28 http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk
JOE MCNALLY
being in Rome. Back in the day,
you got what were called
“guarantees” for magazines – they
wouldn’t pay you every day but if
you were going to Northern Ireland
to spend a week up there they’d give
you $1,000, that kind of thing.
I came home from that trip from
going to cover the Space Shuttle to
Northern Ireland to Rome and,
all of a sudden, I had a magazine
career rolling.’
Luck and circumstance
That story is a perfect illustration of
when luck can play a part in a
photographer’s career. McNally
notes, ‘Luck intersects with a
photographer’s career in odd ways
on a relatively continuous basis and
that can be good and bad luck. I
always tell young photographers,
“Do you think your average banker
or accountant goes to work in the
morning worried about what the
light’s going to be like at four o’clock
in the afternoon?” No, they don’t.
We worry about all that stuff. We
worry about if the subject’s going to
be cooperative. Will it be raining?
How do I make this happen? This is
because you are often dropped into
circumstances in which you have no
control over many of the elements
that combine to make a shoot.’
He muses, ‘A lot of photographers
now are really driven by numbers –
how many pixels, how big or small a
camera is, if it doesn’t have two card
slots, am I going to outrun the
buffer? Digital technology is
wonderful but I think that there’s a
certain element of being a
photographer now that’s a bit of
being a slave to that technology
and, in certain instances, it’s driving
the train when it should be the
other way around. Exactly how
much do you expect this camera to
do for you? This is still a human art
and craft, and it’s about
relationships, it’s about sweat, blood
and tears and it’s enabled by very
fast-paced technology.’
Despite that ever-advancing digital
technology, McNally likes to avoid
complexity when possible. He
reveals, ‘I do keep things simple. I’m
a huge fan of the English
photographer Don McCullin – he’s
such a significant photographer and
we have corresponded a bit on
Instagram. One of his very well-
known quotes is, “I only use a
camera like I use a toothbrush – it
gets the job done.” I’m a bit in that
school. At the end of the day, as
fancy as the cameras are, you’ve got
f-stops, shutter speeds and light and
how all that intersects.’
McNally admits, ‘I do access the
camera technology when I’m
shooting a high-speed frame rate
using high-speed sync to coordinate
flashes. I use the maximum abilities
of a camera to produce a quality file.
But I can get into what I call “super
fancy” and access things like doing
multiple exposures with
multiple flashes – that stuff can Below: Rich Kane
drives Ladder 4 NYFD
truck through Times
Square, New YorkThe largest
gathering of
jazz musicians
ever, LIFE
magazineAbove: Lead plane
of a three-plane
formation, lit with
Nikon flashes