Joe McNally Photography

On a plane….where else to write? Got to my seat, did the usual. Cameras in the overhead quickly, to lay claim to that real estate. Overhead space has become so valuable to get to first that, come boarding time, the gate agent might as well have a starter’s gun instead of a PA system.

Other bag….pull out laptop, and Bose headphones to weather summertime’s screaming children passengers. (I like kids, but on deadline, after a job, on planes, well, the bad Joe takes a bit of an inside word ramble. “You have a lovely child. Looks a little under the weather. Oh my! I’ve got some Benadryl right here!)

Ipod and Iphone go in the seat pockets. Power cord for the whole electronic shebang, should I be blessedly upgraded. Cards and reader come out, to download pix. Eyeglasses geared for the computer screen.

My “normal” walk around glasses have a progressive lens pattern that is so outright weird after 35 years of straining my left eye through cameras, while my right eye often stays open, that my prescription reads like an unsolvable math problem. My right eye will roam when I shoot, on patrol for approaching permit police, pedestrians about to cross the lens, misfiring flashes, editors with unhappy expressions on their face, and hair and makeup people poised on the fringe of the frame, desperately searching for the stray hair.

(The fashion folks are great, but their on set antics always conjures up a wartime buddy movie in my admittedly oddball noggin. Tensed and ready, they operate in teams, desperately searching for the offending garment wrinkle or slightly uneven bend of the guava passion pink lip liner. When they see it, they might as well be dressed as commandos. “I’m goin’ in!” shouts hair. “On your six!” makeup calls back. And boom, like style medics they are on your subject. I can just about feel the downwash of the approaching rescue helicopter on my neck.)

Anyway, my left eye bulges, ogre-like, into the eyepiece  and my right eye tends to pinwheel. This has left me with a combo that according to my eye doc should have me walking, punchdrunk, in a small circle all day long.

That hasn’t happened yet, but it could. I put almost nothing beyond the potential consequences of doing this thing that we do. The ramifications ripple through the rest of your life. I’ve been blessed by most of those ripples, generally. At least none has outright laid me low. But you know that it could. The camera is a machine that produces change. Every time you shoot with meaning, like a tree, you grow another ring. You throw a rock in the pond. Sometimes a big one.

Just grew another ring. My 15^th coverage for the National Geographic got published this month. (Fifteen coverages spread over 24 years doesn’t sound like a lot, but I took a break from the freelance wars in the 90’s to become a staff shooter at LIFE magazine, and thus exclusive to them.) Interesting topic, as yellow mag subject matter tends to be. The evolution of the electric grid in the U.S. It’s a desperately important issue, which of course, drove the magazine to tackle it.

Nothing exotic. No Tahitian sunsets, no blasé French couples coupling on bridges overlooking the Seine. No strange tribal rituals where boys become men, should they survive. (”If you wish to photograph these secret rites of passage, you, too, must pass the test where you pull the sacred ring of the maiden from deep in the throat of the massive river crocodile who happens to be in mating season!” )

“Uh, thank you, no. I’m busy shooting the electric grid.”

The grid had it’s moments, though, I tell ya. For a week, I went to work with lineman building the Tehachapi Project, in the Angeles Forest, north of LA. Tough piece of terrain, very fire-prone, very protected. Hence, there were no roads to much of the area where the towers got built. Helicopters were the vehicle of choice. The linemen would stand on heli skids, yoked to the outside of the bird, and get flown into the very top of the towers, little metal peaks they call “goat tips.” The foreman looked at me and said, “Don’t worry, it’s cake.”

Yeah, but cake tastes different when you’re 57 than when you’re 25, and have rubber legs. Barreling into these towers, holding on left handed, and firing a D3S fixed up with a 16mm fish with my right, I was pushing more than a camera button. You can hear the wind in your own wires, whispering, “Can you still do it, numnuts, or are they gonna take your sorry ass outta here in a basket?”

