Joe McNally Photography

Gotta love The Onion. First rate reporting.

It’d be great to be a Blue Angels pilot, I think. But having flown in formation with them a couple of times and having my head scrambled to the point of not being able to find my ass with both hands while these guys are flying wingtip to wingtip at several hundred knots, I know that’s not happening. Ever. Just ain’t got the skills.

Everybody has occasionally wished to be something else, or perhaps something they cannot be. I wanted to play center for the New York Knicks many years ago. My meager athletic skills and tendency to remain steadfastly governed by the laws of gravity made that unrealistic.

I’m sure all of us who endeavor photographically have met folks who want to be photographers, which is totally cool. I’ve always been of the opinion that we’re all in this mix together. It can be a tough gig, but also a wonderful one and thus very alluring, so questions and aspirations abound. And, once the photographic cat is out of the bag, a gear discussion often ensues. Also cool. I’m a gearhead, so hey, let’s talk f-stops. But then there are those folks who don’t discuss wanting to be, or the fact that they love shooting and are thinking of dipping a toe in the market waters, or they are working on a project and learning and seeking advice and pushing and getting better. There are those folks who coulda been.

Met a pretty confident, aggressive guy recently, while shooting this Geographic job that is currently turning me into an angst ridden pretzel. He went the equipment route immediately. No wonder. He had lots of turbocharged stuff, like, I don’t know, the Canon 3D Mark4S with the Eddie Bauer camo coating and the fast glass with the low rider flame decals. I was, you know, respectful, saying intelligent, pithy things, like “Whoah.” And, “Cool.” Maybe the occasional, “Yeah!”

It was an extensive recitation, to be sure. He flat out said he really had the gear down, knew how to work all of that stuff and that he could be a photog. Lock solid. Done deal. Shoots lots of pictures.  Then, he got thoughtful and said, “My big problem is content.”

You know how you’re smiling at someone and there’s that moment where your face just kinda gets fixed and slightly immobile, cause it doesn’t know what to do next? You keep smiling, but it feels like somebody just slapped on a quick facial mask, one of those gooey, crusty, pomagranate, blue green algae seaweed paste numbers? A glazing, if you will.

What do you say? In my head I’m screaming, like, “That’s a pretty big problem, dude!” But I think I mumbled something about just hanging in and working it.

Happens, right? I had someone once, swear to God, say to me that they could be a photographer, but they just didn’t have the time. I kind of spluttered a reply, something like, yeah, wow, it can be time consuming. You’d have to take fewer shifts on the lube rack.

I love photographic dreams and aspirations. Got a ton of ‘em, even still. I love looking at pictures and sorting out ideas. Especially at a workshop, where there is one essential element in the room all of us share–the desire to find the next level. It’s great looking at work, especially a project, ’cause that set of pictures is really a road map to how that person thinks and feels. That’s why picture editors I came up working for wanted to see your contact sheets, not just your greatest hits. Your contact sheets show very clearly where you hit it right, or where you went off the rails.

I especially love the fact that I still feel overwhelmed in the field. There are time I am so completely bereft of inspiration and ideas I say to myself, “I wonder what a really good photographer would do right now?” I’m not kidding, or being self effacing. There are some jobs I just feel like I’m standing there, the last human in a horror movie, and the zombies are closing in.

So you have to be confident, to be sure. (Or project confidence even while inside your head the insecurity meter has gone to DefCon Five.) But a healthy dose of anxiety and self doubt (”I’m using a 200–maybe I should go wide?”) are also important tools in your bag. Causes you to double check yourself and remember how fragile photographic success is, and while your last frame was Fat City the next one might be a ticket to Pismo Beach. The fact that you rarely have THE answer is a good one to remember. No need to focus on it to the point of paralysis. Just remember it.  You are only as good as your last job. The next one may just eat your lunch and your soul.

So I don’t have too much patience for the odd person or two or three or dozen who gives you that kind wink and cocksure nod about how they could do this bang on full time and you should see the fantastic stuff they just shot. I used to just smile and nod. Now, thirty years on in the struggle to be good at this seemingly easy thing to do, I think I just nod.

Oh well, just part of the human condition I guess. I mean, I coulda been a brain surgeon. I just always had a little trouble with math and science. More tk….

