Dempsey Williams

I got a copy of Joe McNally’s (www.joemcnally.com) new book The Hot Shoe Diaries for my birthday last month. I read Joe’s blog pretty regularly, so I knew he was a pretty funny guy (for the uninitiated his language can get pretty “colorful” sometimes) and I also knew that he’s probably forgotten more than I’ll ever know about photography.  I try to glean as much as I can from every source I can find, so I figured his book would be a good source to have on hand to refer to.  His specialty is lighting – especially speedlights – and that is what this book is all about.  He can do more with one small strobe than I’ve seen others do with a room full of equipment.

I have preferred to keep my necessary gear to a minimum – less expensive and less to haul around – so I haven’t wanted to invest in a big lighting setup.  My preference is to shoot outdoors anyway, but I’ve had some clients over this long, cold winter that wanted to shoot when the weather was really not cooperating with us.  I had to break out the speedlight and start learning, which is where Joe’s book came in.

It’s not a reference manual or even an owner’s manual, and it doesn’t try to be.  Joe is very upfront about that.  The charm in this book is hearing a lot of the “behind the scenes” stories of how he got the shots you see in the book and what his thought process was as he worked through the shoot.  That’s what makes this book worth the read (and the purchase, in my opinion); hearing from a world-class photographer how to get the shot.  He’s also very forthcoming with the info of where he screwed up and how to avoid those problems yourself.

But that’s the thing that makes photography a lot like golf in my mind.  You’re going to shoot a lot and take a lot of bad shots but inevitably you’ll get that one shot that was perfect (hit it true | dialed in the perfect exposure) and you suddenly develop amnesia and forget about all the horrible shots that you took that day.  That one shot will be the shot that gets you back out for the next time.  Photography can be a cruel mistress in that way but I find solace in knowing that someone who’s been doing it as long as Joe still has to “hunt” for it – it’s not just me.  That’s the challenge that keeps me shooting.

Happy shooting!