Joe McNally Photography

Looking forward to hanging with Scott Kelby and the gang down at Tampa this week. (Click on the image above.) Scott and I did a video together in NYC recently, where we started in the wee hours, right at my studio, in the equipment garage, packing the truck and talking our way through the shoot. We talk about the whole deal, from why certain equipment gets brought or not, to strategies for survival on assignment, to location difficulties and solutions. And not just the nuts and bolts. We talk back and forth about the why of a job, the choice of a subject and the motivation to put your camera to your eye in the first place. And, we wander through the workroom, checking out the stuff on the walls, the accumulation of thirty years of imagery, sprung from travels to what is now over 60 countries.

See the picture up above? I look a bit reserved, don’t I? Calm, almost. Well, as you know, it’s anything but calm when Scott and I get together, yakking as we will in the studio on Wednesday night, and also in the location video we did this summer. It’ll be no holds barred, and all questions welcome. Here’s the link to register.

During the day of the video, I shot dance in NYC, at the old Brooklyn Navy Yard, which was a kick, and something I have always loved doing. Below are a couple of shots we generated that day, one with Jonathan, an amazing dancer who uses the urban environment of NY as a springboard for his artistry, and the other with Jenny Ringer, one of the most elegant principal dancers with the New York City Ballet. Just a great day at a great location.

Hope to chat with you on Wednesday!  More tk….

Onboard a Delta jet, bound for Partnercon in San Diego on behalf of my buds at Adorama. Should be a lot of fun, though I am usually responsible for bringing bad weather to that perennially balmy city. I think they had five overcast days last year, and I was there for all of them.

I fly a lot. And there’s been some doozies this year, for sure. I was recently on a flight that was really, pretty much, Darwin’s waiting room with wings. We were in a plane stuffed to the rafters, all of us, including me, feeling a day late and a dollar short.

It’s always entertaining (if you have a  broad definition of entertainment) to be right next to the bathrooms on long flights. I try to use the loo right away, before it’s gets to looking and smelling like a recently flooded basement. Then, being an inveterate people watcher, I just settle in and regard the traffic.

On a recent flight, a lady came up and stood in front of me—right in front of me—waiting her turn. Now she had a posterior that should have been ticketed all on its’ own, in my opinion. Lordie, this was a work of art, years in the making. Broad, expansive and undulating, it was a bit like the Great Plains (which we were at that moment flying over) stuffed into a pair of sturdy jeans.

The way this particular plane was configured, I was in the emergency exit aisle seat, with no seats in front of me, just the wall to the bathroom. In deference to aisle traffic, she understandably kind of squeezed in towards my seat, to let people pass by. I all of a sudden found myself in close orbit with a very large moon. My eyes grew wide. My beloved wife Annie, sitting across the aisle, looked at me with concern, knowing I have tendency to be improvisational, being a photographer.

Then—she started to exercise. Yep. Right there in front of me. One legged knee bends, stretches, waist bends, all done in a fairly slow rhythmic fashion. It was hypnotic, really, sort of like watching a very large pendulum. Up, down, right, left. My face started to follow it. Up, down, right, left.

At this point, Annie’s left eyebrow, which I have described in the past as being attached to a steam driven catapult, is fairly dancing off the bottoms of the overhead bins, and her expression has gone from mild consternation to outright alarm. Her eyes were alive with messages, the unspoken language of marriage, and she reached across with an US magazine featuring Kim somebody or other in an effort to divert her nut job of a mate from doing something irretrievably stupid, just for the sheer giggle of it.

Thankfully, the bathroom vacated and the lady in question disappeared within. I was thankful at that moment I don’t have x-ray vision.

It was great theater, though, and it wasn’t over. A bit later, a lady with enormous, spiked high heels went to use the facilities, and she came out with, oh, about 15 or so inches of toilet paper attached to one of those heels. Oblivious, she trooped up the aisle, with this totem of her recent activities trailing behind her, a bit like the string of cans attached to the rear bumper of the newlywed’s car.

