If you are looking forward to photographing in a city, especially one that keeps close watch for terrorist activity like New York City does, the best thing you can do is know your rights.

Can you photograph in public in NYC? Yes, of course you can. Can you photograph in the subway system? Yes, it’s explicitly permitted (as long as you are not interfering with the operation of the subway or blocking access, etc.). Do you need a permit to use a tripod on the sidewalk? No, you don’t, but if you try to set up your tripod on a busy sidewalk, New Yorkers might kick you, so try not to be a nuisance about it.

Check out NYPD Operations Order 14, wherein the guidelines for field officers dealing with photographers are spelled out in detail:

View full size

I have read of photographers printing out similar documents to carry with them in the event that they are stopped, and that may not be a bad idea at all. Just remember a couple of really important things:

1. Know exactly what your rights are. Research the location you are going to be in and familiarize yourself with the local ordinances.
2. Be courteous and respectful. If an officer is giving you a hard time because they like it, being rude to them is only going to make matters worse. Be understanding of their position, and firm in stating your rights.
3. Comply with directives. If an officer asks you to do something, short of deleting your photographs (which they cannot do without a warrant, at a minimum), do it. You may state that you are complying under protest, but don’t get into a situation where you are resisting, because that can lead to real charges against you.

Following these simple rules will ensure you have a productive and safe shoot!

Remember when I told you about that crazy remote-controlled robot carting a DSLR that these two British brothers would drive around Africa, taking up-close-and-personal photos of wild animals? It was called the BeetleCam, and it was the brainchild of William and Matthew Burrard-Lucas, two swiftly burgeoning wildlife photographers from the UK.

Well, they’re at it again, only this time they’re not using a remote-controlled dune buggy and they’re not photographing lions or elephants. They’re using an ingenious tabletop lighting setup and capturing the births of mosquito larvae.

See all of the amazing macro photos and read about the brothers’ technical process on their guest post on Digital Photography School!

Via Digital Photography School, via Burrard-Lucas.com

Why? Because there is more data in the brightest few stops of sensor attenuation than in the rest of the entire range, which is to say that there will be more detail, less banding, less noise, and so forth, within the brightest areas than there will be in the darkest ones. But you’ve observed that before, right? You’ve seen how terrible shadow areas can look when you try to brighten them up.

“It’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.“—Will Greenwald

Then there’s this guy Will Greenwald. He just posted a whole article about this in which he says “it’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.” Awesome, I agree. But neither of us are saying you should “blow out” any of your image; definitely don’t do that.

Strangely, most of the people who commented on Will’s article disagreed with him. Those people are amateurs.

Why would I say that? I don’t even know them, and I am not prone to hyperbole or dirt-kicking. I’m really not. I’m also sure that all of those people are well-versed, smart individuals. It’s just that… I guess they don’t “get around” much in digital photography circles.

You see, I know something they don’t, and I learned it from an article by Michael Reichmann written some time back around 2003. I don’t need to tell you who Michael Reichmann is, do I? This information is not bleeding edge, it’s not new news. When Chris Blake and I teach our photography workshops, which I plug on this blog shamelessly and regularly, one of the first things we talk about is “exposing to the right,” and we’ve been doing that for three years.

Michael’s article is titled, with tongue pressed firmly into cheek, Expose Right. He means “to the right of the histogram” as much as he means “correctly.” Read that article if you want all of the technical “nitty gritty” involved in digital sensor attenuation and so forth.

You’ll read about how Michael was chatting with Thomas Knoll. You know, the guy who wrote Photoshop. You’ll learn about how they came to agree upon the fact that more detail lives in the brightest areas of an image than in the darkest ones. That’s all you need to know. You don’t need to get any deeper into the technology in order to use this rule.

Okay, so…

How do you use this rule?

I’m glad you asked. This is all you need to remember.

If possible, increase your image’s overall exposure until the histogram touches the right edge.

There are plenty of reasons that you may not be able to do that including subject motion, lack of light, and so on. Do the best you can. Tend toward the right of the histogram.

The image shouldn’t be clipped, which means that if your camera shows little blinking spots where things are overexposed, that’s still bad, but get that graph to move over to the right as far as you can without compromising the image.

If, like me, you operate in aperture-priority or aperture-value mode (Canon Av, Nikon A) all you have to do is use your “exposure value,” or EV, setting to increase the exposure of the image as far as you can up until the histogram data touches the right edge of the graph. If you can’t get it all the way over there without compromising the shot, don’t worry about it. This is a rule of thumb only.

