Joe McNally: High-Flying Images
Over the course of his 30-year career as a photojournalist, Joe McNally has shot cover stories for Time, Life, Newsweek, and Fortune. He has traveled to Chechnya, Rwanda, and Afghanistan to record the destruction of war. He has photographed National Geographic features including its widely-read 2003 “Wings of Change” story on the centenary of flight. “I like thematic assignments — stories about people and ideas, like the aftermath of war, the history of aviation, or the limits of the human body,” reflects McNally.
McNally has explored sport from every angle. He’s a frequent contributor to Sports Illustrated and covered the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games and the 2000 Sydney Olympics for Sports Illustrated, Life, and ABC. He is now helping to promote the 2008 Beijing Games.
“I’m intrigued by the athletic human body as subject,” says McNally. “But,” he adds with a laugh, “I’m not a very good hard-core sports photographer because it doesn’t matter to me who wins. I’m more interested in the pomp and circumstance, the pageantry and, especially, how hard the athletes work. The story, for me, is the outer limits of the human body: how far and how fast an athlete can go, what he or she will endure, and how the body reacts to the wear and tear, the pain, of that push for excellence.”
A Leaping Star
Fresh off a trip to China, where he gave a series of lectures to support an exhibit of his work at the Shanghai Art Museum (“It’s tough to lecture in China — my American sense of humor doesn’t quite translate”), McNally also had the opportunity to exercise his new Aperture skills.
The Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee asked McNally to photograph a young star from the national gymnastics team for a poster series promoting the 2008 Games. Working in a studio, McNally shot the gymnast leaping against a blank background. He then used Aperture to quickly cull the best shots.
“I like the speed at which you can edit in Aperture and the ease of viewing the shots,” he says. “That’s especially important when your clients are not well-versed in editing, because they’ll ask to see this picture, then that one, then this one again. The editing can get all bogged down when you have to do keystroke after keystroke to bring up an image, go back to your original view, then bring it up again.”
Assessing Critical Sharpness
With Aperture McNally sped through the selection process, making a quick — and precise — assessment of each image. “On my last day in China,” he recounts, “I was able to load into Aperture the particular set of pictures my clients were most interested in so we could view them at full-screen.”
When he edits alongside clients, McNally uses two monitors. “On one monitor I’m scrolling through thumbnails and editing the group,” he says, “while on the other I’m displaying my selects at full screen so the client can look at them without the clutter of all my information palettes and metadata.”
For each selected image, McNally applied the Loupe tool to the gymnast’s face to allow his clients to carefully analyze her expression. The tool also enabled him to immediately ascertain whether an image stood up to that essential test for magazine photographers: critical sharpness.
Are We There Yet?
McNally explains, “When a photographer says an image is sharp, that’s a general measurement. But if he says it’s critically sharp, that means he got right into the image to find out if the eyelashes are in focus. Critical sharpness tells you whether the photo will reproduce well when it’s blown up, because every flaw gets magnified. So it’s extremely important for a magazine photographer.
“The Loupe tool is a tremendous device to assess critical sharpness,” continues McNally. “An image might look fine on your laptop, but you could find out when you blow it up that the eyelashes are not perfectly sharp. So the Loupe lets you see if you are there. It lets you edit quickly — and with certitude that the images you’re pulling will work. You don’t want to have to do your selects again because an image fell out of contention.”
Takes on a Plane
Aperture has also turbocharged McNally’s delivery speed. “The pro photography market is getting more and more competitive,” he says. “Some of my clients want to see images within 24 hours of a shoot.”
No problem. On that final morning in China, after examining each eyelash with the Loupe, McNally selected six takes from his group of 200 and dropped them onto a Flash memory card for the poster designer to experiment with.
