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

underwater lighting business, who runs Hydroflex on the West Coast. Every time you go to the movies and see an underwater sequence, you will see Pete’s name roll in the credits. He’d just finished the lighting for Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys movie, part of which had been shot in the NBL, and his lighting units had been safety certified by NASA.
     
    That’s critical. If it’s not safety certified, it doesn’t go in the pool. I rented his lights and he came to Houston for free to help me.

    But underwater HMIs just lift the level a bit and don’t really give you truly shootable light. The real punch had to come from strobes. There is a structure that runs along one of the 200′ sides of the NBL, and I put ten 2,400-watt-second units atop it. A challenging aerobic workout, but how do you trigger those puppies so you can actually make a picture?
     
    Here’s where it got interesting. I went to 40 feet with a Nikon RS, a 17–35mm zoom lens, and a Nikonos strobe pointing not at my subjects, but straight up. At 20 feet there was a safety diver with another underwater strobe, also pointed up, slaving off my flash, which in turn triggered a master slave on the edge of the pool, which was linked to a battery-operated strobe on the pool deck, which was pointed at the office roof, triggering the 10 packs up there. Hellzapoppin!

    I felt like a kid again, trying to make a radio out of coffee cans and string, but it worked. The film that usually comes out of the NBL is 1600 ISO color neg, murky at best. I came out of there with 100 ISO chrome shot atof a second at about 5.6.
     
    Here’s to Mark Sowa and Robert Markowitz, two technically inclined NASA shooters who have forgotten more photography than I’ll ever know, and to my grammar school nuns, who whenever they caught me with a Fantastic Four comic tucked into the pages of the social studies text, told me I would come to no good. Or maybe a career in photography, which is a lot about not taking no for an answer.

    “A career in photography is a lot about not taking NO for an answer.”

     

     
    Improvise, Adapt, Overcome
     

    “Like a Marine, you improvise, you adapt, you overcome.”

    “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

    Contrary to popular belief, that’s not the official U.S. Postal Service motto, but is paraphrased from the fifth century Greek historian Herodotus. As has been noted, Herodotus almost certainly never delivered a letter.

    I can relate.

    I was sent to El Centro, California, which is the winter home of The Blue Angels because of the non-stop blue skies. It never rains. I’m very wary of the word “never.”

    I was shooting the Blues for a fashion story for Men’s Journal . I had one day to shoot it and one day only. The team was giving up their only day off, Sunday, to do this, and it was a big deal.
     
    Unfortunately, that Sunday it rained more in El Centro than it had rained in the previous 10 years. I kid you not. It was a non-stop downpour.

    Now a good rule of thumb to observe when working with the military is, no whining. Like a Marine, you improvise, you adapt, you overcome.
     
    Or, you use strobe.

    How to Get This Type of Shot

    Five feet from where the gentlemen are in the hangar, it is pouring. My lights are in the rain, in bags, with warm gels on them. I got a string of them out there and they lit the hangar with what appears to be warm, afternoon sunlight.

    There’s always a way.
    Lead the Subject
     

    Sometimes you just have to draw the line with your subjects and try (respectfully, logically) to use your power as a photographer—an image maker—to lead the subject where you want the shoot to go.

    After I shot the U.S. Olympic team in the nude in ’96, I became the “Naked Guy.” Hence Time Canada called me to shoot two Canadian Olympians from the 2000 Summer Games, nude, for a cover. One was a female water polo player, Waneek Horn-Miller, an Aboriginal Canadian and a political activist. (A very serious activist. As a child at a rally for Indian rights that turned violent, she had been injured by government troops.)

    The Canadian flag is great to shoot. I mean, it’s tough to beat that red and white leaf, ya know? So I had this huge flag lit up and glowing in the studio for a background. Her mom walks in, looks at it and says, “No way Waneek is posing with that flag.”

    Waneek walked in a few minutes