What I Learned from Joe McNally

When I signed up to participate in Paso Robles Workshops' “Hot Shoe Diaries” with Joe McNally, my first thought was, “Is this like ‘Red Shoe Diaries,’ but steamier?” I mean, they both involve gorgeous-looking people under great lighting, right? Uh, the models, not Joe. (You’re ruggedly handsome, Joe.)

Okay, not really. My real first thought was more like, “Holy Hell, I get to spend a week learning directly from Joe McNally with a small group of photographers, AND it involves shooting models the entire time? Heck, yeah!” It didn’t take much arm-twisting from a friend and fellow photographer to encourage me to sign up.



The Paso Robles Workshops are a fairly young venture run by Syl Arena and his awesome wife Amy. Homegrown and handspun, they have created something amazing in a picturesque town I’d never been aware of before. Paso Robles is a fantastic location, full of local characters, that wonderful small-town feel, but with a variety of cuisine and the best damn food concentrated in a four-block radius. When they say lunch is included with the workshop, do not expect sandwiches. A week in Paso Robles will be one of the best-fed weeks in your life. And let’s not forget about the wine! If you manage to recover from the hangover and food coma, you’re in for an incredible experience.



Joe McNally is a character himself. Humorous, down to earth, full of stories, and one of the best damn teachers out there. And he doesn't have a huge ego, though he has every right to one. If you don’t agree, then you haven’t looked at his work. Go look. Come back later. I don’t think anyone can understand how much knowledge and experience he truly imparts during one, short week without perusing his body of work. The guy is a quick-lighting genius. And he divulges all his tricks. He is open, honest, and generous with his feedback during critiques and in the field, and he never hesitates to answer questions in the same way.

I’m not sure I can fit everything I learned from Joe into one blog post, but here are the highlights:

1. You can be the most celebrated photographer in the world and barely be scraping by financially. If you’re not in this photography business for the love of it, you’re going to have a very tough time when the going gets tough. You’ll have tough times even if you do love it, and hopefully that passion will see you through.
   
2. You will never love every picture you take. Being self-critical is not a bad thing. It makes you try harder next time, or even in the next frame. And eventually you will get one shot that makes your heart soar and will obliterate for a while all the bad ones you had to take to get there. Keep striving and keep shooting.
   
3. It’s okay to turn down the best-paying gig in the world if it goes against your practice as a photographer. Saying no can be even tougher than saying yes, but sometimes it needs to be done. Trying to balance the need to make a living with your love of photography can be difficult. Don’t let anyone talk you into a bad decision just because it pays well.
   
4. The photos you love won’t always be the photos that are published. But it’s important to keep taking the photos you love.
   
5. You never stop learning, no matter how good you are.

Oh, I also learned some amazing things about lighting in very tough situations with small flashes. Things that I had read and comprehended, but I was never able to put into practice successfully. Joe forced me to put them into practice, every day, until it all finally clicked. The biggest “aha!” moment for me was this:

Expose for ambient first! Then add one flash at a time.



I know it’s simple. I know I’ve read it elsewhere. But until I was forced to do it (and fail at it a few times in quick succession), I could never actually do it. By the end of the week, I was having a lot of fun trying to add lights quickly and creatively to a scene, and I wanted to do more. The workshop was so inspiring, I wish it could have gone on another week. It lit my mind up with ideas.



If you have a chance to learn from Joe—and his awesome assistant Drew Gurian—or if you’re debating about attending a Paso Robles Workshop, do it! You will have no regrets.

…except perhaps a slightly expanded waistline from all that fantastic food!

I Don't Shoot It, So I Don't See It

I read a comment from another photographer that struck me as a bit close-minded earlier today, and I wondered: will I be that biased when I've been shooting for 40 years?

Now, this person is an amazing photographer in a genre on the opposite side of the "portrait" spectrum from what I choose to shoot. The photographer has won awards, been published in national magazines, and, frankly, has some jaw-dropping work I can only wish to achieve many decades down the line. I, on the other hand, am a n00b. I recognize that we look at the work we do completely differently, and our approaches to photography as a practice are likely nowhere near similar.

This photographer has been shooting for more than 40 years. Me: 3 years.

There's no question who the better photographer is.

But when this amazing photographer refuses to even look at another genre of photography, claiming they have nothing to learn from it, I am stunned a moment into silence. Could that be true?

I'm certain it's because I'm new that this way of thinking abhors me a little. Then again, I've always been a knowledge hound and am constantly looking for new things to learn, so maybe it's just a personality trait totally unrelated to photography. In my world, I can't imagine turning away from any source, no matter how far-fetched it is from what I may like or choose to shoot, just because I don't like shooting it. I would never think another person's work has nothing to teach me.

For example, I will never be a macro bug photographer. I hate bugs. Vehemently. Scratch-my-arms-to-ribbons-at-the-merest-hint-of-buggy-feet hate. But I still learned from it. I employ the "hold your breath and sway" focusing technique, and it's something I never would have learned if I hadn't viewed macro photographers' work and read about how they achieved them. I'm still never going to shoot bugs, but I'm grateful there are people who do because I have things I can learn from them.

The potential for lost inspiration by refusing to view an entire genre of photography also saddens me. Who cares if you don't shoot it? Does that really mean you shouldn't look at it, either?

So, dear amazing-award-winning-experienced photographer, I will continue to admire and learn from your work. But your bias I refuse to take as a life lesson.

