Glossary
McNally Speak: Other Industry Terms
arc ‘im Good old-fashioned location fun. Sounds like a mob hit, but just involves an older model Speedotron 2,400-watt-second pack, a metallic reflector pan, and a clueless fnugy. Crank the Speedo all the way up to 2,400. I think on the pack by the dial, it simply said “Whammo!” Ask the clueless newbie to put the reflector pan on the head. This would trigger the tubes right when he was basically kissing the light. Pow! Watch him fly! Chuckles all around.
bag it Whenever you put a light up, it is advisable to weight it down with a sandbag. It makes the light more secure, safer to walk under, and more inclined to stay upright in a mild breeze. When you don’t have the luxury of a sandbag (you know you are involved in a strange industry when you refer to a bag of sand as a “luxury”), you can always use your camera bag or the strobe power pack as a very expensive sandbag.
bag the s#!% out of it When you are in the field, even a bit of wind can mean disaster for your lighting, depending on the size of the umbrella or softbox you’ve got up there. (Pursuant to Murphy’s Law, the size of the light-shaping tool required to achieve the desired effect goes up in direct relationship to how breezy it is.) So, given the possibility of a gust here and there, I usually tell the assistants to “sandbag the s#!% out of it” lest we stage our own version of America’s Cup. I lost a 12′ silk with the frame, a 12′ ladder, and a monster Gitzo tripod into New York Harbor on a shoot with dancer Gregory Hines. Wind came up, tore the silk off the high rollers, and it cartwheeled off the edge of the pier, taking a bunch of my stuff with it. (Thankfully it didn’t take Gregory Hines. That would have severely tested the “A bad day in the field beats a good day in the office” theory.)
biddybastards These are what get into your gear overnight and screw things up. Ever do a pre-light day in an office or a studio and everything’s perfect? You shut down and lock the door, and the next morning it looks different? And not for the better? What the heck? What happened overnight? The biddybastards, I tell ya.
bites Bogen Super Clamp, the ubiquitous metal clamp (movie guys call them “mafer clamps”). I tend to call them bites, as in, “Give me a Magic Arm with a coupla bites.” Bogen makes a swivel arm called a Bogen Magic Arm, which swings, tilts, and omni-directs all over the place. The clamps are often used to attach the arm to something, like a railing, or a moving vehicle, or someplace you might want to fly a remote camera. So you’ve got the arm and the clamps. An arm with a Super Clamp at either end is a Magic Arm complete, or an arm with a coupla bites.
c-stand Short for century stand, a heavy three-part light stand. Comes in a variety of sizes, although it used to be 100″ tall, hence the name “century.” Always remember to ask for a C-stand complete, not just a C-stand. C-stand gets you the three-legged base (called a turtle base) and the main column. Bad move. The magic of the C-stand comes from the extension arm. This arm gives you the ability to swing, tilt, and drop a light pretty much wherever you need it, without stuffing the stand itself into the picture and close to the subject. According to Wikipedia, a variant of the C-stand is only 20″ at its shortest height; it is nicknamed a “Gary Coleman” stand.
cheeseball piece of s#!% Any expensive piece of photo gear that works at the camera store, works at the studio, and fails in the field.
chimp Click, click, click! Ooh, ooh, ooh! That seductive LCD...we stare at it often, a look of wonder on our faces, as if we are auditioning for a part in Quest for Fire. Try not to utter hoots, clicks, and grunts in front of the client.
field of frame Means what’s in the frame and what’s not. I always tell my assistants to let me get a field of frame and then we reverse engineer the lighting from there. It’s not good English and may seem mildly obscure, but on the set, everybody always understands what it means. It’s a crucial first step on location. It establishes your field of play.
flux capacitor The standard response when anyone asks you a highly technical, impossible-to-answer, howmany-pixels-on-the-head-of-a-pin-type question about a malfunctioning camera or strobe. “Uhh, lessee, did you check the flux capacitor?”
fnugy F-ing new guy. Usually an overeager, intern type who everybody has mild sport with on his or her first days out on location.
full boat All the way up on the pack, as in, “Gimme a full boat on that pack.” That means that’s all there is and there ain’t no more. (Give me everything you’ve got, Scotty! Jim, have ye gone mad?!!? The engines’ll never take it!)
gobo Quite literally means, “go between optics.” Loosely, I use it on the set to refer to anything that flags off the lens or the light, and helps control spill and flare. It could be a cutter, or a flag, or a piece of cardboard, or your assistant.
justin clamp During the aviation shoot for National Geographic, I was clamping small SB flash units to all sorts of aircraft with a real flimsy set of hot shoe clamps. (See “Cheeseball Piece of S#!%.”) I complained. (In Webster’s, next to “photographer” it says, “he or she who complains constantly.”) I complained to my friend Justin, then of the Bogen Corporation, which is the outfit that represents Manfrotto in this country. He came over to my studio with some off-the-shelf Manfrotto parts and cobbled together this little Frankenstein of a clamp. I looked at it and said, “Perfect. Give me 10 of them.” Bogen has sold, like, 4,000 of ‘em at this writing. And Justin has his place in the world of photo trivia. In the Bogen catalog, the unit is the 175F. But it is listed at B&H as the Justin Clamp.
