Hot Shoe Diaries

The Hot Shoe Diaries

The

B i g L i g h t f r o m S m a ll F l a s h e s When it comes to photography, it’s all about the light. After spending

more than thirty years behind the lens—working for National Geographic, Time, Life, and Sports Illustrated—Joe McNally knows about light. He knows how to talk about it, shape it, color it, control it, and direct it. Most importantly, he knows how to create it...using small hot shoe flashes. In The Hot Shoe Diaries , Joe brings you behind the scenes to candidly

share his lighting solutions for a ton of great images. Using Nikon Speedlights, Joe lets you in on his uncensored thought process—often funny, sometimes

Big Light f rom S mall F lashes

serious, always fascinating—to demonstrate how he makes his pictures with these small flashes. Whether he’s photographing a gymnast on the Great Wall, an alligator in a swamp, or a fire truck careening through Times Square, Joe uses these flashes to create great light that makes his pictures sing. Joe McNally is an internationally acclaimed American photographer and longtime photojournalist. His most notable series is “Faces of Ground Zero—Portraits of the Heroes of September 11th,” a collection of giant Polaroid portraits. He also photgraphed “The Future of Flying,” the first all-digital story for National Geographic. His awardwinning work has appeared in numerous magazines and, in 2008, Joe wrote the critically acclaimed and bestselling book The Moment It Clicks.

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Cover Photography: joe mcnally Back Cover Author Photo: Anne Cahill Spine Author Photo: Mike Corradow Cover Design: charlene charles-will

Digital Photography

US $39.99 CAN $47.99 UK £25.99 ISBN-13: 978-0-321-58014-6 ISBN-10: 0-321-58014-1

McNally

Book Level: Intermediate/Advanced

The

Hot Shoe Diaries B i g L i g h t f r o m S m a ll F l a s h e s

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Joe McNally

Excerpted from The Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light from Small Flashes by Joe McNally. Copyright © 2009. Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders.

Contents This Is Not the Manual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

Part I  Nuts ’n’ Bolts What I Use…and Why and When I Use It. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 A Little Bit of Dis and a Little Bit of Dat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Da Grip. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Part II  One Light! A Place to Put the Light. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Up to Your Ass in Alligators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Good Bad Light. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 A Light in the Doorway. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 The Swamp, Revisited. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Tune in to Station “i-TTL” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Up on the Roof. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 How to Light a Fence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Cheap Arena Lighting. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Make the Sunrise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Light as a Feather. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Father Pre-Flash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 The “Killer Flick of Lig