Thought Piece 3

            In this section of “The Hot Shoe Diaries” McNally talks more about lighting different subjects in a bunch of different places. Subjects such as a puppet maker, ballerinas, even just random photoshoots to make it look like it’s the Joker in Gotham City. Out of all of his shoots in these pages, I think that the Joker one was among my favorites, I enjoyed the lighting and effort put into it and I also love the creativity when it came to solutions whenever he would have problems during this shoot. McNally also talked about a sort of “mugshot” type shoot that he did, and I think the way he explained it was very interesting and also kind of made the way he lights subjects make a little more sense to me. He was doing this shoot with a woman, Bubbles, and it had started out “mugshot-y” but whenever he was talking about changing the lighting, he would refer to the photo that matched and talk about how likely it is you’d bring this girl home to your mom. This was up until he got the lighting totally done and perfect and was saying that “this was a girl you’d bring home to mom”.

            I will admit that I’m still astonished by how he knows where to change his different lighting settings to. The way he’s able to just see how the photo turns out and know exactly what to do from there. McNally talks a LOT about going up EV or down EV on his flash and sometimes I’ll be reading, and I swear those are the only stuff for a few sentences, so it’ll just be numbers and “EV” and plus or minuses. I have to admit that I do get a bit confused when he’s talking about that, especially when those are all that’s in the sentences. I think it’s my confusion and lack of understanding that makes all the things he does in this book more impressive to me. I am fully convinced that if I understood and it came easily to me as it does to him then I wouldn’t be as impressed by the way he does lighting as easily as he does.

            I like to believe that one day I’ll be able to understand and use lightings as easily as McNally does, however I’m also not so sure that I will. See, I don’t really use lighting… like ever. I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to be as good at it, simply because of the fact that I hardly use it. But I do still think it’s amazing what he can do with his lighting and how he can make a boring, flat portrait pop and be so much more appealing to the eye with just a few lights and/or flashes. But, I think that I might like to try adding different types of lighting into my portraits sometime, I really enjoyed when we did it with cars, I wonder what I could do with people.