For the above pic, I went up to the tower early, and the chopper dropped me right where you see this crew getting dropped. I shouted to the pilot to make sure he put the crews right there, i.e., in good light. He screamed back, “I’ll pop ‘em any goddam place you want ‘em!” After I got dropped, I scampered (make that painstakingly put one foot in front of the other) to the other goat tip, where I climbed up and shot this crew going to work, which, thankfully, the magazine ran as a double truck. Great, clear morning. Got lucky with the light.

Every morning, I would stretch out, have a quick conversation with St. Jude, and jump on the skid. “Da guys” were great. More than once they would sling my Moose Pack along with their tools and lunch bucket, leaving “the old guy” just toting a camera. The chopper pilots were amazing. Precise as surgeons in the air, they’d pull wire with a couple inches of clearance, and pick and drop guys off three inch angle iron 300 feet up as easy as taxi picks up a midtown rider.

I got used to moving around up there, though I was painfully slow, compared to the real line guys. I found the “dead end boards” daunting. Hung from the actual cables, these extend out from the towers at precipitous angles, bouncing in the wind. Lineman walk them like they’re on a Sunday stroll. I was stiff legged, and held the safety wire with a death grip.

But that’s what you do. As a photog, you’re always the new kid. You get a brief, and you go. Pictures to be made, stories to be told. It’s that old Irish thing, you know, in for a penny, in for a pound. Rather die than fail. Actually, considering the earful I would get if I handed a bad take to my editor back at HQ, it’s not a bad philosophy. (I think that’s my father talking there. He used to call the obit section of the paper the “Irish sports pages.”)  More tk from the land of the yellow border tomorrow.

The Nikkor 14-24 f2.8 is a pretty cool lens, but ya gotta be careful tipping that puppy around, or pushing it in way close for a portrait. On board a nuke sub, though, especially with 30 degrees down on the dive planes, it’s gonna get a little tippy here and there, mostly ’cause you’re standing at an angle that generally is reserved for mountain climbing and the like.

It’s the perfect lens for the tight spaces of a sub. Shot this with a little fill flash the other week in San Diego, onboard the USS Hampton, a Los Angeles class fast attack sub out of San Diego. Great day. Hit 600 feet on a dive, and did some of what submariners call “angles and dangles,” which you can guess the nature of. Great crew on board, who really looked after us landlubbers. We were the guests of Commander William Houston, the CO of the Hampton, and Commodore Brett Genoble, who is in charge of the Point Loma sub base. They really filled us in on the nature of the mission of the boat.

Hadn’t been onboard a nuke boat since the book Day in the Life of the U.S. Military, where I went out on the boomer Henry Jackson, out of sub base Bangor, in the state of Washington. The boomers are huge by comparison to the Hampton, which is designed to dive deep, and move fast. Regardless of size, though, the subs are absolute marvels of space use and economization.

On the Jackson, crewman takes a rest just a few feet from a ballistic missile. Welcome to the strange world under the waves.

Up at Bangor, the sea lions like the warmth of the boat’s power plant, and just park it there all day long, getting toasty.

My thanks go out to the men and woman who serve across the board, and especially the crews who undertake this very daunting task and lifestyle. When they slide under the waves, they are gone for a while, and few know where they travel. Especially grateful to all the folks at Point Loma who made the visit happen. It coincides with a book effort I am currently writing for my alma mater, LIFE Magazine. More on that tk…..

In Moab, Utah, a good place to look at rocks. There are magic rocks, you know. Out west, certain formations have strange, almost mystical powers to make people disappear, or do odd things. Witness my bud Moose’s blog from a bit ago, where some guy named Joe Blow Tourist was sitting on such a rock, and simply vanished! Pixel dust. Ended up as a broken pile of bones at the bottom of the canyon.

The rock in question is not in Moab, it’s in New Mexico, the land of enchantment, brother moon, sister sky, and uncle indigestion. The magic of the rock was also visited upon Moose, albeit in a different way…..

