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

medium softbox, slightly angled back toward his chest. The low fill light comes from a smaller softbox running at about half the power of the main light, positioned just below his hands. The key to the picture is the little “wing lights” on the sides that provide the visual separation. I used two Nikon SB-800 flashes positioned on either side of his body, just edging him out.

    Ronnie Coleman
    Just Go Click
     

    “Time was, you had to drag in the Polaroid and wander the room with an incident light meter. Now, we can just go click.”

    Just go click. That’s a simple way of talking about an incredibly crucial, immediate thought process that has to take place when you show up. In more formal terms, we’re talking location assessment.
     
    Time was, you had to drag in the Polaroid and wander the room with an incident light meter, sorting out hot spots and shadows. Then you’d shoot a series of 90-second guestimates, wait for them to develop, and make some judgments based on material that was often off-color, lacked the same exposure range as the real film in the camera, and had marginal detail.

    Now, we can just go click . That LCD! What an amazing thing and they’re just getting better. Gives us a whole ton of information right away. You can see where dead zones are, how much or how little light to use, exact composition, shadow detail, histogram info, metadata, what you had for breakfast (kidding!), and the whole nine yards. (I always tell my classes, eventually they’re gonna make a camera system so intuitive that you’ll do the first scouting picture and the LCD will return a set of messages instead of a picture. “Go elsewhere! You’re screwed! You sure you wanna use that lens?”)

    You are now Polaroiding with exactitude inside the same camera you’re gonna use to make the shot. No guesswork. No dragging out attachments or a whole other camera system with an accordion bellows that looked like you were in search of a good polka instead of a picture.

    It doesn’t matter if the first look is even a reasonable f-stop/shutter speed combo. It’s information. It’s immediate. It gives you a starting point. Think of it as the photo weather report. Is it gonna be a good day or a bad day?

    How to Get This Type of Shot

    In this instance, I took an immediate look at my LCD after what I thought was too slow a shutter speed. It turned out, the camera’s brain was thinking right. There was tremendously hot noontime light out on the street, so my eyes were squinting and interpreting the scene as bright. The camera saw the fire truck as a light blocker, interpreted the scene as being dark, and spat out a shutter drag of about two seconds. That length of exposure enabled the sunlight to creep around the truck, off the ceiling, and through the windows, lighting the interior beautifully.

    The back of the truck stayed dark, so that is where I put Louie, my subject. I put up one softbox, just for him, and the sunlight did the rest of the work. Without that instant info, I would have been messing with meters and Polaroids forever, and, it being a firehouse, most likely would have lost the shot, and one of my favorite portraits.

     
    Highlight the Subject
     

    “To show scale, light the whole environment, and then highlight the subject.”

    I was working in Star City, the Russian space training center. It’s a place that, during the Cold War, was not on any maps. Now, in the spirit of openness and trust that exists between Russia and America—not to mention the sharing of technology, expertise, and the exchange of cold, hard cash—American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts live and train together here.
     
    One of the challenges of the story was lighting the world’s largest centrifuge by myself. (“World’s largest centrifuge!” said my contact. “Thousand dollars, make it spin.”) I didn’t have that kind of dough, so I had to shoot it just sitting there. The key to the picture was to establish a sense of scale: tiny human being and monster machine.

    Lighting is a good way to show scale, so I asked Wendy Lawrence, NASA’s most diminutive astronaut, to get into the pod. I lit her with two large battery-operated strobes, drawing attention to her size relative to the machine. I threw a couple other large strobes behind the machine, aimed at the far wall to create some separation. I shot this with a wide-angle lens to establish how enormous this device is. The lights on her are gelled warm, which