Moving Pictures

Playing around with Animoto to create a short promo video. Very addictive.

Shoot, Shoot, Shoot, Pass Out

Been busy lately, which has been a nice change of pace. Things will be calming now as I prepare to head to Scandinavia and Russia in a couple weeks.

Here's a snippet of what's been keeping me busy:









It'll be a bit jarring to switch gears back to landscape and street photography for a while, but I'm so looking forward to it!

Launch of a Lifetime

It may sound aggrandizing to call what I experienced on Monday, May 11, 2009, the "launch of a lifetime," but it's quite the literal truth. STS-125 was the last—the very last—servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. Never again will two shuttles be posed on launch pads 39A and 39B at the same time, one ready to undertake the mission and a second on standby for rescue. It's the last time anyone will see that sight. It was equal parts breathtaking and saddening.

Space Shuttle Atlantis launched on a sweltering hot afternoon at 2:01 p.m. From seven miles away on the East Causeway, there's no sound beyond the chatter and excited conversations of the thousands of onlookers surrounding you. Suddenly, there's a flicker of flame beneath the shuttle then bounds of billowing smoke as the heat interacts with the water sloughing the fire trenches to create copious amounts of steam. Then there's this sudden, intense brightness as the shuttle lifts off. The light hits you long before the sound and is startling, especially from seven miles away. It isn't until the shuttle begins to arc away that the sound finally rolls over you and beats down your eardrums, giving the impression that the sound cuts out here and there because it's beyond what your ears can fathom.





I rented a 600mm lens for the occasion and put together a short movie of all the stills captured with it. It didn't feel right going through all the trouble of getting the lens to Florida and only using one still for a print, so this is my consolation effort.



In a few days, the mission team will return and Hubble will hopefully live on to 2014. More than that, I hope NASA decides to service Hubble in the future. I'd sorely miss those amazing interstellar images if ever Hubble were to retire.

A Little Noir

After a few weeks of doing nothing more than look at my camera, I finally had a shoot this weekend, which made me both excited and nervous. The model wanted film noir, and I went in with too many ideas. She was fantastic, but I really struggled with the lights. It made me long for the new JrX Radiopoppers all the more. I would have killed for a way to pop both my Alien Bee and my SB-800, enough to overpower the sun during late afternoon.

Despite my frustrations with myself, I did manage to grab a few shots of which I'm quite fond. I've only just begun to process, so this is a sneak peek.



Taken with a Nikon D700, 50/1.4 at f/5.6, 1/160 sec, ISO 100, one SB-800 above the stairwell pointing straight down behind the model.

It was a long, tiring session, but it felt great to be shooting again.

Creationary

It's nearly midnight now, and it's more than the recent (superfluous and idiotic) time change keeping me up past my usual bedtime. I've spent the past few hours immersed in other people's creations, particularly Imogen Heap's, and a slow, rumbling, glow of a burn has begun seething in my brain. And, frankly, the damned thing isn't allowing me to sleep. I want to create something. Now. Right now. But I'm stuck in this limbo between too many ideas and not one good one to throw myself at or up against, repeatedly, until I either bloody my nose or break through.

It all began yesterday when Imogen posted on her Twitter page that she would be approaching her biography and cover artwork for her upcoming album in a quirky, fun, slightly silly, and altogether brilliant new way: her Twitter followers—or fellow Twits—would do it for her.

A burbling brook of ideas bubbled up from my heart to tickle my brain with tingly effervescence. I'm not certain I can put into words the excitement and thrill even the possibility of working with Imogen for a week on an artistic venture inspired in me. A gust of giggly, wild ideas blew through me before drawing back in like caught breath to capture the details and colors and to desperately try to pin a few down before they fluttered back out again and far away beyond my grasp.

I've spent much of this evening relistening to her albums, which I've long loved, and perusing her past vBlogs on YouTube. And since I cannot do more than send along samples of my work and then wait, wait, and wait some more, my digging efforts to learn more about this amazing sound artist—"musician" just seems a woefully inaccurate description to encompass all she does—have done nothing more than to feed my creativity even more.

My photography and writing urges now piqued, the educational fuel from literary agents I recently discovered on Twitter, including Colleen Lindsay (mastermind behind the recent and brilliant #queryfail) and Angela James, has served only to puff at the embers of my ideas. Unable to photograph half what I imagined at the nonce, I thought instead about adding more to a short story I began a couple years ago just to get the creativity out and materialized so I could get some blasted sleep already.

Unfortunately, I ended up hating much of what I'd written on that story (still like the idea, but the prose made me heave a little), and that little flicker of an idea was quickly snuffed.

I'm unable to sing full voice, as I'm wont to do when this type of energy stuffs itself up inside me so much that it cottons up my throat, because the hour is late and my downstairs neighbor is an unfortunate gent I'd prefer to have as little run-ins with as possible. Especially after the hooker Christmas present he gave himself last year that ended up screaming naked on his front porch after midnight.

So I can only pour out here, a small sieve to drain a little of the energy out and stop the jittery bouncing of my feet and fingers.

But I know as soon as my head hits the pillow, I will think again of trying to capture the feathery, brilliant spirit of Imogen; of other dream photography assignments; of the neglected characters I left sitting stymied in ink; and of many more things unknowingly tangential that my mind hasn't even yet realized.

How do I get this out? Onto paper. Onto screen. Onto canvas. Onto scraps. Onto ink and color and words.

And why doesn't my muse keep more sensible hours?