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

Collection, I pretty much had the run of the Smithsonian. I got into a lot of back hallways and storage areas, looking for pieces of pictures.

    I saw these life masks in a hallway, forgotten, gathering dust. Loved ‘em immediately. The people at the Smith rolled their eyes, but were gracious.

    It didn’t stop there. I needed them moved and my instructions were explicit. Handle them from the base. Don’t dust them!

    “Michelle’s living, breathing Hollywood glamour. The diamond’s a still life. Both are beautiful and both need to be lit differently, just all at once.”

    They looked at me like I was nuts. But the dust gave them character and patina, and the feel of an artifact. They were ancient and crypt-like, and made a good frame for Michelle’s flawless skin. Okay, so I saw
Raiders of the Lost Ark
way too many times.
     
    Diamonds are cut on a bias for reflectance and brilliance. They need hard light to shine. Michelle made it clear there was to be no hard light near her face. She was real straight about it.

    How to Get This Type of Shot

    So I lit her with a straight-up beauty light combo. The gem? Got a strobe projector, one of those puppies that can throw a 3,000-watt-second piece of light the size of a dime across the room.

    Cut masks in the shape of every gem to be shot and dropped them over the projector. An assistant stood with the unit and followed the massive stone on Michelle’s chest. There’s so much extra light pumping into just the gem that it is ricocheting back off the statues, resulting in the little splotch of light just to the right of Michelle’s face.
     
    Michelle’s living, breathing Hollywood glamour. The diamond’s a still life. Both are beautiful and both need to be lit differently, just all at once.

     

    Michelle Pfeiffer
    Use a Mime
     

    “I don’t like mimes, but they kind of give you a free pass. You don’t have to explain how strange a picture is, ’cause, well, you’ve got a mime in there.”

    I don’t like mimes, but I’ve used them in shoots on numerous occasions just because they’re so damn odd. It gives you a free pass. You don’t have to explain how strange a picture is, ‘cause, well, you’ve got a mime in there.
     
    When I shot this, in the muck of the Prospect Park Lake in Brooklyn, my assistant was a 6′3″ cowboy out of Colorado named Garth. He was bewildered by the painted, wordless men. Maybe they don’t have mimes in Colorado.

    He came up to me at the camera and whispered, “Hey Joe, if I beat the $#!& out of one of these mimes, do you think he’d say something?”

    FYI, this was an illustration for the versatility of the Nikon SB-26, which had an internal slave eye. [ 1 ] There’s a strobe in the umbrella, one in the boat, and one to camera left, lighting the hooked mime.

    [ 1 ] Internal Slave Eye: A photo eye or trigger built in to a flash unit, sensitive to sudden increases in light, which will trigger the flash.

    I’m not sure, but I think I’ve always wanted to say, “hooked mime.”

    How to Get This Type of Shot

    The shot was taken at dusk—the sky is really intensely blue, I shot tungsten film, and the strobes had the CTO gels I talk about on page 82. So, the tungsten film made the scene cool blue and the gels made the light from the flashes warm. If I reshot this today using digital, I would set the camera’s white balance to Tungsten, but still gel the strobes to make them warm. Here’s why you need the gels: the Tungsten white balance makes the fading daylight go blue, and the strobe is a daylight source too, hence it will go blue if left ungelled. You don’t want blue on blue on blue, so time for the gels. One full conversion brings the daylight flash to a tungsten balance, so it would look neutral or white. But you want the flash to be warm, not neutral. So put one more CTO on there, making it a double-gel. Now you’ve got the cool, cool blue sky and warm subjects. It’s a good combo. Always remember that warm and cool colors vibrate next to each other. They engage the eye. They work well together.

    Note: You can now fine tune a camera like the D3 to get the coolest effect possible. That, along with some underexposure on the order of –2 EV, will give you an intense, cobalt blue when shooting in a daylight environment, especially pre-dawn, or twilight. Not to play on words, but it is, you know, cool!
     
    By the way, do you know how I attach the gels to my Nikon SB-800 flashes? Nothing fancy—Scotch