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

in an even way. But always remember, looking at the sky and clouds like this is a good opportunity to play with your plus or minus EV value.

    He looked to the heavens and got the puppet in position. I was completely, desperately unaware of it at the time, racing the light, but what I’ve always liked about the picture is the play of scale between his hands and the puppet’s.

     
    Be the Boss of the Light
     

    “The hardest thing about lighting is NOT lighting. We’re talking control of light here— lighting THIS, but not THAT.”

    The hardest thing about lighting is not lighting. We’re talking control of light here—lighting this, but not lighting that. The problem is that light from a strobe likes to party—it pretty much goes everywhere—and it’s your job as photographer to be the cops, shut down the party, close the bar, and tell everybody to follow you.
     
    I showed up to photograph Dr. Jeremy Nathans, whose work centered on color and the human brain. I had a couple of flashes with me, cameras, and a tripod.

    Given Nathans’ work, he had a bunch of color gels. I covered the lenses on two Kodak carousel projectors with swatches of primary colors and asked him to put on a white lab coat. I tipped the projectors so that the primaries crossed and became the complement on the white coat.
     
    Now all this clever color would go bye-bye if I just set off a flash in something like an umbrella. Hello washed out, dramaless, crappy picture that won’t get published!

    I was always good with construction paper and tape back in grammar school, and things haven’t changed much. I took one small Nikon SB flash and taped a tight honeycomb spot grid [ 1 ] over it. Then I took some gaffer’s tape and cut the grid even further, making a small, controlled opening for the light. I positioned the flash directly in front of his face (the flash was clamped to a ceiling tile), with a quarter-cut CTO [ 2 ] gel on the flash to make the light a little warmer and add a little drama.

    [ 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 ] CTO: Color Temperature Orange. It’s an amber gel, available in various intensities, that pushes daylight towards the warm (tungsten) end of the color scale. A quarter-cut means you get one-quarter the warmth of the full gel.

    It ain’t pretty, but it works.

     

    Dr. Jeremy Nathans
    Push the Wide Lens
     

    “You know the standard rule of photography that states you shouldn’t shoot people with a wide-angle lens? It’s a rule meant to be broken.”

    Ever notice when you put a wide-angle lens to your eye, and it looks great, and you think you’ve got everything in the picture, you look at it later and you’ve got too much of everything in the picture, and the crucial elements are teeny tiny in the back of the frame where you can barely see ‘em? Tom Kennedy, my editor at the Geographic , always told me to: “Push the wide-angle lens—go wide, get tight, fill the frame.” What he means is that consistently shooting pictures from a middle distance, at eye level, is a one-way ticket to boring pictures.
     
    You can push a wide-angle lens very close to someone’s face and still see the street behind them—there’s plenty of context. You know the standard rule of photography that states you shouldn’t shoot people with a wide-angle lens? It’s a rule meant to be broken. Open any magazine and flip though the environmental portraits—you’ll see a horizontal, wide-angle lens used very close to the subject again and again.

    Here’s an example: at a workshop once, I had a lovely lady who was assigned to do a story on a boat captain. She was terrified of shooting people, and kept coming in with these wide-angle pictures that showed the whole boat with the captain doing something interesting that you couldn’t see because he was the size of a pea at the back of the boat. After three days of this, I took her camera, walked up to her, extended my arm, and placed my hand on her shoulder. I said, “Today, you will take this camera and this wide-angle lens, and you will be no further than this (meaning the length of my arm) from your subject, all day.” Her pictures improved dramatically.

     
    Smile and Nod
     

    Ivana Trump

    We were photographing Ivana Trump back in her “The Donald” days, when she was running the historic Plaza Hotel in NYC. I had the bright idea of