Then what?

Then you take your photos home and import them into Lightroom and use the Develop module to adjust the overall brightness of the image using the exposure slider and curves and anything else you need to until it looks good to you. That’s really it.

Here are some things that you are going to complain about, and why you shouldn’t:

• On your camera’s LCD screen, an image exposed to the right may look very bright, and may look desaturated. It’s OK. There is just as much color data in the image as there was when it was center-exposed, and when you bring it into Lightroom you can draw that color out, but this time with more detail than ever.

Okay, so that was only one complaint. If you have other complaints, leave them down there in the comments!

Do you expose to the right already? Do you like it? Do you hate it? Leave a comment and let us all know!

To say that photographing the fireworks display in Washington, D.C. is a challenge might be hyperbole. Compared to those in Boston and New York City, which I’ve photographed two times each, getting a reasonable spot to shoot from is a cakewalk.

The National Mall opens at around 10 AM, but even at 3 PM there are still plenty of good spots by the Lincoln Memorial, so there’s no need to hurry. The real challenge, it would seem, is the complete and total lack of information about the strategy and considerations of shooting in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Have you ever searched for photographs of the D.C. fireworks? You should give it a try. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

There aren’t many. That is to say, there aren’t many great ones. It seems as though Getty and other stock agencies own most of the truly decent shots that exist. There are a few out there by random bloggers, or that you may find on Flickr, but it isn’t a landslide such as you will find when you search for New York City fireworks photos.

Where, When?

Okay, so there are enough shots to know where you want to shoot from, at least; there are a couple of decent opportunities. Many of the “classic” shots are made from the Tidal Basin near the Jefferson Memorial. From there you can frame a shot with the Potomac in the foreground and the Washington Memorial, Capitol, and Lincoln Memorial as your main subjects.

For a closer vantage, any of the areas around the front of the Lincoln Memorial should be ripe for the picking, and that’s where I shot from this year. You can almost tell where I was located when I took the photo below.

Reports of when the crowds start to accumulate around the National Mall are hard to find. Depending upon who you ask, you get entirely different answers. In order to best maximize the opportunity (for which I spent the better part of a day in a car from Connecticut), I decided to get to the National Mall as early as possible.

Things I totally didn’t have to do:

• Get to the National Mall as early as possible,
• Sit at the location I wanted to shoot from for 10 hours under the 97-degree sun,
• Forget to bring a folding chair.

So let me give all you guys and gals out there a hint. You don’t have to get to the National Mall ten hours early to snag a good location to photograph the fireworks display from. Unlike Boston and New York City, which both require a photographer’s attendance ten or more hours in advance, you can probably do very well at 3 PM in most places.

This is where the information bottleneck becomes the limiting reagent in the complex experiment of great Washington, D.C. fireworks photos. If only someone had told me, reliably, that I could get to the National Mall at 3 PM, would stand in essentially no line to go through the security checkpoint, and could still set up my tripod almost anywhere I wished… That would have been nice.

Oh, right, security checkpoints, I almost forgot.

Security Checkpoints

Before the 4th of July celebration, an enormous fence is erected around the entire National Mall. In order to get in, you will have to pass through one of the security checkpoints placed around the perimeter and be subjected to a search. At least, this was the gist of what my research turned up when looking into the logistics of this little photographic adventure.

Here’s what you actually have to know, based on my experience:

They don’t actually care what you bring in.

No knives, explosives, or personal grills. No glass bottles, thermonuclear weapons, chainsaws, etc. No alcohol, either (officially), but if you want to bring around nineteen coolers of food and drinks, a tent canopy, a load of chairs, towels, beach balls, and anything else you can reasonably carry, yeah, they’ll let you in.

Suffice it to say, a huge camera bag and a tripod isn’t going to be an issue, despite online warnings of “they won’t let you in with a bag,” etc., etc. They will need to look inside your bag, but it’s cursory and they aren’t even allowed to touch anything. They will use a wooden stick to poke around and make sure they can see everything inside.

It’s fast.

I was lined up with everyone else by 9:30 on the 4th, waiting for the security sweep of the park to complete and the checkpoints to open. That was the largest line I was ever in, and I was through within 10 minutes of when it opened up. I left the park area and came back in the early afternoon and essentially walked through without waiting at all. So don’t sweat the lines.

Crowd control. It’s an illusion.

