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

photographing her atop one of the horse-drawn carriages. It was February.

    I shot a few frames and she looked over at me and said, “Dahhhling, don’t keep me out here too long. I don’t want to catch ammonia!” Subjects sometimes say some pretty nutty things, and my advice is always just to smile and nod, and keep shooting.
     
    I didn’t bring her out in the freezing cold for no reason. Nor was the horse-drawn carriage an accident. In New York, the historic façade of the Plaza is instantly recognizable, and that hotel and the Central Park horse buggies go together like pastrami and rye, Frazier and Reed, Empire and Chrysler. They are inseparable, quite unlike Ivana and the Donald ultimately proved to be.

    Like most celeb shoots, especially those where the famous subject is shivering, it was over in minutes and consumed less than a roll of film. She’s standing in shadow and the building is in hot light. I put up a mid-sized umbrella on camera left, bumped her exposure up by at least three stops to bring her in register with the sunlight up above her, and blasted away.
     
    Coulda kicked myself later, though. Shoulda used a softbox. The umbrella is lighting her okay, but also heating up the shiny surface of the carriage on the left of the frame. A more directional light from a softbox would have cured this a bit, as I could have then feathered it off to the right. (Feathering is basically rotating the light source right or left to direct the bulk of the light away from a potential hot spot. Nowhere near as effective a technique with an umbrella, ‘cause an umbrella scatters light much more broadly than a softbox.) A flag, cutter, or GOBO would have helped, too. Or a winter jacket. Or a newspaper. Stick just about anything between the strobe and a shiny surface and it will help take some of the heat out of it.

    I didn’t do it, of course, I was moving too fast. I didn’t want to catch ammonia.
     
    Smile and nod.

    “Stick just about anything between the strobe and a shiny surface and it will help take some of the heat out of it.”
    Stand in Front of More Interesting Stuff
     

    “If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.”

    My friend and colleague, Jim Richardson at National Geographic , has simple advice for anyone who wants to become a better photographer: “If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.“

    So, what could be more interesting than a bunch of Munchkins?

    You know, the original Munchkins. Somehow
Life
magazine got access to the last living Munchkins. The magazine had no idea how to shoot them. So I put ‘em in flower pots. My editor told me I was a sick bastard, but hey, in The Wizard of Oz they pop right outta the garden, so I figured, why not?
     
    I hauled in 300 pounds of topsoil to the rental studio. The studio people were reeeeeally pissed at me. Not only did it stink, topsoil got everywhere—like the cracks in the wood floor…the white wood floor. We were up until midnight with vacuums trying to get it out.

    So the Munchkins pull up in this limousine. I meet them and we ride up to the seventh floor, alone. We get into the elevator and the door closes. I look around and, honestly, it was kinda creepy. I was trapped in a confined space with a bunch of Munchkins. I mean, I got an active imagination, and I started thinkin’ about them turnin’ on me, their little faces gettin’ all mean-like and their lollipop-guild voices saying, “Okay, let’s have the wallet, sumbitch.”

    How to Get This Type of Shot

    This is obviously a studio shot and that’s obviously a painted backdrop. When you roll one of these out on a studio floor, you freak (because it just looks so cheesy), but you can transform it with light and f-stop. In this case, there’s a setting sun on the right, so I put a strobe with a honeycomb spot grid to narrow the beam and aimed it at that spot with a warming gel (I used a gel from LeeFilters.com—in their light rolls, it’s their Daylight Conversion Half CTO [Color Temperature Orange] gel), which in this case turned the white strobe into the color of a setting sun. (By the way, a half-cut means that you get half the warmth of the full gel.) I also added a soft wash using a strobe fitted with an umbrella to just bring a little detail into the overall background (underexposed from the foreground subjects by about two stops). Throw in a bit of a shallow f-stop (like f/4) and