Read The Moment It Clicks: Photography Secrets From One of the World's Top Shooters for Free Online

you compression, power, and distills the essence of the frame by isolating the center of interest and dropping out the background. All I had going were the graphics of the scene and the lens nailed them. Shoot this with wide glass, the picture goes away.
    Nice Is Just…Nice
     

    “The umbrella approach (appropriate for some instances, absolutely) scatters light everywhere. It’s indiscriminate, kind of like carpet bombing.”

    Any idiot can put up an umbrella. One of those is writing this book. Done it plenty of times. Put up the old brollie and everything looks nice. Which may mean that everything looks nice, or that everything looks okay, which means everything sucks. Follow me?
     
    Nice is nice , but it stops way short of fabulous. There’s the issue of control. The umbrella approach (appropriate for some instances, absolutely) scatters photons everywhere. It’s indiscriminate, kind of like carpet bombing.

    So what if something in your picture’s got to look one way and something else has to look entirely different? Ahhh, there’s the trick! Put the umbrella away and go for the small softbox or the honeycomb spot grid. [ 1 ] Throw in a homemade gaffer tape snoot [ 2 ] and some black wrap, a few black cards to cut wall bounce, and now you’re cooking.

    [ 1 ] Honeycomb Spot Grid: A circular metal grid (that looks like a honeycomb) that goes over your strobe head and limits the spread of the light.

    [ 2 ] Snoot: Any device that forms a tube around your light source to funnel it and make it more directional. Could be a fancy Lumiquest store-bought snoot, or just some cardboard taped together. The function is to direct the light and control spill.

    This picture of the amazed baby was made with lots of black lining the walls, soaking up stray light. It’s a double exposure, with a focus shift between the baby and the ball. You can do that on a set like this, when there’s a lot of dark area.
     
    The whole idea was to show how babies register moving objects. So I needed:

(a) a relatively astonished baby, and

(b) a moving object. In one frame.

    How to Get This Type of Shot

    For the colorful Nerf ball, I used a tungsten bulb for the trailing motion effect and the repeating flash mode (for stroboscopic effect) on small Nikon flashes. Those little guys were snooted in black tape to minimize light splashing about. The problem was the non-cooperative Nerf ball. Couldn’t control a real-time bounce.

    Solution? More black! The place had venetian blinds, so I grabbed one of the plastic controller wands off the window unit and wrapped it in black tape. Jammed it into the back of the foam ball. The off-camera assistant then held the wand and controlled the flight of the ball. Boink, boink! Perfect trajectory every time.
     
    Made the ball part of the picture, then shifted focus to the baby. Sat him down at the make shift plexiglass table. He leaned forward and immediately went to sleep.

    But he woke up a bit later and stared up into a small softbox with its edges draped in black to control light spill. I dangled a squeaky toy, and the next thing you know, one astonished baby!

     
    Bullseye!
     

    “Some rules are good ones, like the rule of thirds. It works. But, like all rules, ya gotta break it every once in a while.”

    I was shooting in Augusta, Georgia, for Golf Digest . While wandering in a pretty poor neighborhood, I noticed a group of churchgoers. I walked into church with them and immediately liked the simplicity and strength of the place. I asked to meet the minister.
     
    Pastor Grier and I sat and talked. I explained the story. He agreed to be photographed.

    The pastor is a kindly man, but formidable looking. (Check out the size of his hands. I would not want to be a sinner in this minister’s congregation!)

    How to Get This Type of Shot

    Simplicity is best here. I put the minister right in the middle of the frame, where he would radiate authority. I lit him with one softbox overhead, just out of