o.o. This stands for “overt ogling,” or just “oh-oh.” It is a common crew affliction on a set where you are photographing a scantily clad fashion model. As the shooter, you can avoid this by keeping both eyes open at the camera. One eye, of course, is in the lens, but with the other you can keep your eye on your assistants and make sure they are watching the lights instead of staring at the talent.
screw the pooch You just shot a billboard job, got back to the studio, looked at your camera, and found out you were shooting JPEG Basic all day long.
skirt the light A black card, or a piece of cloth, or a winter jacket, or a table napkin. Anything you can tape or clamp to the bottom third of the light source to make sure you don’t light the feet as well as you’ve lit the face.
stingers Leave it to the movie guys to come up with weird names for common household items. A stinger is an extension cord, plain and simple. The best ones to buy are the yellow ones with little glowing LEDs in the male end. That little light is incredibly valuable, ‘cause you don’t have to string 50′ of cord to your power pack only to find out the circuit is dead. Plug it in. If it glows, you’re hot, baby. Ya gotta love the movie folks. They’re like a tribe with their own language. I’ve been renting movie grip gear from Hotlights in NYC for 20 years, and I still don’t know the names of what I am asking for. Bob and Dave, the guys who run the shop, are very patient with me. They listen to my description of what I am trying to do, rub their chin for a minute, and say, “Oh yeah, what you need is a 6″ cool baby redhead!” “Sure,” I reply. I mean, who wouldn’t want one of those?
stitch Leave little swatches of black gaffer tape on the outer rim of your lens shades—all of them. I call them stitches. Then, when you take the lens out of the bag to use and affix the shade, you can peel one or two of those puppies off and stick/wedge them onto the edge of the shade where it bayonets onto the camera lens. The shade will be much more secure if you do this. Face it, most lens shades made by most camera manufacturers are basically cheeseball pieces of s#!%. If you bang them into something, they will fall off the lens and into the lake, or worse. Think of yourself quietly maneuvering to get a nice picture of your daughter giving the valedictory speech at her high school commencement. You are getting to a good spot, silently, unobtrusively, crouching all the way, and then your lens shade bangs ever so slightly into the side of a metal folding chair and falls off, skittering noisily across 10 feet of gym floor. All eyes in the gym swivel towards you. The imperious Dean of Students’ expression darkens in disapproval from the dais. Another parent retrieves it for you, saying in a whisper, “Here’s your shade,” but he might as well for all the world have been uttering that phrase made popular on the country cable channel, “Here’s your sign,” sure evidence that you have just done something irretrievably stupid. Your daughter’s face reddens, and she stumbles through the rest of her speech. She is scarred for life.
a strong eight f/8 and a third. I can’t get used to the new f-stop nomenclature, like f/9, or f/7.1, etc. Comes from the film days when the manufacturers would sell us ISO 100 that was really ISO 80. If it metered f/8 at 100, you really needed a strong f/8 for reproduction.
a tic up A tenth of a stop. Most power packs now are digital, parsing the f-number into tenths. On the set, a tic up is one click, or one push, on the button.
underlensed You’ve got a three; ya need a six.
val In our current climate of doing more with less (nice phrase for “there is no budget for this job”), as shooters we often find ourselves out there assistantless, and have to dragoon the nearest warm body we can find into holding a piece of equipment, usually lighting equipment. When you do this, you constantly have to have both eyes open at the camera, one through the lens, and the other on your unknowing, untested, newfound helper, who is doing a rapid series of calculations in his head and arriving at the question many folks ask themselves after they get involved in a photo shoot: “Why the heck did I agree to do this?” Anyway, you need the lights in a particular place, and of course he is wavering, slipping, drifting, yawning, and otherwise waving the light or the reflector around like he is saying goodbye to his kids on the first day of school. You have to constantly coach him, watch him, and direct him: “A little up, little down, come closer, hold steady....” Congratulations! You now have a VAL—a voice-activated light stand.
valley of the gels Colleague Greg Heisler used to refer to this destination. This is where you go when you leave reality behind in the rear view mirror and work for a client who wants you to turn a cubicle workstation with an eight-foot drop ceiling and two 10-year-old PCs running Office 95 into the deck of the Starship Enterprise.
white light bleed When you are careless taping on colored gels over the light sources, this is what you get. It gives you pink instead of red, powder blue instead of deep blue. If you just need a bit of indiscriminate warmth in your light, you can slap on a warm gel without too much precision. But if you want real color, seal the light. Employ this tactic when you are taking a ride into the Valley of the Gels.
woof Once you have your field of frame, then you can go woof. Your lights often work best when they are as close as they possibly can be to your subject. The assistant moves the light in, and you have the frame locked down, and the light gets in closer, and closer, and then WOOF! You see the edge of the light. Back off an inch. The light is now as close as it can get.
zero out The cameras nowadays are so bloody automatic, they will give you decent exposures, even if the inputs you are making to the machine are completely wacky. On aperture priority, for instance, your exposures on the LCD will look fine, even though you are shooting at ISO 800 and wish to be at 100. The camera makes the adjustments. It doesn’t care about the ISO. (See “Screw the Pooch.”) So to avoid this, every morning in the field I ask myself, or my assistant, “Are we zeroed out?” That means we got the camera back to the baseline. My personal baseline is ISO 100, Cloudy white balance, RAW quality (though now, with the D3, I will be shooting RAW+JPEG), and aperture priority. Those are the items most likely to be changed up during the day as we shoot, but that is where we start.