Seeing how Joe does it

I paid a flying visit to Islington in London yesterday to attend a seminar entitled “Location Lighting Techniques for Photographers”. The unique selling point of the seminar for me was that it was being given by Joe McNally, who regular readers of the blog will probably know is one of my photographic idols.  As soon as the seminar was announced a few months ago I knew I had to go, and I’m very glad I did – it was worth the 4am start that it required for me to get there, and was incredibly informative and interesting just to watch Joe work his way through numerous shoots in a short space of time and in front of a few hundred pairs of eyes.  And as so often happens, more was to be learnt from what went wrong than what went right.

For poor Joe yesterday, it seemed for a while that anything that could go wrong did go wrong.  Not photographically, but there were a few gremlins to grapple with – the temperature of the room, the buzzing on the sound system, a crashing program on his Macbook which almost curtailed one of the most impressive slideshows you could ever hope to see, an SB-900 which refused to fire and a projector which died a sudden death after being unwittingly plugged out.  He coped with it all though, and none of it spoiled the show.  As he reminded us each time, such was life with a location-based shoot.  You just have to get on with it.

And get on with it he did.  The day was split into five sections, four and a half of them dealing exclusively with small flash, with the last part of the day introducing big flashes in the form of Elinchrom Quadra Rangers and (I think) one White Lightning unit.  And these too were mixed with small flash.

For a while I took a note of what type of lighting setup Joe was shooting.  I maintained my list up until lunchtime and I counted over 40 different lighting setups up to then – each one explained, worked through and displayed on two large screens.  In fact he most useful thing of all during the day was that every single shot Joe took popped up on those big screens straight out of the camera.  I’m sure it was reassuring for everyone in the room to see that he too makes mistakes, and he is quite open about the fact that we all do, and that it’s the nature of the job.  What was most informative to see was how he would learn from them before taking another frame.

A case in point – Joe is a TTL flash shooter.  At least, that’s how I understood it before yesterday, and it’s true that he largely works with TTL flash.  But he kind of does so in a manual way.  His starting point when he adds a light to a scene might be to use it straight TTL and capture a frame.  He’ll see how this looks, and then make an adjustment to the flash power by increasing or decreasing the exposure compensation until that flash is behaving as he wants it too.  He’s not really letting the camera or the flash do the thinking, which is the way I would have viewed TTL flash previously – he’s just letting it find him a good starting point, and he’s manually pushing it in one direction or another after that.

There were times yesterday, and are times in many of his shoots it seems, when one or more of his TTL flashes will start behaving a little erratically, perhaps due to subtle changes in his composition or how his model moves.  Anyone who’s ever shot with TTL flash knows all about this.  His solution to this is simple, and a little surprising. If he gets a frame with an unusual flash exposure (having tried to tame the exposure with compensation), he’ll take another and see if it’s a glitch, or a more consistent “inconsistency”.  If the flash continues to mis-behave, he’ll just switch it to manual and leave the others at TTL.  At times yesterday he went to manual on most, if not all, of the flashes lighting his shot.  The key is to recognize when TTL is working for you and when it’s working against you.

He summed it up nicely, saying that TTL has saved him more than screwed him in photo shoots.  And indeed at times yesterday the very first frame he shot of a particular subject was just about perfect.

Joe had the services of two professional models yesterday – one female and one male – who were fantastic in front of the camera, but he also shot people taken from the audience, and for me some of those shots – in particular a corporate style individual portrait and a group shot – stole the show in terms of showing all of us how easy this can be once you keep a few basics in mind and keep control of your lights.

I’m hope Joe will blog some of the photos from yesterday, and if he does I’ll point you in their direction.  In the meantime, just to give you an idea of the size of the seminar, here’s a quick photo I took with a fisheye lens as Joe tried a shot with one of the models positioned near where I was sitting.

[Update: Just as I blogged, so too did Joe - you can see some of the shots from yesterday, including my two favourites, on his blog]

I think there were about 500 people present, and I wouldn’t be surprised if every single person went away happy yesterday.  If that seminar returns to this side of the world again and you have any interest at all in good portraiture and/or flash photography, go see it.