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

tape. For a while I tried to put little Velcro strips on all my gels, but that was just too geeky—even for me.
    Carry a Bed Sheet
     

    This doesn’t have to be rocket science.

    I was shooting a story on prayer and working with a lovely family who had great-looking kids. One of the young daughters had the face of an angel.
     
    So I’m struggling…wait a minute. She’s got the face of angel. I’m doing a story on prayer. Whack! That’s why I’ve got a flat forehead.

    Threw a bed sheet over a window with hard sunlight pouring in. Turned the room into a studio. Swiped a macramé tablecloth and pinned it to the wall behind her for texture.

    “Throw the bed sheet over the window, and watch the room start to glow.”

    She got prayerful. I got a cover. It took about five minutes.
     
    FYI, I am a bed sheet thief. If I think I need a broad light source, I swipe the bed sheet from the luxurious Motel 6 I might have stayed at that night and stuff it into my gear bag. There’s no weight and it takes up no space.

    How to Get This Type of Shot

    We’ve all walked into a room with a little hot shoe flash and looked at hot sun pouring through a window, where it’s, you know, f/90, and then just out of the light, where it’s f/nothing. How you gonna make that work with a tiny on-camera flash?

    Throw the bed sheet over the window and watch the room start to glow. The window was off camera right and the shadow side of her face was just a little too dark. To compensate, I bounced a very weak flash off the ceiling of the room, which filled in the shadow side just enough without overpowering or destroying the feel of the existing light.

     
    Warm Is Better Than Cool
     

    When it comes to skin tones, warm is generally better than cool. This is a personal preference, you understand, and it stems from the fact that I feel people look better with a little warm glow, as if they’re sitting at a nice, candlelit table at the Four Seasons, rather than looking like an extra on The Sopranos who’s been hanging on a meat hook for a few days.
     
    Of course, it depends on the mission. You can go either way—the important thing is to remember to choose. Don’t let the gear choose for you. WARNING! WARNING! Technical talk starts here!

    How to Get This Type of Shot

    Flash units come from the factory neutrally balanced for daylight. The output is plotted as a bell curve. At the lower end of the curve, it is burning at a warm temperature. At the top of the curve, it is fairly cool in terms of degrees Kelvin. Depending on certain factors, like strobe duration and shutter speed, your exposure will carve out a piece of this bell curve, and more than likely, the cool chunk of it. Hence, your neutral strobe might look a little blue.

    There are any number of ways to fix this. Try a Cloudy white balance, which is a slightly warm version of daylight. Or put a CTO on your strobe. A CT who? CTO: Color Temperature Orange. It’s an amber gel (available in various intensities) and it pushes daylight towards the tungsten (or warmish) end of the color scale. You can push it a little, which is natural and pleasing, or you can push it a lot and make somebody look like the Great Pumpkin. Be careful.
     
    I love talking this tech stuff. Strobe durations and bell curves! Whew! Gets me hotter ’n Georgia asphalt.

    “When it comes to skin tones, warm is generally better than cool. Of course, it depends on the mission. You can go either way - the important thing is to remember to choose. Don’t let the gear choose for you.”
    Don’t Light All of It
     

    “If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.”

    John Loengard, the picture editor at Life , always used to tell me, “If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.” He’s right.
     
    Follow your instincts. Here’s the deal: the client was
Parade
magazine and they print on a paper grade that, well, let’s just say it’s not the best, so they always need color or want color. They kept telling me: no beiges, no browns, make sure you have color. My imagination was all about something really moody and reflective about Tony at this point in his life, and lit in a minimal way on black. Now black is generally not the ticket for success when it comes to a cover.

    I had Tony for two hours and I ran four sets: a black, a white, a gray, and a somewhat cheesy painted sunset. I figured the black set would be more of a picture for myself than