Joe McNally: High-Flying Images
On other jobs he uses Aperture to make productive use of his travel time. Says McNally, “If I shoot 600 frames, I can do my initial edit while I’m on the plane back to New York, and when I land, send them to my clients via an FTP site. It eliminates the whole hassle of packing slides for FedEx.”
Aperture also allows McNally to participate more in shaping the story. “If you’re smart and you have a good relationship with your client,” he notes, “you can edit a take to create a positive first impression. You can create a small e-portfolio or a web gallery and deliver it, the day after the shoot, before your client gets in for his morning coffee.”
Joanne Foley Gross, sister of Rescue 3 Firefighter Tommy Foley, lost on 9/11, New York, New York. (From “Faces of Ground Zero.”) © Joe McNally
Time for an Upgrade
McNally recently upgraded the hardware in his Connecticut studio to support a sweeping overhaul of his 30-year image archive. With three Power Mac G5 Quad towers, three 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays, an Xserve with 7TB Xserve RAID, and an iMac for his business manager, the McNally studio is equipped to efficiently organize and protect his pictures — and deliver even better service to his clients.
He confesses that frequent road trips have made it hard to get organized. Now his staff is scanning, transferring, and arranging his 30-year archive using Aperture and the new Xserve RAID to make the images easily accessible for future projects, and, with the redundant storage solution, to protect them from mishap.
Preserving their work is essential to pro photographers. “Aperture lets you deal with versions of your image,” McNally says appreciatively, “so you can edit the image without putting the original at risk. That’s such a good thing.”
Hurly-Burly Marketplace
With Aperture and his new hardware, McNally is outfitted to keep up with the action. “Digital technology has made photography into this hurly-burly, shoulder-bruising marketplace,” he says. “To be a pro and to attract high-end clients, you have to be on the cutting edge. Using Apple and Aperture is a tremendous resource — it’s technology that is more and more crucial to your success.”
Since he went digital in 2001 to better meet the demands of a pressure-packed marketplace, McNally has witnessed its pros and cons: on the one hand, many new players have entered the arena; on the other, each has more advanced tools with which to distinguish his or her work.
“Everyone has a digital camera, and everyone’s getting more savvy,” he says. “Since the dawn of autofocus, they all think they’re sports photographers. And there are a lot of things you can do in post to make a sort-of-bad picture look better. It’s just tremendously competitive, with so many pros and amateurs and enthusiasts out there creating so much imagery.”
Instant Gratification
Still, McNally has no desire to turn back the clock. “Even kicking and screaming,” he declaims, “you couldn’t drag me back to film.” Why? “Photographers are children,” adds McNally. “We love instant gratification. And the fact that now I can move through a take quickly and see my results immediately is very cool — and very reassuring.”
For 20 years, McNally shot National Geographic features that required up to 28 weeks of field work, during which he’d generate about 1500 rolls of Kodachrome film — a mind-boggling 54,000 images. Assigned to do the magazine’s first-ever all-digital shoot for the “Wings of Change” story, McNally significantly lightened his editing load. “My image count went way down — to about 7,500 frames. That’s a lot of the wonder of digital; you have this instantaneous confirmation. So you can dispense with that certain level of paranoia that always attends the photographic process.”
McNally has literally flipped over the benefits of digital. “Using Flash media, as opposed to film, is very advantageous in certain situations,” he says. “Like when I was flying upside down, pulling six or seven Gs in a high-speed tactical aircraft for the centennial of flight story — you don’t want to be trying to change film rolls in that situation.”
The photographer is pleased that his needs are well understood. “Historically,” he says, “Apple has always been committed to the visual marketplace — and now, with the launch of Aperture, Apple is speaking loudly to the pro photographer. You’ve got all these possibilities: stacking, editing, archiving, organizing. Aperture opens so many doors. So the exciting question becomes, ‘Where do we go from here?’”