Whenever you’re photographing fireworks, no matter what the location or occasion, you have to learn to hold your ground. Whether it’s another photographer or a particularly ambitious spectator, people will encroach on your space if you don’t make your boundaries known. Fortunately for you, the intrepid Washington D.C. fireworks photographer, you won’t have to deal with any serious crowd issues until around 5 or 6 PM. That’s when you’re going to start getting surrounded.

This is all very foreign to me, with experience only in the “Big Apple” and “Beantown.” I assumed that by the time the gates opened, a sea of tripods and camera bags would stretch out before me, blanketing every good vantage point imaginable… And that simply was not so.

Comparatively, photographing the fireworks show in Washington, D.C. was one of the easiest fireworks shows I have ever photographed.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, Dennis Hopper passed away just days ago (the 29th of May, 2010). As an actor, I personally loved his roles in such classics as Super Mario Bros., Waterworld, and Speed, though he is best known for Easy Rider, Rebel Without a Cause, Cool Hand Luke, and more. He certainly had a knack for the dramatic, but what I didn’t know was that he also had a knack for photography.

The “Chasing Light” blog has a wonderful post containing photos that Hopper took through the years (all of them black and white). I was very impressed with them; they show attention to composition and subject comparable to those of a seasoned professional or serious hobbyist. You could certainly call Hopper a serious hobbyist, though he was more widely known for his feature films than for his photography, painting, and sculpture.

Over at artnet, you can view (and attempt to purchase) 39 other photographs by Hopper that are held by various galleries.

Whether you are into Hopper’s photographs or not, let’s take a moment to remember a great actor and inspirational creator.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m out here in the great American west—“big sky country,” if you want to call it that—and some of the sights I’ve seen were nothing less than demanding of a panoramic treatment. On top of that, I suffer from a devastating case of technolust and wanted to really put “AutoPano Giga” through the paces. Well, I sure did. I also probably melted the heat sink off my poor laptop’s CPU…

Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In the case of AutoPano Giga, I think he was wrong; I think it actually is magic. I have tried a few panorama tools out there; the free and open-source Panotools, a couple of Mac-exclusive ones, and so on. AutoPano Giga is so easy and so fast and so accurate, it blows them all out of the water. Of course it also costs an arm and a leg, but at least you know why.

After the break, actual panoramas!

One of the awesome things about AutoPano Giga is that it reads the EXIF data from your photos to figure out what kind of lens you used, and then adjusts for distortion based on that information. Essentially, this makes it totally kick ass at stitching together fisheye photographs, which normally do not directly overlap whatsoever. The edges have to be flanged out before two fisheye photos taken side-by-side will match up.

This one, taken at “Black Sand Basin” in Yellowstone, was stitched together from only two 15mm fisheye images (I wanted to limit the number in order to take them rapidly because the steam was moving quickly and when parts of the scene move a lot from one image to the next it can cause ghosting and stitching issues). Click for a larger view.

I think you get more of a sense of the vastness of a space from a good panoramic image. This place is as big as it looks.

While leaving the Grand Teton national Park earlier in the week, we stopped by the site of the “Cunningham Cabin,” which is exactly what it sounds like it is. The cabin itself, though, wasn’t much to look at. I was more intoxicated by the mountain range in the distance and the clarity of the sky and clouds. My New England brain, drunk on what is actually a somewhat average afternoon sky in Wyoming, required the capture of a panorama.

Of course, what you can’t tell by looking at it on this blog is that at actual size, it’s this big:

The total dimensions of this panorama are 11,154 by 3,186 pixels. I could make a very respectable five-foot-wide print of this image with perfect clarity!

Finally, on the last morning in Yellowstone, I wound up on this snow-covered road on the east side of the park and just had to try a crazy panorama. By “crazy” I mean that I didn’t just turn around, taking each photo beside the last. I tossed in a total of 53 images, some pointing up, some down, some tilted to the side a bit… Just to see what AutoPano Giga could do with them.

Click to embiggen!

I did this one on my laptop, so in order to make it possible I exported the original 53 images from Lightroom at about 800 pixels wide. If you look closely on the right side, you can see a little stitching error causing a notch in the far side of the road. I am convinced that this happened because of the limited detail in the smaller input files; when I get home to my big desktop I will attempt it again with 53 full-size 22-megapixel images.