Seems all of my seatmates of late have been sort of large and grumpy as well, which hasn’t been fun. One gentleman, who should have purchased about 30% of my seat, pulled out his Ipad and began to play high speed poker right away when we hit 10,000 feet. He held it in his left hand, and furiously punched and pulled cards with his right index finger. Unfortunately, his right elbow was also connected to that index finger.

Now, I enjoy a massage as much as the next person, but having my ribs tattooed by somebody’s poker playing elbow doesn’t classify as pleasurable. I shifted as far as I could to the right of my seat, but after a couple hours of this I finally took my laptop, put it on my knees and raised my tray table upright in the defensive position, forming a wall between his seat and mine.

Being both male, it got real mature, real fast. We kept eyeballing each other over my impromptu castle battlement like a pair of five year olds having a turf war in the playground. I swear if I had some of my old plastic soldiers I would have lined them up on the armrest and started making machine gun noises.

It’s been a little nutty up there lately. More tk…

Leaving Moab, Utah. I’m heading home, and Moose is heading for the wild blue yonder, somewhere over Texas. With him goes the Digital Landscape Workshop Series, one of the most durable, inspirational, educational efforts in the world of photography. Moving on.

Like a favorite TV series that comes to wistful but logical ending, DLWS has staged its’ last episode. Moose, redoubtable shooter that he is, has been re-inventing himself for a while now, and sees a future up there in the skies, with the fly boys, and perhaps not as much with the bears and the birds. Not that he’s utterly leaving landscape and wildlife behind, he’s just, as all good shooters do, migrating a bit, following his eye and his heart, and seeing how his formidable skills translate aloft. He’s not really abandoning his vast legacy as a natural history shooter, he’s just adding another chapter in the adventure book.

Me, I’m heading back to concrete. It’s been a wonderful ride, being on the faculty of DLWS. I visited parks and places (and yes, rocks and stumps) that I would not have encountered otherwise. You see, no magazine editor in their right mind would think of me first to go do a story on Yosemite Park, or the great lighthouses of East Coast. (Unless they made the assignment in the afternoon, and they had belted a few at lunch. That’s been know to happen in the world of journalism.)

I always had a bit of a cheeky attitude towards wandering around a park, teasing Moose that “I never met a landscape I couldn’t make better by putting a person in front of it.” But, truth be told, it’s been a thrilling ride throughout the natural wonders of this country. I’ve actually made some good landscape photos, mostly because I occasionally had the good sense to stand next to Moose’s tripod, and peer at his settings over his shoulder.

So, now, at the conclusion of the last of these workshops, I did in fact put a person in front of a landscape. My good friend Moose, out there on the highway. A portrait that’s a bit of both worlds–standing on a seemingly endless, battered ribbon of tarmac, bounded by sage, scrub, mountains and sky. For the technically minded, this is two SB900 flash units, a white interior 24″ Ezybox, and a little skip fill off a tri-grip on the road. Good light, which is something Moose knows quite a bit about.

Be well, and shoot straight, my friend. Continue to enjoy this wander with a camera in your hands, even now, as it leads you into the clouds. More tk…

Last week, I was tied to NYC, pleasantly so, via PPE, that annual, orgiastic, nearly pagan celebration of the pixels held at the Javits Center, hard by the Hudson.  It’s hard for me. I haven’t caught up to the last two new things yet, and here we are, face to face with the next new thing.

One good thing I did to clear my head was go airborne. I checked the weather, and NY was visited last week with one of those fall days, the kind of which happen only occasionally, a day that brushes over the city like a beautifully scented broom, sweeping the lingering, stale sweat of summer out to sea. As Bruce Cockburn sings, it lets the bad air out.

As a NY shooter, I almost feel it’s an almost religious obligation to update skyline views of NY. The city is dynamic, and the skyline changes and morphs over time. The energy down at the street can’t sprawl outwards—it ain’t Vegas, hemmed in by nothing but sand and cactus. In response to people, money, numbers, time, and the determination to recover from disaster, the heartbeat of the city pulses relentlessly upwards.

