Joe McNally Photography

James, who’s a welder by trade and a heckuva nice guy, picture above to the contrary, posed for my Santa Fe Workshops class yesterday. Shot this as a quick demo. Worked three SB units in this scene in an old power plant out there in the desert. Top light, gelled blue, is zoomed to 200mm on the SB900. Packs a pretty good wallop, even though it is literally two stories up from our position in the basement. The main light is a speedlight with a Lumiquest 3.0 softbox. Backlight, another SB, gelled warm. Pretty easy to do…the small size, far away position of the blue light makes sure the shadows from the floor grate stay sharp and defined.

Quick hit. Busy week. Really love it here. Always unexpected. After all, it’s New Mexico, where as they say, reasonable calculations based on experience elsewhere…..fail. More tk…

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…..