Master of Light Joe McNally Dissects 3 Environmental Portraits

There are few better lighting teachers in the world than Joe McNally who—in his 30-year career—has shot covers for TIME, Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly and Men’s Journal, and is an ongoing contributor to National Geographic. Here, McNally (who is, by the way, WPPI 2015’s keynote speaker) tells us his lighting processes behind three environmental portraits.

Photos © Joe McNally

Window Light on the Hudson
A dirty window should never get in a photographer’s way, and a lighting demonstration in a dilapidated, Hudson River building provided the perfect opportunity for McNally to prove that. “I often try to mimic and augment the natural feel of light as it presents itself on location,” McNally says. “The available light was nice, but wasn’t strong or crisp enough to light the model.”

So McNally followed the natural light path, which took him outside the building, to a railing above the window. To it, he clamped three Nikon SB-900 speedlights to be triggered by his camera flash. “I was able to take my commander flash off my camera and position it with a cord up into the window where it would see the other flashes,” he explains. “You have to achieve line of sight, and the original camera angle wasn’t conducive to that.”

McNally says the window then became the light shaper and in turn, a diffusion element. “You could also do this with a big flash like a Profoto B1, controlling with a radio,” he says. “You could hot-shoe it to the camera and transmit a radio signal to the outside flash. When I teach, I try to show what you can do with both styles and different styles. People sometimes get a little afraid to experiment, but a slight shift of the light can cause a major difference in the photograph.”

LOCATION: A relic building on the Hudson River, NY CAMERA: Nikon D3 LENS: 48 mm EXPOSURE: f/5.6 at 1/250th of a second ISO: 200

Butterfly in Manila
It’s not every day that a ballerina and Cirque du Soleil dancer has a break in her busy performance schedule to pose for a portrait. But while in the Philippines teaching, McNally had the good fortune that Kris Mamangun—the wife of McNally’s friend and fellow shooter Jojo Mamangun—had time between shows. Having always been fascinated by Filipino jeepneys, McNally had the thought to put dancer and vehicle together. “I found a local street where people were amenable to having a big-ass jeepney blocking everything, and we just went for it,” he says.

McNally says the main light source is a big, indirect Octabank, placed high up and camera left, lighting the subject. “The overall driver for the exposure of a picture like this is the sky,” he says. “You have to wait for it to burn down a bit toward the later afternoon, but then the street becomes dark and needs to be lit.“

That translates to 12 to 15 flashes, each, McNally says, with its own “mission.” First, a number of small flashes with warm gels in the passenger section of the jeepney, which, when triggered, bounced into the interior but also spilled onto the street. The reddish glow behind the jeepney is from two flashes, gelled red. Kris’s gossamer wings are backlit with a strobe flash that’s on the roof firing into the back of her. There are lights in and under the awning of the stores, plus a couple in the driver’s compartment of the jeepney. And if all that wasn’t enough, McNally lit down the block, firing into the background. The finishing touch? “I convinced a guy running a portable barbecue to bring it down the street because its smoke gave my light a little shimmer and character,” McNally says.

LOCATION: A populated street in Manila, Philippines CAMERA: Nikon D800E LENS: 32mm EXPOSURE: f/5 at 1/25th of a second ISO: 200

Take Me to Church
While in Augusta, Georgia, shooting the Masters Tournament for Golf Digest, McNally drove by a small, community church. “The physical city is not opulent, it’s just a town off the Georgia turnpike with a lot of very modest neighborhoods,” McNally says. “I walked into this church because I was intrigued, and I was so impressed with Reverend Greer. I asked if I could do a portrait and he said ‘okay,’ very kindly.”

McNally asked the reverend to stand in the middle of the photograph, because, “as churches tend to be, it’s all about symmetry,” the photographer says. “He’s obviously a blocky, big man as you can see from his hands.” A softbox overhead is the main portrait light defining the subject, with the rest of the church lit by available light.

But McNally didn’t stop there; he describes this as a two-light figure. “The luxury item is that I took a small flash with yellow warming gel and fired that at his hands that are holding the cross, so that light is triggering, along with the overhead light,” he says. “I’m accent-lighting the cross because that’s obviously a statement of who this man is.”
The circular lighting figure overhead in the background was no accident, either, he says: “I chuckled to myself as I placed him there that I had a built-in halo.”

LOCATION: A community church in Augusta, GA CAMERA: Nikon D2x LENS: 12 mm EXPOSURE: f/8 at 1/8th of a second ISO: 100

Don’t Miss: Joe McNally’s keynote at WPPI 2015 on Tuesday, March 3, from 8-10 p.m. at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

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