Joe McNally Photography

Drew here, Joe’s first assistant/tech guy/personal darkroom, etc.  I’m the guy who helps Joe keep up with all this stuff when he’s on the road, as I tend to be back in the studio a bit more than he is.  I started working for the studio back in October, when my good pal, Brad Moore moved down to FL to assist Scott Kelby.  Previous to this job, I was a PA-based freelancer (website), doing a lot of work in the music industry… 

So, first off welcome to the new blog, and thank all of you for the amazing feedback on both the blog and website.  Hopefully, all of the little glitches will be ironed out very shortly, and YES, that includes the RSS feed issue (most of which “should” be fixed right now).  The amount of feedback we’ve gotten, and the speed at which we’ve gotten it has been extremely helpful, so keep it coming.

Also, wanted to give you a few tidbits about the redesigns, and say a few thank you’s.  We worked on the website with our friends at Livebooks, and would like to give a big thanks to Jon Lucich, Pochih Chang, and everyone else we worked with over there!  The blog was designed and coded by the great Lauren and Eric Murrell at Volacious Media, who patiently worked with us to bring our ideas to life.  They all did an amazing job, and without them, we’d still be tinkering with a sketch pad.

A few things have changed around here…we think, for the better   There’s now links to Joe’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc..  This handful of online sites can hopefully help you keep up with Joe, no matter where he is (and no matter where you are, for that matter).  Twitter is the place to see all his spur-of-the-moment thoughts, cool links, and other quick updates, especially while we’re on the road or on-location.  Facebook will be continually updated with all kinds of behind-the-scenes photos/videos.  The blog..well, you’ve all come to know what to expect here!  We’ll also be adding much more video content on both YouTube and the website in the coming months.

You’ve probably also noticed that the workshops calender is no longer on the blog- but you can check that out if you click the “workshops” link up top. That’ll bring you right to the workshops page on the new site.

The “What’s in the Bag?” page has always been one of our most requested items, so we moved it up in the right bar…just about any equipment inquiries you may have can be answered there.

We have a bunch of great ideas rolling around in the studio, but being that we have this incredible community here, we’d love to hear from you as well….feel free to comment anything at all you want to see, and it very well may come to life.  Any questions you have, just drop us a line.

Lastly, for an update on the One-Day Lighting Summer Workshops (click here for PDF), there are only FOUR spots left!  If you’re interested in getting in, email Lynn, our studio manager/producer at lynn@joemcnally.com.

Looking forward to bringing you a ton of very cool content in the coming months.

Cheers,

Drew

The world wide web is the deal now for photogs. Gotta have a website, gotta have a blog. I credit Moose Peterson with nudging me into the blogosphere. For about a year, he was givin’ me the Moose Eye, ya know? “Where’s your blog?” Every time I’d see him. “Where’s your blog?”

So did a blog, and it’s been fun. But our website and blog have never been synced up style-wise, till today. Credit to first assistant Drew Gurian, who has been laboring on these puppies now for some time. Happy to say, they launch today. Lots of new work, new design, new linkage between the two. Love for you to check ‘em out. (If you’re reading this, you’re halfway done!)

Lots of inspiration, great work and strong voices on the web. One particularly inspiring voice is Chase Jarvis, who in terms of innovation, creativity, and the sharing of knowledge is at the top of his game. He just launched a series of really fun videos called The Consequences of Creativity, in which all sorts of dastardly things happen to him while he’s pursuing an image. He falls off a bridge, explodes into flames, gets hosed down, and also gets run over by a fast moving vehicle. So my studio started buzzing, and well, we have a lot of sick puppies here.  One of our interns, Mike Grippi had an idea and here’s what we came up with…

a ton more stuff in the pipes..

more tk.

Can’t say enough about the folks at NAPP. They got Photoshop World coming up, and they be cranking on that, and at the same time, they launch today this cool tips and tricks show featuring Scott Kelby, and the other KMan…Matt Klowskowski. Now here’s a couple of guys who know, right? How many pages of the manual has anybody out there read? How many times do you get to a point on a job and you wish you could remember where that custom function was? Scott and Matt have read and remembered it for you. All that stuff– the bells, whistles, buttons, dials, dive planes, air horns, g-thrusters, and cloaking devices of the new digital SLRs made by Nikon are handed out in bite sized chunks of video. Gotta check it out. I did, and right away I had one of those, “I coulda had a V-8!” types of forehead slapping moments. The live view white balance deal Scott showed was very cool. As was the command dial feature Matt showed to scroll your pix on the LCD on some of the camera models. Check it out at http://www.nikondtown.com/.

