Joe McNally Photography

That’s how it goes, right? Or is it mad badgers and Englishmen? Mad dogs? Can’t remember, but that’s okay, cause Drew Gardner reminds us in his lighting video. Lessee, this video is about location selection, apparently dead fashion models, trees, tractors, Elinchrom Rangers, booms, C-stands, makeup artists, live badgers, animal trainers, fences, lighting theory and diagrams, water buffalo with naked women atop them, smoke machines, smoke wafting, backlighting, sidelighting, mood lighting, post production, and of course, the ring master who can control the action in all three rings of the bigtop of his brain, the aforementioned mad Englishman, Drew Gardner. Check out this teaser. Drew keeps his clothes on (thank you!), the model gets a bit naked.

Drew is a piece of work, as anyone who has encountered him knows. He’s got one of those singularly crazy sensibilities behind the camera that always pushes the envelope of what is possible. Thing is, he has always got a destination in mind, which is great, especially for somebody who likes a story line. He links these pix into a narrative. An admittedly hazy, madcap narrative, but a narrative nevertheless. Witness his epic fashion shoots with fashion models in 6 inch stilettos impossibly outrunning heavily armed Russian special forces troops. There’s a bunch of these. Makes me wonder what eventually happens? Stay tuned! Are they caught and brought back to a nasty prison for the outrageously overdressed? Do the SWAT guys propose marriage on the spot? Or do the young ladies turn on their pursuers and start wielding their Manolo Blahnicks as fearsome, unusual weapons, ala Go Go Yubari and her chain mace ball of death in Kill Bill, Part I? I want to know! Drew, next installment please!

This installment is a load of fun and information, and pushes Drew further down the road of his ongoing forest adventures, which are already notable, and involve, as always, fairies, nymphs, real animals, animals from story books, exquisite staging and styling, a Phase One back and a smoke machine.

Ahh, the smoke machine. Drew has not got your garden variety, take it out of the closet every Halloween and see if it works type smoker you can buy at Partytime for $19.99. No, no. He has got a state of the art, industrial strength, planet Dagobah type smoker. Think LA on a bad day, and you’ve roughly got what the forest looks like after Drew gets done with it.

Check out the video, and Drew’s website. Quite mad, indeed. More tk…..

Been using more and more high speed sync. Gonna show some stuff later today here in Cologne that hopefully will demo the technique well. We have sunshine here today for the first time since getting here.

Speaking of sunshine….

Knocked this out in the desert last month. 1/8000 @ f6.3. Had a great time with some dancers out there and Drew had a blast with a Coolpix shooting this video….

Keep you posted on today. Gonna try for a shot I saw yesterday but couldn’t get to….More tk…..

At PSW in Beantown, where winter chill lingers. We felt it for sure down at the shipyards yesterday, where we went to shoot on the NAPP Photo Safari. Great day, great group, and a tough bunch of models who braved the chill in shorts (for a while) and open toed high fashion shoes. They were a hard working group. Cassandra here had great range, so I put her by the explosives bunker (live rounds in there, what could go wrong?) and told her to act out some sort of espionage type escape deal.

Lens was 14-24mm f2.8 (very sharp) on a D3 at 250th of a second at around F13 or so. Two SB900 units, group A camera right, and group B camera left, lighting the, uh, explosives. We had a, uh, blast. More tk….

We have a wonderful companion along on this DLWS, Hawaii style. Hannah, 13 years old, is here with her photo enthusiast dad, Richard.

Seeing her here brought memories back of my daughters as dad dragged them along on various photo misadventures. My oldest, Caitlin, went to at least 7 Eddie Adams Workshops. Claire came along with me to China during a photo jaunt for the Beijing Olympic Committee. Their reactions ranged everywhere from eye rolling bored to ecstatic. (“Dad rented a convertible!”)

Being female, they were invariably conditional and measured in their responses and willingness to participate in the miracle of photography as they got older. “Hey, Dad’s got this shoot going at XYZ interesting place! Wanna come along?”