I’m in Maine, teaching at the venerable Maine Media Workshops. We had a great week, great class, nice bunch of folks. I haven’t told too many people about it though, cause in terms of cell phone connectivity,  I might as well be in Mongolia. The cell plan there might be better. I hear that after 9pm, you can yak all you want for free. Or is it, you can call all the yaks you want for free. Dunno. Have to read the fine print.

My cell signal I’m sure is out there, somewhere in the fog. Thing is I don’t have a boat. I’m land bound, so I drive around, looking for it. I find it here and there, glimmering at the end of the block, like a special effect in the movies. Five bars! Come closer, it beckons like a siren.  And then it vanishes,  just like those ball players in Field of Dreams.

We’re right at the water, so I’ve been thinking about penning a word doc on a thumbdrive and stashing it in a bottle, and hoping the coastal currents carry it New York way, just to let Annie know I’m safe. It’d be almost as efficient.

I’m operating my communications efforts at the behest of AT&T because Verizon lied to me. The man at the counter told me when I updated to the Storm that it’d work no problem on a Mac based system. A little software assist, and bing, the Storm would be smooth. Like buttah.

No. After two days of trying, which even consumed a freelance day rate to a tech savvy assistant, everyone at the office had dubbed my new phone the “ShitStorm.” Brad and Drew, on their way to Photoshop World, dragged my caveman ass into an Apple store to buy an Iphone. Which is what I made the pictures for this blog with. Thankfully it does takes pictures. Cause otherwise, that puppy’s just so much useless weight on the drag strip right now.

Oh well, it’s Maine. (Forget it Jake, it’s…Chinatown.) That beautiful stretch of Northeast that the rest of the country only remembers when they think about going someplace where it’s not too hot in the summer. Lots of nice folks up here. Though it must be admitted, there is a substantial, crusty group of natives who think being born in the state of Maine automatically bequeaths to you the right to be grumpy towards anyone not born in the state of Maine. And boy, in the summer, there are lots of those folks. Vacationers everywhere. Folks from the big city who de facto have no brains, can’t tie a bowline, get up senselessly late in the mawning, and are just uselessly frivolous because they weren’t born and raised up in good old Maine, the land common sense. In particular, if you’re not from here, you absolutely cannot operate a motor vehicle with any skill whatsoever. Given that fact, I drive very cautiously, so I don’t pull a move that will piss off a local. You never know. The person driving that pickup truck you just cut off might be a congenial, blue jeaned, hard working man of the land with a few acres and a barn full of cows. Or he just might be a genuine, deep fried state o’ Maine wingnut who got rid of the cows long ago and now has the barn stuffed with more heavy caliber automatic weaponry than a Somali warlord.

Nonetheless, people are on the roads, though. The traffic in downtown Camden on the weekends looks for all the world like the Manhattan side of the Holland Tunnel at 5pm. Why are all these folks here? Don’t they know there’s nothing to do here? I mean I guess there’s stuff to do, like hiking, boating, fishing, antiquing, staring at the fog, beating back mosquitoes who when they score it feels like you just got stung by a Black and Decker power drill with wings, or trying to decipher driving directions given out in a Maine accent. But most of these endeavors smack of relaxation, so I’m not all that interested.

Best reason I know of to come here is…ice cream. If you are wandering around downtown Camden and are not interested in buying a duck decoy or a hoodie with a picture of a lobster on it, head for Camden Cone. They’ve got this flavor I’ve not seen around before–black raspberry chip. Scoops of purple inundated with big chunks of chocolate. Only downside was that after I finished,  I walked six blocks with my empty ice cream cup, eventually just putting it in the truck and taking it home to throw out. Say what you will about New York, but every ten feet there’s a trash can. More tk….

Man it was rough at Kennedy. I mean, it’s never easy at that nexus of sweat, angst, nerves and fatigue nestled near the Brooklyn shoreline. It’s a classic case of way too many of the frayed, obnoxious and demanding being serviced by way too few of the disinterested and disgruntled.

The cafeteria line was really long, made longer by people demanding specialty food alterations that really didn’t have a prayer of making anything that had been baking under glass for several hours in the noxious JFK terminal air taste any better.

