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

with can be printed.

     
    Step Right Up!
     

    “In this image-crazed world of ours, you need your pictures to shout.”

    Thinking up a shot like this, I feel like a carnival barker. Ozzie Smith! The Wizard of Oz! Looks like he plays shortstop from five different positions at once! See the bearded lady and the amazing fire-eating contortionist!
     
    It makes sense, actually. In this image-crazed world of ours, you need your pictures to shout.

    So how do you get a cool picture of this magical ballplayer? Mirrors!
     
    Oh, boy. Mirrors are great, but they are fragile, heavy, expensive, and highly reflective. I always remember stuff like that too late.

    We got them out to the infield okay. Got them tweaked and torqued, polished and cleaned, sighted and sandbagged. Ozzie was not in the picture, he was standing right next to the camera. He was lit with a strobe on a huge movie boom, flying overhead of the whole scene, just out of frame and looking back at the camera. I controlled the spill of light with a tight honeycomb spot grid [ 1 ] . Otherwise, it would have been flare city back at the lens.

    [ 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.

    Dusk was coming and I noticed something. Our white elephant of a grip truck was reflected in every mirror. A not-so-minor detail I managed to overlook while setting up.
     
    Couldn’t move the truck—all the power lines were running out of it. Okay, white reveals, black conceals! Quick race to the nearest fabric store. “Hi, I need to buy every yard of black material you have in this place!” Retailers love desperate photographers.

     

    Ozzie Smith

Joe’s Lighting Tips

     

     
     

    Things to Remember When You’re on Location and the Flying Fecal Matter’s Hitting the Rotating Blades of the Air Circulating Device.

    I have always thought of light as language. I ascribe to light the same qualities and characteristics one could generally apply to the spoken or written word. Light has color and tone, range, emotion, inflection, and timbre. It can sharpen or soften a picture. It can change the meaning of a photo, or what that photo will mean to someone. Like language, when used effectively, it has the power to move people, viscerally and emotionally, and inform them. The use of light in our pictures harks back to the original descriptive term we use to define this beloved endeavor of making pictures: photography, or photgraphos , from the Greek, meaning, to write with light. Writing with light! Cool!

    It’s a big deal, right? As a photographer, it is very important to know how to do this. So why are so many of us illiterate?

    Or more properly, selectively illiterate. I have seen photographers with an acutely beautiful sense of natural light, indeed a passion for it, start to vibrate like a tuning fork when a strobe is placed in their hands. Some photographers will wait for hours for the right time of day. Some will quite literally chase a swatch of photons reflecting off the side view mirror of a slow-moving bus down the block at dawn just to see if it will momentarily hit the wizened face of the elderly gentleman reading the paper at the window of the corner coffee shop. These very same shooters will look hesitantly, quizzically, even fearfully at a sourceof artificial light as if they are auditioning for a part in Quest for Fire , and had never seen such magic before.
     
    I was blessed early in my career by having my self-esteem and photographic efforts subjected to assessment by some old-school wire service photo editors who, when they were on the street as photographers, started their days by placing yesterday’s cigar between their teeth, hitching up a pair of pants you could fit a zeppelin into, looping a 500-volt wet cell battery pack through their belts, and snugging it to their ample hips. Armed with a potato masher and a speed graphic (which most likely had the f-stop ring taped down at f/8), they would go about their day, indoors and out, making flash pictures. What we refer to now as fill flash, they called “synchro sun.” Like an umbrella on a rainy day or their car keys, they quite literally wouldn’t think of leaving the house without their strobe.

    They brought that ethic to their judgment of film as editors. During the 1978 Yankees-KC baseball playoffs, I returned to the UPI temporary darkroom in Yankee Stadium with what I thought was a