden and it got real messy, real fast. Amazing how quick you can get off a background with wide glass, as below of Matt our break dancer.

Okay. Clean background, room to work. Where to put the light? In the rain on a balcony outside the gallery hall which we were supposed to stay inside of! Bagged an SB 900 and put it out there, about 80’ from the stage. Waited then, for the folks to show up.

And they did. Wonderful folks. Great, actually. We had a terrific day. I was told the Finnish people were going to be amiable but quiet. And indeed they were. Real quiet. Studious, which was understandable, cause I was speaking my brand of hyper caffeinated English and I don’t even understand myself sometimes when I yak like that. So, introductions were over, and I looked out at them, and they looked, quietly, back at me. Hmmm….

The unsettling thing was that they were all wearing horned helmets and carrying broadswords. Shit, I thought, I better be good. Kidding!

Nicklaus was up first, and we worked through some single flash, hot shoe basics using my buddy, Mr. White Wall. Got a couple decent frames, real quick, real simple, but you know, the kind of stuff a trained seal could knock off. Okay hot shot flashy pants from America, now whaddaya gonna do?

I asked Nicklaus to jump and I hit him hard with the 900 on the balcony, which was coming through windows and rain and the crowd and nailing him as he hit the top of his jump. (I mean, most of the time at the top of his jump. Bill Frakes I ain’t.) Triggered it with an SU800 running off two daisy chained SC29 cords, mounted to a stand and aimed out the windows toward the 900 sensor.

Bango! Shadow games. This shot came up, and ya know, full blown, on two projectors, and its, well, its kinda unexpected, just one flash, from the balcony etc. Most of the audience didn’t really pick up on where the flash was right away. When you nail this, live, in front of an audience, on the fly, you kind of expect maybe reaction? A, you know, “hmmmmm, good idea,” kind of murmur. A burble of restrained approval, perhaps? A song to Oden?

Zero. Nothing. Coulda heard a pin drop. Geez, I thought, this is gonna be a long day. But then! A question from the nice lady in the front row! I woulda answered it in detail even if she was asking the color of my boxers. But, fantastically, she asked if that could be done with an SB800. I started to spew textbook bullpucky about the power ratings and the zoom and then, whoah, I coulda had a V8! Try it! Good information, win, lose or draw. All I hadda do was replace the light.

We got this. Damn interesting. See the fuzzed edge of the shadow? Dramatic, I think, argument for the upgrade to the 900. That 200mm zoom throw is cleaner, harder, and obviously has more edge clarity. Cool. Either an interesting shadow experiment, or somebody’s flash went off and my exposure partially clipped it.

Another point of information occurred here. Working a 70-200mm from the back of the room, and the photos were translating through the WT-4, real slowwwwllllyyyy. The ever vigilant Lars called out to me, “Joe, where is the WT-4?” I was sitting in a chair, and it was in my back pocket, so I was quite literally sitting on it. I raised it up higher, and it worked splendidly. So, if you’re gonna use it, don’t put it in your butt crack.

Onto Matt, the break dancer. Put two SB units in the hands of two folks in the front row, camera right and left, no umbrellas or nothin’. Hard, crossing light. Copy light, basically. Got Matt upside down, with, predictably, two shadows on the background, coming from two crossing lights of equal power. Okay, finesse the light? Possible, of course. But—moving fast, and wanna adios the shadows? Blow the background away.

Quick put up 4 SB units on two stands, either side, high and low on the stands, using Justin Clamps, dialed up the power. (“Targeting the main generator now, my lord. You may commence your attack at any time.”) Bye bye shadows. Still have the hint, but I, heh, heh, still had 2 more stops left in the background units. Poor little shadow. Wanna see God?

Pushed past this and got Katerina on stage. Very lovely person, with great physique and equally great hair,
which we started to play around with immediately. Almost right away, got another question from the audience! Yes, sir!!?? (Refer to the pictures up above, with the leaping, shirtless, Nicklaus.)

“In the interest of equality, could you ask her to take her shirt off?”

I don’t know how to say “WTF?” in Finnish, but I did my level best. I turned to Katerina, who was gracious and bemused, in that calm, self assured way that having 18” biceps can afford you. I told the questioner he could take it up with her directly, but he should be aware that there are windows in the back of the room and we were on the sixth floor, and Katerina might not have gotten her workout in that day.

More tk…..

23    comments

Nov 7

This Just In…..

In News at 10:30am

Amazon just posted one of their 2008 listings…..here’ the link…

Let me take this opportunity to talk about the guy who wrote #1. The guy who wrote #2 would still have a bunch of loose cannon thoughts, bromides, non sequiturs, and arcane mumbo jumbo rattling around in the sieve of his brain were it not for Scott Kelby, sitting in the back of a DLWS class, listening quietly in the shadows.

At the end of that lecture, Scott, the Don, the dean, the man, the legend, the “capo di tutti capi,”  leaned forward into the solitary spotlight over his table (no one else sits there, ever) and with the harsh overhead light still shading his eyes, pushed his double espresso off to the side, and said, “Joe, come take a walk wid me.” As I recall, everyone else in the room put one hand to their face in astonishment and fearful anticipation. With their free hand, they made a sign of the cross.

I think I know what they were thinking. “Joe’s gonna write dis book, or Joe not comin’ back.”

Seriously, Scott and I were on a lonely Vermont road, and frankly, the leaves weren’t talkin’ to us. Scott said, “Ya know, all ya gotta do is write down what you say in class.” He already had the title in his head. Honestly, he had the book in his head before I had it in mine. He edited the book, asked me the right questions, and the vapor in my brain became ink on paper.

He was the prime mover, the thought provoker, the editor, the mojo, the guy who opened the door. Most importantly, he’s my friend.

POOR WILMA!

She’s off the newsstands now, of course, it being November, but I remember feeling bad for her, kind of all by herself, in the middle of the science and adventure section, fer chrissakes. I mean she’s right next to Field and Stream, and their cover subject got fuckin’ antlers. And there she is in all her resplendent Neanderthal female pulchritude, all by herself. I was hoping they’d put her in the Beauty and Glam section, ya know, so she could give Angelina or Reese a run for their money. She’s back in the Netherlands now, with her creators, the ever brilliant Kennis brothers. Felt so bad, I sent her some mascara and some skin cream. Maybe next time, if she hits the treadmill, loses the spear, and does some tweezing.

Lookit all those magazines! Always amazes me. There’s a magazine for everybody and everything, I suppose, right from Spudman, Voice of the Potato Industry, to Compressed Air Monthly, which I’d be a natural for. Also this one, which I found on location.

Thought of sending them some promo stuff. Figure if I take two Bogen magic arms with super clamps, and rig a D3 on a ball head, clamp the rig to the arm rests of the next coach seat long flight I’m taking, use a 14-24, with the face recognition focus jazz, and program a timer to fire the camera every 3 or 4 minutes, I’m bound to catch myself drooling all over my t-shirt. Be the perfect ice breaker for sending them a portfolio. More tk….

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