Some of the things about AutoPano Giga that make creating these panoramas easier (or in some cases possible) include:

• The ability to augment the software’s automatic “control point” detection, which is how it links features in one photo to those in another (the core of the “stitching” process); for what it’s worth I’ve almost never had to use it, the SIFT key extraction of APG is extremely good,
• Center point, horizon detection, and vertical correction tools, which allow you to basically coach the software as to what you want the center point to be, or what feature(s) you ultimately want to be horizontal or vertical,
• Numeric yaw, pitch, and roll adjustment, which permits you to tweak the projection of the final image such that the perspective appears the way you want it to,
• Mercator, planar, spherical, and cylindrical projection models, which—although my understanding of projection is limited—essentially gives you a few basic effects to choose from when mapping the images into a flat environment.

With regard to the projection models, cylindrical tends to work best when you have one or more rows of images taken very evenly, whereas spherical and Mercator tend to work better when the images are somewhat more chaotic. I know that’s not an entirely accurate statement, but if you want to know more about projection models… Wikipedia is your friend.

The real challenge of panoramas is that once they’re stitched together, you inevitably wind up with a weird patchwork of images that needs to be cropped down. Here is what the Cunningham Cabin panorama looked like before cropping:

As you can see, you generally want to photograph beyond the edges of what the final panorama will include, because after distorting and stretching the images to fit together, you lose a lot of corners.

One other thing I should mention, although I haven’t yet tried it myself, is that if you bracket¹ each image in your panorama, AutoPano Giga will also “fuse” the exposures, preserving more highlight and shadow detail. Now, you don’t have a ton of control over that process; it’s very hands-off, unlike Photomatix Pro or some of the other actual “HDR” software out there, but it sure makes the whole panorama creation easy!

That’s all I have right now for panomania!, but if you folks have any questions or comments, there are a couple of boxes down there at the bottom that you can use to share them, and I continue to encourage it!

1. Bracketing means taking the same photo with different exposure settings, generally something like -1 EV, 0 EV, +1 EV

This week, I am traveling through the western US on a sort of national park whirlwind tour. I flew into Denver, CO on Sunday, took a quick jaunt through about half of Rocky Mountain National Park, and now I’m hanging out in Grand Teton National Park until tomorrow when I’ll head up to Yellowstone (to the right is a fisheye shot of part of the Teton range I took yesterday).

Although the landscapes are breathtakingly (and effortlessly) beautiful, photographing out here in these western mountain parks presents its own challenges, and I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned so far about successfully shooting in Rocky Mountain and Grand Teton.

The major challenges that face a photographer in the Colorado/Wyoming parks are:

• Getting there,
• Getting around,
• The weather, and
• Chasing the light

These hurdles all have straightforward solutions, except for chasing the light. Fortunately, that’s sort of the fun part, so it’s the challenge you signed up for in the first place if you’re out in the parks with your camera. If it isn’t, well, it’s not too late to sell all your stuff on Craigslist and find another hobby. I hear that flying sport kites is pretty thrilling…

Getting There

Getting to Rocky Mountain National Park is actually the easiest. You can fly right into Denver International (DEN), rent a car, and be in the park within a couple of hours. There is a town nestled right inside the park (like a little non-NPS island) called Estes Park, which offers many hotel choices.

I wasn’t staying over in Rocky Mountain NP, though, so I got back on the highway and drove toward Grand Teton, stopping in Rawlins, Wyoming for a night on the way.

The drive from Denver, CO to Jackson, WY—the border town you’re most likely to be in or around if you’re visiting Grand Teton NP—is a rather formidable eight or nine hours, most of which is spent on state highways coursing through seemingly endless farmland. It’s beautiful for the first three or four hours, and then it gets hypnotic.

To save some driving, you can fly into Salt Lake City, Utah, which shortens your voyage to a mere five hours. What I found, though, is that flights from the east coast out to Salt Lake City are significantly more expensive than those to Denver. Part of this is due to my preference for United Airlines, for which Denver is a fairly significant hub.

Either way, you’re going to be in the car for a while.

Before I get a bunch of angry or confused comments from my audience regarding the omission of Jackson Hole Airport as an option, let me explain the situation. Jackson Hole Airport is actually inside the national park, and is a stone’s throw from downtown Jackson. The problem is, it’s a tiny, single-runway airport that can only land small jets. Not only is it extremely expensive to get out there, you are at the whim of any inclement weather, and there may or may not be room within the cabin for both you and your camera bag.

I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but I don’t check my camera bag; it stays with me at all times. So yes, five to eight hours is a pretty onerous drive, but it’s actually a lot less expensive and dangerous for your equipment to just bite the bullet and do it.

