The Moment It Clicks: Photography Secrets From One of the World's Top Shooters

helicopter, advised me to lose some weight.

    “Why not fly her on a wire off the chopper over the Hollywood sign? A shot that says, ‘Stunt actress. Hollywood,’ all at once. Her people said no. She said yes.”

     

    Michelle Yeoh
    Bring a Camera (Then Use It)!
     

    Jay Maisel always says to bring your camera, ‘cause it’s tough to take a picture without it. Pursuant to the above aforementioned piece of the rule book, subset three, clause A, paragraph four would be…use the camera.
     
    Put it to your eye. You never know. There are lots of reasons, some of them even good, to just leave it on your shoulder or in your bag. Wrong lens. Wrong light. Aaahhh, it’s not that great, what am I gonna do with it anyway? I’ll have to put my coffee down. I’ll just delete it later, why bother? Lots of reasons not to take the dive into the eyepiece and once again try to sort out the world into an effective rectangle.

    It’s almost always worth it to take a look. At the Lockheed plant in Marietta, I was told an F-22 Raptor, one of five flying at the time, was about to take off. It was the hot plane in the skies, still in test phase, so of course I said yes.

    “Sometimes it’s all working for you and you still miss. Other times it all sucks and you get a terrific frame. You just never know. The one surefire way to get nothing is to not bother looking.”

    I walked out onto the blazing tarmac at high noon, accompanied by a corporate shooter who kept assuring me I would get nothing. It’s bad, no, make that horrible light. It’s backlit. No color. We’re not going to get close to the plane. There was a whole litany of reasons why I shouldn’t bother. Every one of them was accurate.

    I got one of the best pictures of the story, a shot that, for a time, was the best-selling cover of National Geographic , and ran inside as a double gatefold. [ 1 ]

    [ 1 ] Gatefold: Fold-out page in a magazine that makes a two-page spread a three-page spread. A double gatefold, or double gate, is four pages across. Requires the photographer to make a long, skinny picture.

    Sometimes it’s all working for you and you still miss. Other times it all sucks and you get a terrific frame. You just never know. The one surefire way to get nothing is to not bother looking.
     
    By the way, the negatives about this picture were very real. I had bad light, no color, and couldn’t get close to the plane. What saved the shot was a 400mm lens. A long lens gives you compression, power, and distills the essence of the frame by isolating the center of interest and dropping out the background. All I had going were the graphics of the scene and the lens nailed them. Shoot this with wide glass, the picture goes away.
    Nice Is Just…Nice
     

    “The umbrella approach (appropriate for some instances, absolutely) scatters light everywhere. It’s indiscriminate, kind of like carpet bombing.”

    Any idiot can put up an umbrella. One of those is writing this book. Done it plenty of times. Put up the old brollie and everything looks nice. Which may mean that everything looks nice, or that everything looks okay, which means everything sucks. Follow me?
     
    Nice is nice , but it stops way short of fabulous. There’s the issue of control. The umbrella approach (appropriate for some instances, absolutely) scatters photons everywhere. It’s indiscriminate, kind of like carpet bombing.

    So what if something in your picture’s got to look one way and something else has to look entirely different? Ahhh, there’s the trick! Put the umbrella away and go for the small softbox or the honeycomb spot grid. [ 1 ] Throw in a homemade gaffer tape snoot [ 2 ] and some black wrap, a few black cards to cut wall bounce, and now you’re cooking.

    [ 1 ] Honeycomb Spot Grid: A circular metal grid (that looks like a honeycomb) that goes over your strobe head and limits the spread of the light.

    [ 2 ] Snoot: Any device that forms a tube around your light source to funnel it and make it more directional. Could be a fancy Lumiquest store-bought snoot, or just some cardboard taped together. The function is to direct the light and control spill.

    This picture of the amazed baby was made with lots of black lining the walls, soaking up stray light. It’s a double exposure, with a focus shift between the baby and the ball. You can do that on a set like this, when there’s a lot of dark area.
     
    The whole idea was to show how babies register moving objects. So I