Neal Preston: Iconography
Creating a Monster
Since that experience, Preston says with a laugh, “I’ve been raving about Aperture all over L.A. Before, I made my selects using Nikon View, my adjustments in Photoshop, then I transmitted the pictures to my editor with Fetch. Instead, I did all that in Aperture.”
What really proved time-saving was the actual editing. As Preston puts it, “When you’re using Aperture and you have this truly amazing 30-inch Cinema Display, it’s so easy. You mark your selects with the star system. You can look at all your selects and you can see the whole RAW take at the bottom of your screen. It’s really fantastic.”
Preston sums it up: “Apple has created a monster! Now I don’t want to live without Aperture. I believe in it totally.” The program instantly became indispensable to his daily tasks. “When I came home from Italy,” he remembers, “I had so much to do. I had to answer photo requests from magazines, digitize and edit some old photos, go through my archives for a client. Now I’m doing all that with Aperture — it’s the only thing I use.”
High Praise
”That’s high praise,” confesses Preston, “from someone who for years swore he was not put on earth to move pixels around on a screen.” The difference with Aperture, he says, is that it mimics the way he’s used to working. For an old-school guy, the familiar visual metaphor is priceless.
“I’m used to nice, big light tables where I can move around pages with chromes and edit transparencies,” says Preston. “And using Aperture is, digitally speaking, very close to that experience. It’s an invaluable tool.”
Aperture relieves the pressure of a slew of projects by helping Preston get work out the door. “I’m contributing some photos to a book on Springsteen,” he says. “I had to edit a lot of digital material that the picture editors picked out. Sometimes I get these kind of projects every day, and the editing process is so much faster with Aperture.”
The Photographer as Director
Of course, it’s not technology but artistry that propels a photographer to the top ranks. And over the course of 30-plus years, Preston has learned how to get even the most skittish rock legend, celebrity athlete, or movie star to reveal something real to his lens. “I’m outgoing so people tend to be comfortable around me,” says Preston. “Also, some photographers aren’t used to directing people. I never had a problem with that.”
To get a good photo, Preston believes, it’s essential to take charge. “It’s like a dance where I’m leading and you’re following,” he reflects. “I can’t just stand there and say, ‘Now move!’ I’ve learned that my subjects want to make a good picture as much as I do. But they also want to be led down the road. They’re grateful when I do that. It’s a collaborative creative process between the photographer and the subject, and together we go somewhere that makes a beautiful picture.”
Preston does have one firm rule: Never show a subject a bad Polaroid — especially not as the first picture he or she sees. While he snaps Polaroids only to check technical specs like lighting and contrast, he’s careful to show just the good ones. “Whatever trepidation the subject may have about doing a photo shoot is washed away the first time they see a great Polaroid and realize you know what you’re doing. That kicks the door open.”
Shooting Concerts
Preston has spent much of his career on the road, shooting images that keep the heart-thumping highs of a rock concert reverberating for years. “Doing really beautiful performance work is not easy,” he confesses. “There are so many things that can fail. And it can be difficult to make your photos look different from other people’s.”
For this photographer, who got an almost unbelievably early start doing concert photography while still in high school and who never received formal training, his success in preserving stage highlights is “a gift from above.” As for style, he says, “I tend to shoot with a very romantic look. A lot of my best work is against black. I like a clean photo. I want to get a good look at someone, and I don’t want a lot of extraneous stuff in the frame.”
Moreover, adds the one-time guitar player (Preston had a band in junior high school, though he admits he never surpassed the talent plateau he reached at age 16), “I have a love for music — and that helps me capture certain moments.”