On the upside, it’s amazingly beautiful all along the way and you never know when you’re going to run into photographic opportunities.

Here’s one I snapped from the side of the road somewhere along the highway in Wyoming (barely edited; I know it’s covered with lens spots and whatnot):

The geography and topography apparently result in a totally routine formation of incredible cloudscapes. It almost makes sitting in a car all day worthwhile!

Getting Around

The second hurdle that an adventurous photographer faces when shooting in these parks is that they’re enormous. I’ve photographed both Yosemite and Death Valley twice. Both are absolutely huge parks, but all of the parts you really want to see and shoot are pretty close together. Yosemite is a great example because the Yosemite Valley “loop” takes you by 99% of the sights you want to see, and by comparison to the park as a whole, it’s like a single raindrop in the ocean.

The various sights in Grand Teton NP are spread out across two long roads, highway 191 (also 26 and 89; lots of highways overlap for long distances in Wyoming, I haven’t figured that out yet) and Teton Park Road.

Let me give you some perspective. Not counting the drive into the park, which will vary depending on where you choose to stay, the drive all the way around the Yosemite valley “loop” (out on Northside Dr. and back on Southside Dr.) is 14.1 miles. Meanwhile, the entire loop of the Grand Teton NP—taking Teton Park Road north from the park entrance at Moose Junction and returning on highway 191—is 42.6 miles.

Check out these neat maps if you don’t believe me.

The loops are actually to scale, at least to the degree that Google Maps is. As you can plainly see, the Grand Teton National Park is not a park you can very easily drive around and around all day (whereas in Yosemite, that’s all I did… Around and around…)

This has an impact on your flexibility in choosing locations to shoot. Let’s say you want to photograph sunset and you aren’t exactly sure exactly where a good spot might be. At least in Yosemite you can drive by all of the candidates in 30 minutes. In Grand Teton, good luck… More about this in the last section.

The Weather

Every photographer is subject to Mother Nature’s whimsy. Sometimes weather plays directly into the photographer’s hands and they wind up with something like Clearing Winter Storm, but more often than not, the weather is an impediment.

From what I’ve experienced so far here in the Grand Tetons, the weather changes by the minute. You’re driving along and you see these nice blue skies and everything looks happy…

And then you go into the park and the next thing you know you’re at 6,000 feet elevation and the world is a winter wonderland!

The two photos above were taken only four hours apart. Even for a very high value of how fast do you think I was driving? it’s incredible to move from one weather system to another in the blink of an eye.

Up here in the foothills of the Tetons, it can rain and snow spontaneously, and I have seen storms roll in and roll out almost as fast as you can say what on earth is happening?

Needless to say, dress in layers, pack an umbrella, maybe some snow shoes, you get the idea. Sometimes the results can be spectacular, but you have to be ready to roll with it.

Chasing the Light

The most exciting—and at the same time, tedious—part of this whole national park, landscape, nature photography gig, is what my fellow workshop instructor Chris Blake calls chasing the light.

Even when you have a really solid idea of the kind of photos that you want to make in a park, there is never any guarantee that even the most “tried and true” natural vista will deliver for you on any given day. There are basically two approaches to this hurdle that I have employed in the past:

1. Commit to a location and stick it out; if the atmosphere doesn’t cooperate, try not to cry about it.
2. Identify the best candidates for a particular time of day and stay mobile. If it doesn’t look great in one place, move to another… Lather, rinse, repeat.

The latter course of action is what I term chasing the light, because that’s literally what you’re doing. If you really want a photo from Yosemite’s Tunnel View or Death Valley’s Zabriskie Point, absolutely go for it. My advice, though, is to keep your options open.

If sunset isn’t going to be anything special, well, it doesn’t much matter where you are, but don’t lock yourself into one spot when another could offer the chance of a lifetime.

I was once shooting Tunnel View at sunset, alongside what must have been 20 other very serious shooters, one of whom had a massive 8×10 bellows camera that took her fifteen minutes just to set up (talk about commitment to a location). As the sun began to set behind the mountains, it was apparent that not much was going to happen. The valley grew darker and darker, but there wasn’t much color to speak of.

I got into my car and went up the hill, through the tunnel, to the other side of the peak that borders the Tunnel View parking lot area. As I emerged from the other end of the tunnel, I was greeted by a fierce red sky, glowing intensely behind a faraway mountain ridge covered with burned trees.

