Thanks to David Hobby over at Strobist for posting this on Saturday – apparently I have been missing the boat on videos lately as Google has a pretty extensive video archive of well-known people that they get to come out to the campus in CA and speak for a short while. David posted the YouTube video of Joe McNally (which was posted last Wednesday on YouTube). Normally I guess people speak for about ten minutes or so. Joe McNally’s talk – 1 hour! He naturally talks about The Moment it Clicks, but I walk away amazed every time I hear or read a little more about it. I have to get this book! Some key snippets came out of his conversation there that I took the time to write down and thought I would share these with the blogosphere. Call these “McNallyisms”:
On the big picture:
- “My philosophy about photography is that it’s a very open-ended profession.”
- “Human gesture trumps everything”
- “You have to have fun. If you’re not having fun, your pictures will reflect that.”
On motivation
- “At the end of the day, you’ve created something that didn’t exist that morning.”
- “I’m not driven by a particular type of photography…[but] by the love [of photography]”
- “I have to make a picture that conveys the emotional and visual experience I am having, and if the photograph doesn’t do that, then I’ve failed.”
On technique:
- “There are no secrets, no mysteries, no dark kind of ‘Keys to the Castle’ or anything…”
- “It only takes one ‘Awww, shit!” moment to wipe out three ‘atta boys’…”
- “The migration period [apertures, f-stops, shutter speeds, ISO’s, etc.]…taking all the sundry stuff and migrating it from the front of your head to the back of your head…you need to learn that stuff”
- “Technique is important – mechanical inputs have enormous aesthetic implications. You need to learn them and be fluid with them and it enables you to be able to speak with a louder voice.”
Yeah, it’s over an hour long, but it’s worth the listen…it can remind you of what’s really important about photography, and what doesn’t matter as much as you think it does:
And speaking of remembering what’s important, and what really matters versus what doesn’t matter so much, today you simply must stop over at Scott Eccleston’s blog for Weekly Photography Tips. That, my friends, is what really matters! Anyway, hope everyone enjoyed the weekend. Hope the coming week is just as good and keep those cameras clicking – happy shooting!
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