Saturday, November 13, 2010

One Day With Joe

Today was day one of a two day weekend seminar style workshop with Joe McNally. The even was sponsored by CAPIC and The Camera Store. This was my second time with Joe. Back in July of this year I spent a day with Joe at his workshop in Dobbs Ferry, NY. I gotta say each day I spent in the company of Joe, I learned a bunch and I came away with tons of energy and inspiration.

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The highlight of day one of this weekend workshop happened after we came back from a fifteen minute break. Joe had an idea. We had two female models, both pretty done up but one was in character as Marilyn Monroe. So Joe's idea was to create a paparazzi type scenario. He had the two girls in front of the stage facing away from the audience. Way at the back of the theatre he had one light stand with flash on either side of the room pointing towards the stage. Each of those flashes was gelled yellow. They were to be the "Hollywood search lights". In front of the models he had two strobes in Lumiquest Mini Soft Boxes. The killer addition was he pulled a half dozen Nikon shooters out of the audience and set each of them up with a hot shoe strobe. The fake "paparazzi" were told not to turn on the cameras as Joe was working his TTL magic from his camera. It took him about two or three tries to get the lighting right and then he ended up with this amazing shot!

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Wow! I think I got goosebumps on that one. OK, now my picture of his creation projected on to a big screen does not do the image justice but you get the idea. It was truly incredible to see Joe create that one out of thin air and end up with such an awesome shot. That was definitely a show stopping moment for me. And, I would be very surprised if a shot from that scenario does not show up in a blog post. It was so good.

I honestly can't say enough about Joe. It is twice now that I have had the privilege to see him work his magic and I am never disappointed. He is gracious, he is willing to share all what he knows and he does it without any ego and with so much humour and humanity. This guy is the real deal.

The best part about today is I get to do it all over again tomorrow. So good.

Keep shooting.

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