I’ve been having a blast doing the Kelby Training Videos. Shot the above for a new one called One Light. Put myself in a box and could only take one light out of it. Used two lights, actually, but not together. I compared and contrasted approaches using one SB900 Speedlight, and one Elinchrom Ranger. Big light, small light, but always one light. Tried to push the envelope a bit and see what we could do with that particular limitation. Also, continued my history of tempting fate by combining expensive electronic equipment with large bodies of water by dragging a Ranger with an Octa (yep, the 74″) into Tampa Bay to shoot Bo, an unbelievably amiable, patient, terrific teenager. Hey, it was Scott’s Octa. Come to think of it, it was Scott’s Ranger, too:-)

Other news…very cool. Jeff Snyder sent me this the other day..the Bogen Tri Flash Bracket is #LSTF3PFS  and will be $69 at Adorama. Considering Jeff is close with the folks at Bogen, particularly Mark “The William Holden of Flash Photography” Astmann, he should be able to get a bunch when it comes out next month. Tried it a couple times, and it rocks. First did a demo at our lighting workshops in Dobbs Ferry last month, where we had the first one in the country, and Mark shot a cell phone pic of it.

I mean, we were shooting stuff like this….

And this….

And, yep, you guessed it. I got more mail about the Tri-flash than the fashion models. Photographers, we’re strange. 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…..

Amazon just posted one of their 2008 listings…..here’ the link…

Let me take this opportunity to talk about the guy who wrote #1. The guy who wrote #2 would still have a bunch of loose cannon thoughts, bromides, non sequiturs, and arcane mumbo jumbo rattling around in the sieve of his brain were it not for Scott Kelby, sitting in the back of a DLWS class, listening quietly in the shadows.

At the end of that lecture, Scott, the Don, the dean, the man, the legend, the “capo di tutti capi,”  leaned forward into the solitary spotlight over his table (no one else sits there, ever) and with the harsh overhead light still shading his eyes, pushed his double espresso off to the side, and said, “Joe, come take a walk wid me.” As I recall, everyone else in the room put one hand to their face in astonishment and fearful anticipation. With their free hand, they made a sign of the cross.

I think I know what they were thinking. “Joe’s gonna write dis book, or Joe not comin’ back.”

Seriously, Scott and I were on a lonely Vermont road, and frankly, the leaves weren’t talkin’ to us. Scott said, “Ya know, all ya gotta do is write down what you say in class.” He already had the title in his head. Honestly, he had the book in his head before I had it in mine. He edited the book, asked me the right questions, and the vapor in my brain became ink on paper.

He was the prime mover, the thought provoker, the editor, the mojo, the guy who opened the door. Most importantly, he’s my friend.

POOR WILMA!

She’s off the newsstands now, of course, it being November, but I remember feeling bad for her, kind of all by herself, in the middle of the science and adventure section, fer chrissakes. I mean she’s right next to Field and Stream, and their cover subject got fuckin’ antlers. And there she is in all her resplendent Neanderthal female pulchritude, all by herself. I was hoping they’d put her in the Beauty and Glam section, ya know, so she could give Angelina or Reese a run for their money. She’s back in the Netherlands now, with her creators, the ever brilliant Kennis brothers. Felt so bad, I sent her some mascara and some skin cream. Maybe next time, if she hits the treadmill, loses the spear, and does some tweezing.

Lookit all those magazines! Always amazes me. There’s a magazine for everybody and everything, I suppose, right from Spudman, Voice of the Potato Industry, to Compressed Air Monthly, which I’d be a natural for. Also this one, which I found on location.

Thought of sending them some promo stuff. Figure if I take two Bogen magic arms with super clamps, and rig a D3 on a ball head, clamp the rig to the arm rests of the next coach seat long flight I’m taking, use a 14-24, with the face recognition focus jazz, and program a timer to fire the camera every 3 or 4 minutes, I’m bound to catch myself drooling all over my t-shirt. Be the perfect ice breaker for sending them a portfolio. More tk….