Joe Mcnally
Environmental portrait masterclass
FWWW.JOEMCNALLY.COM
irst off, what could go wrong when you are in the sweet town of Cookeville, Tennessee, in a legendary ice cream shop, with two amazing country rockers? American Young are wonderful to listen to, and an enormous amount of fun to work with.
So, the big bones of a good picture are all in place; great subjects, good location. Then it’s over to you to light the picture well. We were using Speedlights and the SB-910, which means line-of-sight TTL triggering, not the very facile mode we have now of radio control. There were a couple of challenges; I wanted to pour some light into the shop from outdoors, and I had optical sensors (slave eyes) on my units, out in the July Tennessee sun. In other words, those puppies out on the sidewalk were cooking, and intense sunlight on a sensor can interrupt coherent transmission of the pulse from your commander flash.
For the smaller shot (far right), I chose a Lastolite 4-in-1 umbrella, a shaper I helped Lastolite design. We used it in shoot-through mode here, as you can see, mounting three Speedlights on a Tri-flash. I set the exposure to: 1/500 sec, f/1.4, ISO250 and used a 24mm prime lens. Filled a bit with a Tri-flip, gold side up. We goosed the background with another threesome on a Tri-flash, on an Avenger C-stand out in the street. That one kind of just blasted some additional exposure into the bar area of the shop. It gave the background some pop, shadow and direction.
For the main picture, we shifted all the lights outside. By this time, the sun was gone and it was raining, hence the plastic bags on the lights. Again, the big umbrella was up front, raw light for the background. No C-stand for the lead light here, we went with a Manfrotto stacker. We were moving fast at this point as our artists, as they always do, had places to go and songs to sing.
The exposure combo for the window shot was 1/80 sec, f/7.1, ISO200 with a 24-70mm lens. The tough part of that picture was doing my best to keep the lines straight, and not have Jon and Kristy pushed so far into the corners of the frame that they took on distortion. The camera was the D810, now supplanted by the D850.
Ultimately it was just an enjoyable, simple shoot, and even now I’m still following American Young, and they are doing great.