Now here we are together, again, amidst the rocks. We went to visit a famous one this morning, dutifully arising in the blackness of the night, and traveling to meet the sun. Our group arrived in the gloom, and of course, there was already someone there, tripod arranged, clad for the long haul in the chilly darkness, shoulders set in absolute determination to get the shot. As we all would be, having spent half the night hugging a tripod, cold comfort indeed.

“Don’t cross that line,” was the cheery greeting to our gaggle of shooters. Understandable. Spending hours stamping your feet in the cold focuses both the mind and the camera, and it is natural to start to feel, well, proprietary, about this mute piece of stone. Reminding him that this rock belongs to no man, and we could all work together to secure a few precious frames produced, well, not exactly a gesture of teamwork.

But salvation arrived in the form of whole busloads of Asian tourists! I turned and saw so many of them flooding into this little piece of canyon land I thought I was watching a battle sequence from The Last Samurai. Bubbling with enthusiasm, each with a point and shoot in virtually every pocket, they quite wonderfully turned the steely, territorial attitudes of the pre-dawn into a something akin to a celebration of spring and sun on the rocks.

Being a people shooter more than a rock shooter, I applauded this event. These folks were great. Talked to a few, shot some pix with them, and then I noticed the gentleman who seemed to have developed a portrait franchise on the left edge of the arch. He posed everybody carefully, shot multiple frames, got subjects to twist hips and legs just so. I think, you know, I look, well, for 6am, damn good.

It was just a terrific, energetic morning. I love watching folks with unabashed photo enthusiasm, all shooting each other against this most famous of rocks, and shooting “me and my baby” shots. There were a few crusty moments as the mentality of “shooting the rock” met head on with the mentality of “shooting me in front of the rock.” But it was cool, and made the whole trek out there worth it.

And I did, at the end, get a rock picture.

Night before our canyon adventures, we had very different subject matter–an old ramshackle town called Cisco. I guess there was one similarity. Just like in the canyon, the old shacks and decaying junk around Cisco did not move. Usually I regard locations such as this as portrait settings. Tina, one of our participants, agreed to be a subject in front of an old trailer. Sun was pretty much down, so a put a flash in the distance, roughly at the angle where the sun had been.

Got an angle of incidence/reflection highlight, and then moved Tina’s wonderful face into the frame, lighting her with an EzyBox Hotshoe softbox (24 inch). Two lights, TTL, done deal.

Off to San Diego shortly, to the NIK Summit. Organized by the legendary Tony Corbell, this gathering should be very cool, and in, of course, a cool place. I feel bad going there actually, ’cause my arrival will probably interrupt their non-stop run of beautiful sunny days. Weather Jonah Strikes Again! Alan Hess already tweeted that he is sandbagging his house and preparing for the torrential rains and flash floods that will attend my arrival. More tk….

Had a great time earlier this year, teaching and working in Malaysia. Drew and I were the guests of Louis Pang, who is one of the premier wedding shooters in all of Asia. We were blessed to work with Evon Tan, absolutely one of the most fluid and creative people I have ever shot with. So much so, I wrote about it in the coming issue of American Photo (May/June). We hit the colorful streets of Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown, and just rolled for all of about two plus hours. All small flash, all done TTL.

Got one issue of the mag with me, so just plopped it on the floor of the hotel room and shot the spreads  real quick. It’s a fun read, and goes about as fast as we were shooting. Lots of TTL issues, off camera advice, EV adjustments on the fly, and the like. Fun, in other words. Like this very short video, again shot by Louis Pang.

More tk….

In Germany now, rotating to various cities on the 4th edition of Nikon Europe’s “Speed of Light” tour. Lotta fun, great people.

Worked the other day at Brabus, who design, engineer, and re-tool cars that sell for over a half million dollars. Yikes. In the showroom, they had a huge curtain made basically of strings. In the distance was a white wall. Hmmm…..

One SB900, about 80 feet away. Raw light, nothing fancy. Warm gel. Part the curtains, enter Eva. Blog’s a little light this week. Traveling like crazy, and meeting some book deadlines. More tk….