One of the guys slinging food behind the counter did a quick, mostly covert move and appeared to get his finger so far up his nose as to indicate there might have been something truly valuable up there, but, ahhh, relief, he turned around and put on gloves. Thank goodness….with the motley and colorful variety of pizzas served there it would be tough to pick out a booger.

I got stuck behind two pleasant ladies who insisted on debating the various tantalizing merits of almost every offering, but then got themselves one slice of cheese pizza to split and moved forward. I was right behind them at the register when they sparked a lively debate with the cashier about getting the pizza/salad combo price and were informed the discount didn’t apply to a piece of plain cheese pie.

It was all cordial and chummy, but it took several minutes to agree to the ala carte pricing. And then! Drumroll please! The search for the wallet begins! Both of these ladies had shoulder bags the size of say, a large turkey. They were both crafted in that puffy, fabric-y style that looked like they were stitched together from the also rans at last year’s county fair quilting contest. Colorful is the kindest word I can find at this writing.

Eventually, the wallets were found, and the aforementioned pizza was bought. Why do women do that? Wait for the cashier to tell them the total and have a hand out before they in turn reach for the dough? I mean, they hadda zip open these bags and begin a rummage that would make the search for the holy frikkin’ grail look as easy as a connect the dots game on a Denny’s placemat.

I would not have put my hand inside one of these bags. The innards were spilling out and looked a bit reminiscent of that plant in Little Shop of Horrors. I was waiting for one of them to belch “Feed me!” in guttural tones. I’m surprised these women had all their fingers.

See, men don’t do that. They belly up to the counter, $20 in hand, and just fork it over. Like Robin Williams says, you get your McBurger and fries, grab your McChange and get the McFuck outta there. Maybe it’s cause we all remember our first illegal beer bought at a bar and we had no idea what it was gonna cost so we had a twenty ready to go so as not to get embarrassed by having to fish out some extra dough on the spot. Dunno. Might be genetic. Might be that chromosome right next to the one that causes Male Refrigerator Blindness.

Back to the ladies. Oh, we’re not done!  They also asked for cokes with lots of ice cause they had just got back from Europe, and you know, “In Europe, they just don’t serve anything with ice! I mean, really! They drink their soda warm! Can you imagine? And you can’t get tap water anywhere, it’s all in bottles, they cost like $6 each! I tell you, we’re glad to be back in America!”

And by golly, we’re glad to have you back…

I got on the plane and was seated next to someone who was part of a group that couldn’t get seats together so they were shouting to each other over the aisles. Pleasant. My neighbor allowed in a loud voice as he probably shouldn’t have just had those 4 beers. It was a swell flight. More tk…..

I spend a lot of time on the road, so coming back to the mail is interesting. I got this not too long ago, Hmmmm. A very big promo piece for a very big book called The End, by the excellent photog Rodney Smith. The blad contained text from Rodney describing these tough times we are currently experiencing. “Gone are the days of luxurious photo-shoots with gold-gilded Hasselblads and caviar-encrusted lunchtime snacks.”

Hmmmm. I don’t miss the above described days because I don’t remember them. Last time I checked, there was nothing at Subway encrusted in caviar, and I shot Mamiya for my 120 system ’cause I couldn’t focus a Hasselblad worth spit. The promo is, as I mentioned, huge, and lavishly presented. The accompanying, hyperbolic, hopefully tongue-in-cheek intro alludes to it being “the kind of book that will set the tongues of the artistic community wagging for a thousand years.”

The book will no doubt take it’s place in the ranks of stylish efforts, as Mr. Smith is indeed a stylish and successful photog. Again, from the front matter….”An unparalleled artistic masterpiece, this book is monstrously expensive and is being produce as a Very Limited Edition…. ” Further, the book “should only be handled while wearing white gloves.” And, “its profound imagery, compounded by its brain-teasing text, comes with a stern warning: Please consult your physician or therapist before perusing its contents.” It states that “every Smith photograph is a canny encapsulation of an essential cosmic truth.”

In addition to stylish and successful, did I mention ballsy?

