Santa Fe Photographic Workshops has just posted their schedule for Spring 2009. This is the schedule only; individual course descriptions should be available by the end of September. I’ve taken a number of workshops at Santa Fe and have always had a great experience. If you are looking to take a workshop with guys like Joe McNally or Jay Maisel, register today. Their classes always fill up quickly. If you wait for the actual catalog to be published, your favorite course may be filled already. Santa Fe has a stable of great instructors that return every year to teach. They’ve also added a flock of new, yet equally great, names to their faculty (Michael Britt is a personal favorite as his High-Volume Digital Workflow seminars always speak to my inner-geek), To stay in touch with SFPW, subscribe to their e-newsletter and their blog.

This post last updated: August 3, 2008.

Back in the middle of photography’s dark ages, during the formative years of my youth (circa 1968), listening to shortwave radio was a keen fascination. When I visited my cousin’s house, at night, we would tune in to stations from around the world on his shortwave set. We laughed as the path opened for us to discover exotic languages and music. Other than scrounging up an old receiver and some wire for an antenna, there was no cost to riding the airwaves.

Today, I think the blogosphere is at a similar state of evolution. For only the cost of access to the Internet, I can tune in to the thoughts of photographers (and other colorful thinkers) far and wide. Likewise, the cost of starting and running a blog can be minimal. Consider that WordPress, the most widely-used blog software, is a free download and that thousands of blogs, including some of the most highly-visited sites (like Strobist), are hosted for free on Blogger. [Read more →]

As flashmasters Joe McNally and David Hobby have proven again and again, the first step to getting an amazing photo with your strobe is to uncouple it from your camera and move it to the side/back/top/bottom of your subject. Combine a unique flash angle with TTL flash control and you have a dynamic duo.

TTL (Through-The-Lens) metering of flash is one of the amazing windfalls of digital photography. Not only can your DSLR figure out where to focus and what shutter/aperture combo to use, it can tell your flash when to fire and for how long. Wireless TTL works by sending a series of pre-flash light pulses from the controlling unit atop the camera to the remote unit(s). Both Nikon’s i-TTL and Canon’s E-TTL provide wireless solutions that enable the camera to maintain control of the strobe(s) if… if there’s nothing between the camera and the strobe, if the strobe is not too far from the camera, if there’s not too much sunlight, if it’s not raining, if… Enter RadioPopper, destroyer of the IFs.

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If Joe McNally were a cartoon character, I think he’d be the Tasmanian Devil (although I’m sure that some days ol’ Joe feels like he’s Wile E. Coyote). Why the Tasmanian Devil? He never slows down. Between shooting, blogging and teaching, Joe’s the photographic equivalent of a whirling dervish. Fortunately for the legions that follow in his dust trail, Joe has also been carving out time to write his next book The Hot Shoe Diaries - Creative Applications of Small Flashes.

Good news. You can pre-order it now on Amazon. For those who waited to order Joe’s first book, The Moment It Clicks, and could not get it until the second printing, you know that you’ll want to pre-order your copy of The Hot Shoe Diaries. So, do it now. We’ll wait for you to come back. If all goes as planned in the McNally household and at New Riders Press, you’ll have it in hand by Christmas.

And for the four of you who have been reading PixSylated for a while, the answer to your other question is “Yes”. I’ll pimp The Hot Shoe Diaries just like its big brother. Click here if you’d like to get a close look at Joe’s first book and read my original post on ‘Pimping Your McNally’.

For frequent McNally installments and more details on The Hot Shoe Diaries, keep an eye on Joe’s blog.

[And thanks to The Man himself for giving this cub reporter the go ahead to run with the story before he made the big announcement.]

If you think of a photographer’s career as a roller coaster, then Joe McNally’s car has been around the track a bunch of times. To get a sense of his persona, mix equal parts of photojournalist, theatrical lighting director and New Yorker. Then infuse that mix with the cool intensity of an ER physician and add the spontaneity of a court jester. The cocktail makes for a great photographer with a long list of colorful stories to share. Or is it a colorful photographer with a long list of great stories? Either way, you’ll find these tales and the photos that inspired them in Joe’s recently published book, The Moment It Clicks.

If you missed the circus last February, the release of The Moment It Clicks created quite a stir among armchair critics on Amazon. Many among the enlightened, myself included, praised Joe’s unique style of writing (part memoir, part photography how-to). Others were critical because Joe does not provide step-by-step recipes for each of the amazing shots in the book. Nevertheless, The Moment It Clicks climbed straight into the stratosphere on Amazon and topped out in the Top 10 one day — not for photography books, but for all the books sold on Amazon. It was right up there, sandwiched between two selections from Oprah’s Book Club. Mrs. Joe must have been so proud. Today, some three months later, sales remain strong with Top-5 ranking in photography books and Top-500 for all of Amazon. [Read more →]