Joe McNally Photography

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….

Lessee….bunch of stuff….this just in, from David Hobby….many thanks to him from one half of JoeBob….me and Bob Krist did have a punch up on the new 900 video, and we’re thinking of doing a tag team guest appearance now on WWE;-) I loved Joe Bob’s reviews. Just loved ‘em. My kind of movies always scored well, in other words, those kind of movies where stuff blows up, the women are as fast and sleek as the cars, and there is a subtle exploration of the nuances, depths and shadings of the human condition…you know the kind of movie I’m talking about….sort of a “Harold and Maude Meet the Killer Bugs from Ice Planet X” type of thing.

David’s onto something with that chainsaw. I think I’ll put it in my cargo bags, and it’ll be the first thing I bring out on location when I get to someone’s house. Kind of an ice breaker, ya know? More on that tk…

Many thanks to Scott Kelby for the mention of the Geographic cover story this month. I’ve shot for the yellow magazine for over 20 years now, which is wild to think about. For me, it’s just humbling to share ink with folks who have gone before, like Jim Stanfield, Bill Allard, Sam Abell, Jim Richardson….list goes on. More on adventures with Wilma, our striking cover subject, in blogs tk.

Ahh, location work. Shooting the spread above, we slid into a Spanish national park at sunrise, because it offered the only glimpse of the type of rocky terrain Wilma and her cohorts most likely experienced in their day. The cave where they found the new Neanderthal DNA, about 30 klicks away, is now surrounded by deciduous forest. I was a tad nervous, as we unloaded things, cause we did not have a permit to shoot in the park.

I’ve snuck into more places and shot pictures from more spots that I ain’ supposed to be than I can remember. Nothing unusual about that. Most photogs wouldn’t have a portfolio to show if they actually listened to the word “no.” And there are lots of folks out there with the word “no” already teed up on the tips of their tongues. I call ‘em the walkie talkie assholes. Give somebody a 3 week course, a flashlight and a walkie talkie, and they can ruin your day. But I digress.

I was more worried about the light. Sunrise was not looking good. Pulled out an Elinchrom Ranger pack, which is my field light of choice. Gelled it warm and slapped a tight grid spot on it. Made some decent pix, but there was no rationale for this warm golden light hitting Wilma’s face, while the rest of the world was obviously gray.

But I should remember this morning the next time the light don’t work out, but, being a photog, I probably won’t. A slice of sunrise came through a break in the Eastern clouds, and hit the rock face behind Wilma. It was all I needed. I got about 10 frames and we were done.

Then we decided to move Wilma and give it another go, as it were. She is, well, not a delicate flower. She is 200 pounds of silicone wrapped around a steel frame. The best way to lift her is to circle round back, crouch a little bit, throw your arms around her ample pelvis, and basically give her a good, hard shag. Up she goes off her pedestal, and then you can trundle her, rather ingloriously, wherever you want.

We were in the process of doing this when around the corner came a patrol car with two Spanish National Park rangers in it. “Hola!” “Yes, she is naked!. But she’s not real!  No, its not what you think. See? She’s not inflatable!” The whole thing had to have looked hinky and kinky at the same time.

Luckily, one of our party spoke fluent and evidently persuasive Spanish, and engaged the officers while I told Brad to take the shot cards and put ‘em someplace the sun don’t shine. We were allowed to leave, along with Wilma. I miss her, actually. When she was wrapped back up in bubbles for her drive back to the Netherlands, it was quite emotional. I told her it would be alright. Even if we never see each other again, we’ll always have Spain.

Photo East is coming up, and the toy warehouse will be spilling all over the Javits Center in NY, with widgets, gadgets, biddybops, thingamawhooziewhatzis, fast glass, smart cameras, whopper hard drives, and a lot of yakkin ’bout pictures. I’ll be doing some of it myself, teaching small flash on Thursday morning, doing a couple stints in the Nikon Booth, and signing some posters for Epson.

A word about Epson and Dano Steinhardt. I ain’t exactly Moose Peterson, JP Caponigro, Jay Maisel or any of these kind of master printer/shooter guys, but Dano continues to be an enormous source of faith and support for my studio, year after year. He is one of those guys who stays in the background, facilitating photographers, showing them the latest and greatest Epson stuff that in turn makes their stuff look great, and all the while, one of the best kept secrets in the industry is that Dano is one helluva shooter. He makes incredibly beautiful imagery out of things most of us walk right by. I think the key here is seeing photographs. He sees. And then he distills all the jumble and cacophony that attends just about any walkabout of modern life into clean lines and stunning symmetry that makes sense, not to mention beautiful pictures.

Same thing can be said about Kriss Brungrabber and Mark Astman of the Bogen Corporation. Their commitment is unflagging in support of photogs, and photographic education. If we decide to do something together, we do it on handshake, and its a done deal. Good people, and Mark in particular, who has been out on a bunch of my workshops, is a striking presence as a photo subject. Sort of a William Holden who knows everything about Elinchrom flashes:-) I’ll be hanging in the Bogen booth a bunch, with my buds Bill Frakes, Drew Gardner, and of course, Moose.

Strikes me a whole bunch of the yakkin’ about to occur on the West Side of NY is gonna be about light, and lighting, which means flash. Hmmmm…..interesting thing, this flash stuff. Lots of folks playing with it, yanking it around, trying different stuff, myself included. It’s all good, some of it is even really good. But it gets me to thinkin’, always a dangerous thing.

I really feel alot of the conversations about flash and light we’re having nowadays wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for Greg. When I say “Greg” I mean Heisler. To me, he’s always been one of the one name photogs, up there with Annie and Avedon.

Greg changed the way we all see. He burst onto the magazine photo scene in NY, oh, about 1980 or so, trotting out Norman 200B’s, gels, camera work and color that popped our eyes, stopped our hearts, and made for legions of imitators, myself included. He started working for Geo, LIFE and doing annuals for outfits like RCA (Remember that name? Remember the dog and the victrola?) and doing special projects like Day in the Life Australia.

His take outta the land of Oz just flat out flattened folks. He brought to the pages of that book color and drama that had legions of experienced shooters looking around and going “Wassup???” And of course the next question was, “How do I do dat?”

In the years since, Greg has shot about a bazillion TIME covers, and done it all, from the movie lots to the halls of state. No one has done it better, or with more panache and versatility. He single-handedly changed magazine photography by introducing a “look” (I might call it style) that all of sudden re-directed the missions of magazines and editors everywhere.

Olympic athletes have been one of his fortes. I’ve been involved with Olympians to a degree as well. You know, every four years, you get a call and start working with these amazing athletes. Its been fun to do.  And every four years, like clockwork, I have had my ass kicked. I would shoot somebody, think it worked real well, and then Greg bombs into town for a day, no less, and leaves with this ass kicking TIME cover. Frustrating. Maddening. Inspiring. Head shaking. In a word….Greg. A look see at his website is a must.