I finally got the opportunity to spend two days in the company on Joe McNally at a seminar arranged by Sharlie Douglas of Nikon and Larry Wheeler of Houston Camera Exchange. While the audience was primarily made up of Nikon users, I wasn't the lone Canonista. I also learned some areas where Nikon Speedlights have advantages over Canon Speedlites. Like the David Ziser ‘Captured by the Light' evening I attended the previous week, the two days with Joe were both educational and entertaining.
The venue was the auditorium at the George R. Brown Education Center at the Houston Zoo. This theater-like setting presented some location challenges and that added to the event in my view. Besides the tech-talk and the insights from his career experiences, for me the highlights were watching Joe craft his images, setting the base then adding light and color to get to the final image. These were photographs being made, not taken.
In the iPhone4 image below, Joe crafts a band-like group portrait with green-gelled lights for the background and flashes fitted with Honl grids to tighten the illumination on the faces of the models (well, two models and a member of the audience filling in).
From his low angle and capturing his tethered images on the screen in the background he was able to echo the image multiple times in one shot.[ad name=”post”]This being the houston Zoo, they brought in a Macaw for Joe to photograph. In the iPhone4 image below the Macaw and her handler are being illuminated by two SB900 speedlights through a 3 x 6 Lastolite panel.
On the second day of the seminar, Joe moved on to large flash units and large light shaping tools such as the 74-inch Octa in the image below of the handler with a snake
Joe also did an amazing set with a local bodybuilder, low-key lighting, black background, red highlights on the side to define the musculature. Watching Joe build up these images was, quite simply, fascinating while at the same time, despite being in houston, not rocket science. I look forward to putting what I learned from both David and Joe to work in the future.
This was also one of the first times I'd played with the camera on my iPhone4. Looking at the two images with the animals and their handlers, the second image has noticeably less noise. While the ambient light may have been greater for the snake guy, the main difference in these images is that Macaw-girl is a single image and Snake-guy is the iPhone4 hdr image where it takes three exposures of the scene and merges them for a final image in-phone. The Macaw-girl image also has more digital zoom applied that also appears to be influencing the amount of noise. Despite being a low-light venue, the iPhone4 camera coped relatively well.
