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

cobbled together this little Frankenstein of a clamp. I looked at it and said, “Perfect. Give me 10 of them.” Bogen has sold, like, 4,000 of ‘em at this writing. And Justin has his place in the world of photo trivia. In the Bogen catalog, the unit is the 175F. But it is listed at B&H as the Justin Clamp.
     
    o.o. This stands for “overt ogling,” or just “oh-oh.” It is a common crew affliction on a set where you are photographing a scantily clad fashion model. As the shooter, you can avoid this by keeping both eyes open at the camera. One eye, of course, is in the lens, but with the other you can keep your eye on your assistants and make sure they are watching the lights instead of staring at the talent.

    screw the pooch You just shot a billboard job, got back to the studio, looked at your camera, and found out you were shooting JPEG Basic all day long.
     
    skirt the light A black card, or a piece of cloth, or a winter jacket, or a table napkin. Anything you can tape or clamp to the bottom third of the light source to make sure you don’t light the feet as well as you’ve lit the face.

    stingers Leave it to the movie guys to come up with weird names for common household items. A stinger is an extension cord, plain and simple. The best ones to buy are the yellow ones with little glowing LEDs in the male end. That little light is incredibly valuable, ‘cause you don’t have to string 50′ of cord to your power pack only to find out the circuit is dead. Plug it in. If it glows, you’re hot, baby. Ya gotta love the movie folks. They’re like a tribe with their own language. I’ve been renting movie grip gear from Hotlights in NYC for 20 years, and I still don’t know the names of what I am asking for. Bob and Dave, the guys who run the shop, are very patient with me. They listen to my description of what I am trying to do, rub their chin for a minute, and say, “Oh yeah, what you need is a 6″ cool baby redhead!” “Sure,” I reply. I mean, who wouldn’t want one of those?
     
    stitch Leave little swatches of black gaffer tape on the outer rim of your lens shades—all of them. I call them stitches. Then, when you take the lens out of the bag to use and affix the shade, you can peel one or two of those puppies off and stick/wedge them onto the edge of the shade where it bayonets ontothe camera lens. The shade will be much more secure if you do this. Face it, most lens shades made by most camera manufacturers are basically cheeseball pieces of s#!%. If you bang them into something, they will fall off the lens and into the lake, or worse. Think of yourself quietly maneuvering to get a nice picture of your daughter giving the valedictory speech at her high school commencement. You are getting to a good spot, silently, unobtrusively, crouching all the way, and then your lens shade bangs ever so slightly into the side of a metal folding chair and falls off, skittering noisily across 10 feet of gym floor. All eyes in the gym swivel towards you. The imperious Dean of Students’ expression darkens in disapproval from the dais. Another parent retrieves it for you, saying in a whisper, “Here’s your shade,” but he might as well for all the world have been uttering that phrase made popular on the country cable channel, “Here’s your sign,” sure evidence that you have just done something irretrievably stupid. Your daughter’s face reddens, and she stumbles through the rest of her speech. She is scarred for life.

    a strong eight f/8 and a third. I can’t get used to the new f-stop nomenclature, like f/9, or f/7.1, etc. Comes from the film days when the manufacturers would sell us ISO 100 that was really ISO 80. If it metered f/8 at 100, you really needed a strong f/8 for reproduction.
     
    a tic up A tenth of a stop. Most power packs now are digital, parsing the f-number into tenths. On the set, a tic up is one click, or one push, on the button.

    underlensed You’ve got a three; ya need a six.
     
    val In our current climate of doing more with less (nice phrase for “there is no budget for this job”), as shooters we often find ourselves out there assistantless, and have to dragoon the nearest warm body we can find into holding a piece of equipment, usually lighting equipment. When you do this, you constantly have to have both eyes open at the camera, one through the lens, and the other on your unknowing, untested, newfound helper, who is doing a rapid series of calculations in his