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

softbox you’ve got up there. (Pursuant to Murphy’s Law, the size of the light-shaping tool required to achieve the desired effect goes up in direct relationship to how breezy it is.) So, given the possibility of a gust here and there, I usually tell the assistants to “sandbag the s#!% out of it” lest we stage our own version of America’s Cup. I lost a 12′ silk with the frame, a 12′ ladder, and a monster Gitzo tripod into New York Harbor on a shoot with dancer Gregory Hines. Wind came up, tore the silk off the high rollers, and it cartwheeled off the edge of the pier, taking a bunch of my stuff with it. (Thankfully it didn’t take Gregory Hines. That would have severely tested the “A bad day in the field beats a good day in the office” theory.)

    biddybastards These are what get into your gear overnight and screw things up. Ever do a pre-light day in an office or a studio and everything’s perfect? You shut down and lock the door, and the next morning it looks different? And not for the better? What the heck? What happened overnight? The biddybastards, I tell ya.
     
    bites Bogen Super Clamp, the ubiquitous metal clamp (movie guys call them “mafer clamps”). I tend to call them bites, as in, “Give me a Magic Arm with a coupla bites.” Bogen makes a swivel arm called a Bogen Magic Arm, which swings, tilts, and omni-directs all over the place. The clamps are often used to attach the arm to something, like a railing, or a moving vehicle, or someplace you might want to fly a remote camera. So you’ve got the arm and the clamps. An arm with a Super Clamp at either end is a Magic Arm complete, or an arm with a coupla bites.

    c-stand Short for century stand, a heavy three-part light stand. Comes in a variety of sizes, although it used to be 100″ tall, hence the name “century.” Always remember to ask for a C-stand complete, not just a C-stand. C-stand gets you the three-legged base (called a turtle base) and the main column. Bad move. The magic of the C-stand comes from the extension arm. This arm gives you the ability to swing, tilt, and drop a light pretty much wherever you need it, without stuffing the stand itself into the picture and close to the subject. According to Wikipedia, a variant of the C-stand is only 20″ at its shortest height; it is nicknamed a “Gary Coleman” stand.
     
    cheeseball piece of s#!% Any expensive piece of photo gear that works at the camera store, works at the studio, and fails in the field.

    chimp Click, click, click! Ooh, ooh, ooh! That seductive LCD…we stare at it often, a look of wonder on our faces, as if we are auditioning for a part in Quest for Fire . Try not to utter hoots, clicks, and grunts in front of the client.
     
    field of frame Means what’s in the frame and what’s not. I always tell my assistants to let me get a field of frame and then we reverse engineer the lightingfrom there. It’s not good English and may seem mildly obscure, but on the set, everybody always understands what it means. It’s a crucial first step on location. It establishes your field of play.

    flux capacitor The standard response when anyone asks you a highly technical, impossible-to-answer, howmany-pixels-on-the-head-of-a-pin-type question about a malfunctioning camera or strobe. “Uhh, lessee, did you check the flux capacitor?”

    fnugy F-ing new guy. Usually an overeager, intern type who everybody has mild sport with on his or her first days out on location.

    full boat All the way up on the pack, as in, “Gimme a full boat on that pack.” That means that’s all there is and there ain’t no more. (Give me everything you’ve got, Scotty! Jim, have ye gone mad?!!? The engines’ll never take it!)

    gobo Quite literally means, “go between optics.” Loosely, I use it on the set to refer to anything that flags off the lens or the light, and helps control spill and flare. It could be a cutter, or a flag, or a piece of cardboard, or your assistant.

    justin clamp During the aviation shoot for National Geographic , I was clamping small SB flash units to all sorts of aircraft with a real flimsy set of hot shoe clamps. (See “Cheeseball Piece of S#!%.”) I complained. (In Webster’s, next to “photographer” it says, “he or she who complains constantly.”) I complained to my friend Justin, then of the Bogen Corporation, which is the outfit that represents Manfrotto in this country. He came over to my studio with some off-the-shelf Manfrotto parts and