I made arrangements with Pete Zanlunghi of Air Metro, who I’ve flown with over twenty years. (Been flying so long over the city I flew with his dad, Chuck, who was the legendary dean of the chopper pilots who ply the nervous airways over the city.) I also called my bud, RC Concepcion, because I know he is in relentless search of good overviews of his hometown. I simply told RC I got us a spot with a great view. He was psyched. I called him back and told him to bring a sweater. I didn’t tell him our vantage point was going to have blades and a tail rotor.

I’ve got hundreds of hours by now in all manner of these nimble hummingbirds of the sky. In certain areas of the world, I’ve gotten into some prudence might have dictated avoiding, but then, I always feel, the pilot knows the machine, so I place my trust in that knowledge. It’s worked out so far. It’ actually really fun to cowboy around with bush pilots out in the hinterlands, in relatively uncontrolled airspace. They get their ya-ya’s out, and can park you in the sky in some some pretty cool places, like just about inside one of the dishes at the Very Large Array.

I even taught a helicopter workshop once, in Dubai. I was dubious. I mean, it’s hard to make a workshop out of, “Hold the camera steady, and point it at something interesting.” But, we did one day prep, and one flight the next morning, and as I thought my way into it, there was a fair amount of strategizing and, I don’t know, knack, might be a good word, that can be discussed. You do it, practice it, and eventually you develop a knack for it.

This particular workshop was interrupted by a huge fire that just blew up, while we were in the air. One of the Dubai skyscrapers just turned into a sixty story matchstick. Strange stuff happens up there sometimes.

Camera holding is crucial, obviously. I don’t use an external gyro, which is probably anathema to some airborne shooters. I just find them useless weight on the drag strip. I try to insulate the camera with my body, trying to cushion it against the vibration of the bird. I brace, anticipate the shot, and squeeze. I shoot on consecutive high, always, and try to be mindful of the buffer as I track into and approach the crucial frame.

Been back from Beijing for a bit now, and cranking away, finishing a new book, Sketching Light. I’ll be done writing in a couple of days, which is good, or I’m gonna go blooey. My long suffering editor at Peachpit, Ted Waitt, probably thinks I already have, and I’m holed up like the Unabomber in a shack someplace, with an old Royal typewriter and a kerosene lamp, laboriously typing out a change of heart manifesto titled, “Flash is Bad.”

Had the pleasure of shooting with a bunch of good photogs over there, Trey Ratcliff amongst them. He’s a terrific shooter, with an amazing touch for HDR. He also uses his Ipad as a bit of a flying carpet, zooming around, doing videos, interviews, and BTS stuff with it as he shoots. By contrast, Mongo here just use it to see movie on plane.

Very graciously, he shot a couple of chats we had and posted them up over on G+. We talked a bit about the picture above–this elegant Chinese musician at the Peony Pavilion opera. It’s an ISO 2000 shot on a D3S, out of camera, with no noise reduction. Not a photo to rattle anybody’s timbers, but I simply enjoyed the serenity and the expertise this young lady demonstrated during the performance. I found myself tuning into the music, honestly, more so than the actual staging of the show. Trey has since posted up a part 2 of the Ipad chat here. Speaking of Google Plus, we’re going to get more active on it shortly. Right now, just about every keystroke is about the book. Sigh….

Beijing was fascinating, as it has always been. Eventually going to post some stuff that dates back to my original visit there in 1987, but for now, thought I ‘d throw some stuff up from the recent trip.

At the Water Cube…..

Science Museum. Amazing the tools we have now. ISO 1600, D3S, 16mm fish, AF. I’m not looking through the camera. I’ve got it extended at arm’s length, over a glass splash board down into the bubble bath these kids are playing with. Try that with a non AF film camera….

More tk….