30 http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk
JOE MCNALLY
Joe McNally is an
internationally
acclaimed
photographer whose
career has included
assignments in nearly
70 countries. He has
shot numerous cover
stories for magazines
including LIFE, National
Geographic and Sports
Illustrated. His
advertising and
commercial clients
include FedEx, Nikon,
Adidas and Epson. He
won the first Alfred
Eisenstaedt Award for
Journalistic Impact for a
LIFEcoverage titled The
Panorama of War, and
he conducts workshops
around the world.
http://www.joemcnally.com.get a little bit complicated and
the camera is a huge assist. If
you’re a certain age and were
brought up with certain cameras it
was kind of like you [hold up a light
meter] and make a guess. Now the
camera enables that guesswork to be
much more precise.’
Working with light
In his new book McNally debates
about the differences between the
quantity and the quality of light, so
I ask him to expand. He explains,
‘I shot events at the Olympics at ISO
8000 and got really good quality,
which was unheard of not long ago.
You get this school of thought that
pushes back at you about the use of
flash, like, “I’ve got higher ISO, why
would I use flash?” But ISO relates to
one thing only – the quantity of
light – but that has nothing to do
with the quality of light.
‘If you want to express yourself,
and if you view light as your
language, photographically, then
you want to craft your message... at
least sometimes. You want to be able
to use light effectively, even if you’re
an available-light shooter. You have
to be able to identify good light and
when you can leave the strobes in
the trunk of the car and just work
with available light. You may assess
the situation and say, “This isn’t
compatible with what I need. I have
to create the environment with
light.” That’s the difference – the
light has to match the subject.’
In fact, all of McNally’s skills when
lighting and shooting with flash are
self-taught. ‘I never assisted anybody,
so everything I know about using
flash has been trial and error. I had
no choice. When I took the job at
ABC my boss just looked at me and
said, “We light things and we use
Kodachrome,” and then he walked
off. I had never really shot under
those conditions before, so I had to
learn. I bought myself a set of
flashes, 800 Watt per second packs,
but it was foreign to me as to how to
make this work. I had a lot of
disasters but that’s part and parcel of
being a photographer.’
Cameras and using them
Despite being a long-time devotee of
Nikon SLRs, McNally’s camera
choices have changed. ‘I’ve made
the leap into mirrorless so now
mostly I’ll take the Z 6II and the Z
7II. Then I have D850s – that’s my
last DSLR. When the mirrorless
thing started to turn I had a whole
bunch of DSLRs. I had three D5s,
three D850s and a couple of D500s- it sounds like a lot of cameras but
it’s not when you’ve grown up like
I have photographically.’
He adds, ‘At the Tokyo Olympics
I shot nothing but D6 because that’s
the kind of job you need a flagship
camera for. Nikon is beating the
drum about the Z9, which they
identify as a flagship camera, and I
hope it’s going to be a great camera
because that’s a necessary step.
Mirrorless technology is very good
and I made the transition relatively
easily. It’s amazing to me that a Z 7II
is so small but you’ve got 45.7
million pixels – it has technology
like crazy.’
But technology can only get you
so far when you’re taking a picture.
McNally reveals, ‘I’ve always felt it’s
not about the pixels or which lens
you use; it’s about the emotion the
picture conveys. To get a picture
published in National Geographic I’d
have to fire on at least three
cylinders – it’d have to be pictorially
successful, it’d have to beShot on
assignment for
Sports Illustrated,
Rio de Janeiro,
2016 Olympics