The accompanying letter encourages the visual community to invest wisely during these times of economic duress. “In this period of economic crisis and hardship, we photographers must band together in support of our respective endeavors.” When Wall Street is a sinkhole run by people who are supposed to be managing your money but seem generally preoccupied avoiding doing 3 to 5 at a minimum security facility, and stuffing your cash in a pillow seems as good a plan as an aggressive mutual fund, what do you do? Invest in–this book! The early bird asking price is $650 including shipping, a substantial discount off the retail price of $750. The book is described as “worth its weight in gold.”

There is an advisory about the book contained in the promo. “Its value will only increase with time, making it a prudent investment in these tricky financial times.”

It might be the way to go. I’m on the fence. I talked to my buddy Bill down at Nat Geo about it and tried to convince him we should pool our money on this. Problem is, he’s got what’s left of his dough tied up in bull semen futures.

Now here’s an entry in the “big is better” category. THE LAST MAGAZINE. Picked it up in Manhattan last week. (Downtown, where else?) For $15 bucks. Yep, 15 balloons. Geez, there are some big pictures in here. And I’m not averse to that theory, mind you. At LIFE we always used to say, “If you can’t make ‘em good, make ‘em big and in color!”

This mag has taken that theory and, well, enlarged on it. Many of these obscure, out of focus frames should have had a healthy chat with Mr. Delete Button, or at least remained on the hard drive until the authors had passed and thus gained a certain retrospective merit. (”He shot this during a time when he was struggling to find his vision.”) But somehow, they got loose, got fed reassuring burbles about how astonishingly fresh and new they truly are, and just like the monster in the first Alien movie, they got real big, real quick. The title of this mag is oddly appropriate. More tk…

Gary Fong  recently sent out an ad blast special for Valentine’s Day.

Now lemme get this straight. The Fongster evidently thinks a GPS attachment to your camera is somehow a romantic gift, the kind you would associate with Valentine’s Day? Does it come in a heart shaped box?

It might be useful. If in fact you have this, then you can exactly mark the spot where she fucking dumps you. You can take notes and re-visit it by your sorry ass self every Valentine’s Day. And if it comes to pass they build an Arby’s over it or something, you can go in and have a Super Roast Beef sandwich all by your lonesome. My advice guys? Lay low on the GPS and go the jewelry route.

Down in Vegas. Drew and Lynn sat next to each other in the emergency aisle. We’re casting today, and Drew has the wonderful duty of photographing about 150-200 beautiful women. He better be careful not to crack wise or say anything male or disgusting about it though, cause Lynn’ll reach over and slap that boy silly. Lynn is such an amazing producer. I know, come Friday when we shoot, I can walk to the camera and put my eye into it and not worry about anything else, cause I know everything’s been handled. And Drew’s been great. He came into the studio back in October and started traveling and running things without skipping a beat.

Lessee…more odd, ironical stuff. Walter Isasscson just wrote an interesting piece for TIME about the future of newspapers. Tough thing, though, is he writes about saving newspapers in an issue of TIME that’s about 4 pages thick. The supernova egos of the scribes and pundits at TIME must be really gasping for oxygen at this point, as the relevance of the magazine drifts. They still are doing a great job with a fraction of the resources they used to have, but man….TIME was always the photographic flagship as well, even though it was run by word merchants. The very good picture editors up there, like Mark Rykoff and Hillary Raskin, always got good shooters in the right places, even if they didn’t use the pictures all that well. As a magazine, it lives in the world of words. As one of their more peacock writers once proclaimed at a location dinner (I was actually invited), “Joe’s pictures are the whores that sell the chalice of my words.” Hmmm…

Good stuff…kudos to Syl Arena for outing the sumbitch who was just cloning people’s blogs and running it as his or her own proprietary site. Syl led the charge, and the site came down.

Great series of posts from David Hobby. As usual, helpful, informative, and funny. The Harrington link to cute kittens killed me.

I’m ranting of course, and that’s mostly cause I haven’t been able to have my daily morning rant with my buddy Bill of late about the state of things and I’m really missing it. He’s had this crazy bronchial pneumonia, bronchitis, throat thing for the last month or so. He’s been going in to work, but unable to talk at great lengths. I told him it was very clever to vector himself into the work force as a one man viral terror attack. Job security being what it is, if he can knock off a few co-workers, it might be just the thing.