Response: “Maybe.”

Hannah followed suit. “Hey, you wanna help me with this picture?” Her comeback….”Okay. I’m not doing anything else right now.” Okaaayyyy. Now there’s a wild endorsement!

She was a lovely subject, indeed. She arrayed herself on the rocks in the athletic, pliable way that is the province of the youthful (she is an all star basketball player) and let the wind take her hair various places. The light is one SB900 unit, camera left, shot TTL through a Tri-grip diffuser. Tried an umbrella, but that was truly misguided as the sea breeze made short work of it. Drew and I had a mildly hysterical moment as that particular light shaping instrument was turned into a jigsaw puzzle of shredded fabric and twisted metal in about, oh, 10 or 12 seconds.

Shot a few frames, aperture priority, minus 1.3EV on the camera, nothing dialed into the flash. Sweet and easygoing, just like my subject….more tk…..

So what if it rains all the time. (It actually doesn’t. We had a killer sunset last night.) Its a great town and the photo community is like strobist-style crazy. I mean enthusiasm. Creativity. Energy. And easy going to boot. Did a lecture the other night at the Planetarium (oddly appropriate, considering my style of public speaking) and had a great crowd of folks who came out to hunker down around photography on a night when they could have bought Metallica tickets.

We ended up with about 250 or so folks cramming in to see some pix and do a quick lighting demo. I think half of them were in the Vancouver Strobist Group. Its daunting you know, David? I mean, everybody, and I mean everybody, came up afterwards and asked, “Hey do you know David Hobby? Could you tell him to  come here?”

Like DH said in his blog yesterday, free beers-he’s there. Think about it guys.

We did big lights and small lights.

The big lights, as you can see, are courtesy of Elinchrom, which in Canada, means they are courtesy of Ron at Vistek in Toronto. They are the Elinchrom/Lastolite suppliers to the Great North country. They stepped up big time, and made the workshop happen. Bogen USA, my good buds, stepped up too, sending the William Holden of flash photography, none other than Mark Astman, all the way from New Jersey to Van, BC. As always, he was a huge hit with the participants, explaining all things Elinchrom and Skyport, and making his usual giant tacos out of oversized Lastolite twisty, bendy, light shaping tools. I have never seen anybody wrap up a light shaping tool twice their size into a bag smaller than a Subway half foot plastic sandwich bag with the dispatch and aplomb of Mark.

In the above photo, courtesy of Marc Koegel, the instigator of all this stuff by being the creator of the Vancouver Photo Workshops, the diffuser panel is being held by Pooya Nabei, local fashion shooter and one of the most gracious assistants I have ever worked with. He brings coffee with him, fer chrissakes, in the am. He will look at me and ask if everything’s alright, and when I ask him back he will say everything’s groovy, and he really means it. As he said tonight, he simply can’t believe how lucky we are to be photographers. Even after getting sandblasted, fried, deep sixed, nailed to the wall, kicked in the ass, run out of town, stomped in the head, run through the mill, hung up wet, and generally being read the riot act for the last 35 years, I couldn’t agree more.

SPEAKING OF GRACIOUS,  LOCAL AND TALENTED FOLKS…..CONGRATS TO SYX AND TARYN ON THEIR COMING BABY!  They will know if its a boy or girl on Christmas day. they came today and posed for a lighting demo for my class…..

Syx is a local shooter who does a mix of commercial and intensely personal work….which is how he met Taryn.

Also worked today with Zara Durrani, a local model who poses for the workshops. Late in the day, put a red and blue gelled light out in the street and a strip light overhead, and made a few frames as a class demo.

This was pretty much the first frame…shocked the shit outta me, I tell ya. Sometimes you just fall in the right direction. Finished the night tonight having a bite with Martin Prihoda who does this workshop called Big Lights Far Away, where he artistically nukes a daylight scene with generators and big lights, basically wrestling the sun to the ground and stepping on its throat. Cool…Thanks for dinner, Martin.

More tk…..