I could not have captured this image if I had stayed at Tunnel View with those 20 other very dedicated and serious pros. This is the best advice I can give to any nature landscape photographer: stay mobile, and don’t be a slave to famous overlooks.

Happy shooting, my friends.

Today I stumbled across this short blog post in the New York Times’ technology section (a blog called Pogue’s Posts, written by David Pogue) about the way a camera’s settings is generally included alongside photos in various magazines and articles related to learning photography.

Pogue’s point, in part, was:

… [T]he caption always gives the specs for the photo: “Taken with a Nikon D90 at 1/200th second, aperture f/2.8, exposure +1, using Sigma 18-200mm lens” or whatever.

It’s always bothered me that often, the camera came up with these settings.

Plenty of shutterbugs use Auto mode or Program mode, where the camera computes the shutter speed and aperture size.

Others use Aperture Priority mode or Shutter Priority mode, where the photographer dials up one variable (the f-stop or the shutter speed) and the camera calculates the other one (the shutter speed or the f-stop).

For the record, I shoot in aperture priority mode (in the Canon world, Av for “aperture value,” and in the Nikon world, A, for “aperture”) essentially 99% of the time.

Also, for the record, I am totally unashamed of that. Why try to balance two settings all the time when you can simply adjust one (and occasionally tweak the EV)? Isn’t that what all of this fancy shmancy “through-the-lens” metering is supposed to be for? Yes, yes it is. I trust my camera’s meter, and I do rely upon it. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.

Getting back on topic, what Pogue is calling for here is a more forthright description of how a photograph used for instructional purposes is described. An accurate way to put it would be “Aperture set to f/2.8, exposure +1, auto shutter at 1/200th.”

In point of fact, the phrase that Pogue gave as an example (“1/200th of a second at f/2.8, exposure +1”) kind of doesn’t make sense because if you are in full manual mode, “exposure +1” would be an observation, not a setting. You can’t use EV settings in manual mode. But I digress.

I certainly don’t have the clout in the publishing world to make magazines and high-profile sites change the way they represent camera settings, but for what it’s worth, I completely support Pogue’s idea, and let it be known that if I mention settings for a photograph I’ve taken, nine times out of ten I let the camera choose at least one of the values.

Little did I know of the abilities of so-called “tethering,” for I had never tried it myself.

In the photography realm, tethering is a term generally used to describe shooting while the camera is directly connected to a computer. Most often, it is used to instantly push the photos onto the computer so that they can be previewed or, in some extreme cases, immediately edited by someone else for review by an on-site art director and so forth.

So really, “wireless tethering” is a super oxymoron, but that’s what they call it when you control your camera wirelessly or retrieve the photos in realtime wirelessly. Canon makes a device for this, and it retails for $800. I think you’d really have to need it to spend that much.

At least, that’s what Jamie Carl thought, so he made his own. Basically, tethering nowadays is just a standard USB connection, the same connection that you use to download photos directly from the camera (if you ever do that). They actually make wireless USB extenders now, which basically just separate one end of a USB cable from the other using wireless technology. It works just like USB, for just about anything that talks through USB.

I’m not sure what the bandwidth is like, but for controlling your camera, you don’t need much.

Jamie wanted to have wireless control of his camera because he was going to be riding in a car at highway speed, with his Nikon dangling outside on a mounting bracket! It seems like it worked out pretty well!

Check it out on Jamie Carl’s blog.

The dude loves Profoto gear. Wait, you don’t know Profoto? They make some pretty high-end on-location strobes and other lighting accessories. (Buy ‘em from B&H.) Two 2400 watt-second strobes with basic reflectors, a battery pack, and a case to carry them in is going to run you around $2,500, and then things go up from there.

Anyway, if you’re into off-camera flash, Allegri is someone you should idolize. He has perfected what he calls “guerrilla lighting” wherein he can set up a shoot for an A-list celeb, snap off 20 or 30 photos, and have them off on their way in sometimes less than five minutes. This guy can not only capture the mood and emotion of the individual, but also throw together a creative lighting setup in as much time as it would take you to imagine doing it.

Speed isn’t everything. There is a huge amount of technical savvy and creativity that goes into a successful photography career, especially working for Getty and operating at those high-stakes levels. Still, when it comes to photographing a movie star, pop singer, or even a CEO, you are going to be in demand among publicists and agents if you can pull it off in the time it takes your subject to walk from the stage to their dressing room.

Read more about Carlo Allegri and see some of his great photos on Profoto’s blog