Its jarring now when you get his phone message. I’ve gotten used to the new voice, which is somewhere between Tom Waitts and Darth Vader, but the old Bill is there on his recording, clear as a bell. Told him I thought he should change it up to some sort of Joe Cocker-esqe greeting, something where one protracted, guttural vowel sound would pass as a greeting. This would be punctuated by a resonant splat as he pulls the phone away, makes a long sucking sound like folks do in a Japanese noodle shop, thus accumulating the contents of his nasal passages in the back of his throat, which of late has been something of his own personal Baikonur Cosmodrome. The splat occurs when he then hocks an enormous loogie right up against the plate glass window he has by his phone. Give him a call. I can give you his number.  It’s an altogether bracing way to start the day.

Back on a plane yesterday. Cell phone envy. I guess I’ve got it. I have one of those really cheap, simple phones. It feels like it tumbled out of a Cracker Jack box. But everybody else on that plane had some Blackberry, Noodleberry, or IPhone with like 300 apps. It’s like a cult or club or something. Moose Peterson actually blogged about being over at Scott Kelby’s one Friday night, watching football, and everybody started comparing Iphone apps. I was teasing Moose, ya know, like whoo…baby, what a wild night! Were the police called?

I mean the guy next to me sat down and just started typing into this thing he pulled out of holster on his belt. Swear to God. It was like sitting next to the Dirty Harry of Blackberry users. This thing was enormous, and had like flashing lights and shit. He could type almost as fast as my youngest daughter, who types faster than those guys talk when they come on at the end of a commercial and need to qualify what was just advertised. “Rates vary in some states. What we just said was bullshit in every state. We really didn’t mean it, what you just saw was a come on cleverly disguised as an offer so we could entice old people to call our 800 number so we can get our mitts on their retirement accounts.” It doesn’t really register cause they talk so fast.

So then we take off and he switches up to his computer which is some sort of monster Dell that makes kind of a Tarzan yell when he opens it, and man he starts peckin’ away on that like he’s getting’ paid by the keystroke. This went on for a while, and I just about had enough so I start pseudo-Photoshopping some pictures I thought might knock him off his stride a bit.  I’ve got the new Macbook Pro, the 15 incher with the glossy screen so there’s no way he couldn’t notice. That thing is so bright and contrasty they could use ‘em in the searchlight towers of a maximum security penitentiary.

It worked.I could tell he was sneaking glances, cause he started to make typos…heh-heh.

Today when we left JFK we had to make a tight turn to the runway and right behind us was an Air France jet, and I could just about see into the cockpit. In the interest of international relations, I pressed my face to the window and started mouthing “Frog Pussy!” I think they saw me, cause I swear the co-pilot was mouthing back, “Mick Bastard!” Runway fun.

You know I never really mean offense by any of that stuff. I’ve been on the road for over 30 years, and I’m pretty addled at this point, plus enormously sleep deprived, and that probably contributes to the oddball train of thoughts that trundle through my brain at all hours of the day, especially the early hours. I mean, ya gotta laugh doing this, or you’ll just start weeping uncontrollably. Remember in the Perfect Storm? The boat capsized and it’s over, and the tough guy on the crew, played by William Fichtner (who always does a great job) is standing in an upside down cabin of the boat, his macho exterior cracked and splintered, crying as it fills with water? As photogs, we could all just stop right where we are and do that. But I refuse. Hard as this is, just still love it. Love it, love it, love it. That essential thing, coupled with a mildly bent sense of humor, keeps me going. Bleary eyed, but still going. I’ve come to embrace the shot below as something of a self portrait. That camera made the entire 1000 miles of the Baja race, clamped to one of the dune buggies, and this is how it came back. Battered, beat up, but still shooting pictures. (It was a loaner camera, by the way, Nikon was not pleased.)

I’m sure they’ll box me up and cart me away someday. I have dreams about this sanitarium type place I end up, sorta like the one Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday ended up in towards the end of Tombstone, one of my favorite really bad movies. He’s in a bed, white sheets, white pillows, white walls. Everything white, then he can’t feel his toes, and then…nothing. His reported last words were, “Damn…this is funny.”  It would serve me right to make the passage in monochrome after shootin’ all that damn Kodachrome….more tk.