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

up with a package. “Wanna see my sight tray?”

    After that story, I put my feet up and waited for the phone to ring. And waited. And waited some more. Never happened. I had spent so long and had dived so deep into the story, I had to go out and pound the pavement, reminding people I existed.

    It was a long haul before I got any work again. Bills were mounting. Couldn’t pay ‘em. It was bad. Not a happy household. Tense, in a word. I was on the phone with American Express, telling them they‘d get their money real soon. My now ex-wife called out from the kitchen, “Why don’t you show them your sight tray!”

    Lots of lessons learned. Including the wherefores of a shot like this, which is basically spit, glue, and a whole bunch of luck.

    How to Get This Type of Shot

    I needed a picture that defined sight. I thought a shot of a procedure like this might cut it. It’s lit with one hot shoe flash, camera right, slightly behind the subject. (If the subject’s eye is 12 noon, the flash is at two o’clock.) All it is doing is edging out his nose and defining his eye. I controlled the spill of the light by making a snoot [ 1 ] out of gaffer tape.

    [ 1 ] Snoot: Any device that forms a tube around your light source to funnel it and make it more directional. Could be a fancy Lumiquest store-bought snoot, or just some cardboard taped together. The function is to direct the light and control spill.

    Now for the laser. You generally can’t see a laser unless it hits particulate matter in the air, so one good non-toxic solution is dry ice vapor. All you need is a subject who can keep his eye open for 30 seconds (the exposure was a complete guess) with a laser beam going in it, a flash going off, and a cup of dry ice vapor being poured down his forehead. Luckily, this gentleman was studying Zen Buddhism.
     
    I shot one roll of Kodachrome 200. One frame worked, a mighty lucky one at that. After a year on the road, 1,500 rolls of film and many, many thousands of miles in the air, the lead shot came down to a high-tech Hail Mary.
    Keep Your Camera Ready
     

    “Keep your camera near your Eye.”

    Steve Martin and I were on the beach and we were both like pilots who had lost airspeed, altitude, and ideas all at once. I knew the shoot was just about over.

    “This year has gone really well for you,” I said, reaching for anything. “Is there any way you can show me that?”

    “Yeeaahhhh, but you know, when you physicalize an emotion like that, you tend to appear self-obsessed,” he replied, grimacing.
     
    A voice in my head was shrieking, yeah, that’s the deal, you are self-obsessed!

    And then he gave it to me, mostly because he thought I wasn’t ready. My camera was off my eye, down at my chin, but pointed at him. He gave it to me for a split-second, which was actually pretty generous of him, ’cause he didn’t want to do it. I squeezed off one frame without looking through the lens.
     
    The two major pieces of any picture story are your opener and your closer. I just got the closer.

    How to Get This Type of Shot

    This was shot with just one portable strobe, connected to the end of a 3′ monopod, and it had a small 1×2′ softbox over it. This was held by my assistant, maybe three feet in front of him to the camera’s left, and I was shooting in really close using a 20mm wide-angle lens.

     

    Steve Martin
    Sometimes You Feel Bad
     

    “I was Photographing this poor guy and his D.I. came up to him and started screaming, ‘Oh good, they’re gonna put you on the cover of Whiner magazine!’”

    When stuff like this happens, man, you feel bad for the guy. You just have to remember that you are there doing your job, and he is doing his, and this is Navy SEAL Hell Week and all this misery would be going on whether you are there with your camera or not.

    Speaking of misery, that is the name of the log these guys are hoisting. The boat crews for the SEALs routinely work out with and carry around the equivalent of a telephone pole. When they screw up, they get to meet a very special telephone pole, this 350-lb. pup nicknamed “Misery.”

    How to Get This Type of Shot

    This is fill flash, by the way. Just a little, –2 EV or so. Without a small pop of light under that log shadow, his face will disappear, and your editor will bypass the picture in search of something more reproducible. That is a crucial part of your mission, not just to observe and shoot, but to make sure what you come back