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

head and arriving at the question many folks ask themselves after they get involved in a photo shoot: “Why the heck did I agree to do this?” Anyway, you need the lights in a particular place, and of course he is wavering, slipping, drifting, yawning, and otherwise waving the light or the reflector around like he is saying goodbye to his kids on the first day of school. You have to constantly coach him, watch him, and direct him: “A little up, little down, come closer, hold steady….” Congratulations! You now have a VAL—a voice-activated light stand.

    valley of the gels Colleague Greg Heisler used to refer to this destination. This is where you go when you leave reality behind in the rear view mirror and work for a client who wants you to turn a cubicle workstation with an eight-foot drop ceiling and two 10-year-old PCs running Office 95 into the deck of the Starship Enterprise.
     
    white light bleed When you are careless taping on colored gels over the light sources, this is what you get. It gives you pink instead of red, powder blue instead of deep blue. If you just need a bit of indiscriminate warmth in your light, you can slap on a warm gel without too much precision. But if you want real color, seal the light. Employ this tactic when you are taking a ride into the Valley of the Gels.

    woof Once you have your field of frame, then you can go woof. Your lights often work best when they are as close as they possibly can be to your subject. The assistant moves the light in, and you have the frame locked down, and the light gets in closer, and closer, and then WOOF! You see the edge of the light. Back off an inch. The light is now as close as it can get.
     
    zero out The cameras nowadays are so bloody automatic, they will give you decent exposures, even if the inputs you are making to the machine are completely wacky. On aperture priority, for instance, your exposures on the LCD will look fine, even though you are shooting at ISO 800 and wish to be at 100. The camera makes the adjustments. It doesn’t care about the ISO. (See “Screw the Pooch.”) So to avoid this, every morning in the field I ask myself, or my assistant, “Are we zeroed out?” That means we got the camera back to the baseline. My personal baseline is ISO 100, Cloudy white balance, RAW quality (though now, with the D3, I will be shooting RAW+JPEG), and aperture priority. Those are the items most likely to be changed up during the day as we shoot, but that is where we start.

More tales from the barroom

     

     
     

    Let’s call it Louie’s East, in honor of that semi-famous dive that used to be on the corner of 41st and 2nd Avenue and which served as the unofficial watering hole, hideaway, strike war room, and confessional of the New York Daily News . Often, as a copyboy, I would be dispatched to the third floor, where in the din of presses that at the time jack hammered out over a million papers a night, I would pick up a few dozen one-stars, the Bulldog, the first edition of tomorrow’s paper.
     
    Next stop, Louie’s East. I would not return to the seventh floor newsroom. I would go downstairs, cross the street, and walk through the doors and into a solid wall of stale beer smell. I would then walk along the bar and distribute papers, and editors would phone in their corrections over a boilermaker or two.

    I’m not disparaging the place unfairly. It actually reveled in how scruffy it was. There was graffiti in the men’s toilet that read, “Don’t do no good to stand on the seat…the crabs in here jump 10 feet.” I shit you not, to continue the visual.

    It was part of the mix, the culture of New York journalism. Here would mix poets and scribes and columnists and editors and photographers, all reveling together in the imperfect and wonderful occupation of telling stories. It was here I think I first heard that old New York tabloid mantra: “Some facts are too good to check….”

    Tales got told. Here are a few…
     
    It Can Be Stressful
     

    Fighter pilots are great. Until they get to know you, they’ll use that responsible, technical military speak.

    “Yes sir, the back seat of a tactical aircraft does present a dynamic environment for the shooting of photos.”

    Uh, that means I’ll be hanging onto my a$$ while I throw up through my nose, doesn’t it?

    “Yes sir, it does, sir.”

    I was assigned to shoot a story on the 100th anniversary of flight for National Geographic , so I knew I was going to