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The Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light from Small Flashes |  | Author: Joe McNally
Brand: Peachpit Press
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $21.99
as of 9/3/2010 11:28 MDT details
You Save: $18.00 (45%)
New (51) Used (19) from $19.64
Seller: theslippeddisc
Rating:  185 reviews
Sales Rank: 8528
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1 Original
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 8 x 0.8
MPN: 0321580141
ISBN: 0321580141
Dewey Decimal Number: 778.72
EAN: 9780321580146
ASIN: 0321580141
Publication Date: March 13, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
After spending more than thirty years behind the lens - working for National Geographic, Time, Life and Sports Illustrated - Joe McNally knows about light. He knows how to talk about it, shape it, color it, control it and direct it. Most importantly, he knows how to create it using small hot shoe flashes.In The Hot Shoe Diaries, Joe brings you behind the scenes to candidly share his lighting solutions for a ton of great images. Using Nikon Speedlights, Joe lets you in on his uncensored thought process-often funny, sometimes serious, always fascinating-to demonstrate how he makes his pictures with these small flashes. Whether he's photographing a gymnast on the Great Wall, an alligator in a swamp, or a fire truck careening through Times Square, Joe uses these flashes to create great light that makes his pictures sing.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 185
 Happy I bought this book! August 15, 2010
Misha E.
Once I picked this baby up, I couldn't stop reading it. Finally after many blogs, books, podcasts etc, I can finally see the "light". It is highly informative and very funny.
 too Nikon focused July 17, 2010
JBL (Redwood City, CA)
I'd read good things about this book, but I have to say I didn't care for it. It's overly Nikon-centric which would be great, I guess, if I owned Nikons, but it seems focused to a fault, even getting down to things like using an SC-28 or SC-29 cable which are just hotshoe extension cables for off-camera flash use. I also found McNally's writing style overly conversational and borderline incoherent. I know other people like that sort of thing, but I found it hard to follow and stressful to read.
 Diaries are personal...but sometimes fun to read July 13, 2010
Nuncia (Pacific NW)
Many others have detailed the pros and cons of this book, the most consistent attributes: Nikon-centric (true, this book's shelf life is over when Nikon moves on to another generation of Speedlights), and it is written in style that is supposed to mimic the way the author speaks. Anyone involved in photography knows that it is an alphabet soup of acronyms and topic specific jargon. These things aside, if you are shooting with a Nikon DSLR, using Nikon flashes and have some familiarity with your camera and your flash this book can help you reach the next level by demystifying how a pro shooter got the shot. This book, like many "how to" gear centric books is speaking to a guy only audience from the perspective of a guy. This part gets irritating quickly. While is may be true that the majority of the pro photographers and pro want-to-be working today are men there is a growing and committed group of women out there who are looking to up their game as well. For that reason alone I rate this book a 4 out of 5. If you can get past the references to his body parts, sports and military jargon there are excellent recipies to get great lighting effects. I recommend David Hobby's website, Strobist.com and Peachpit Press Digital Photographer series by Scott Kelby, both a wealth of information in a much more gender neutral, reader-friendly style for Canon, Nikon or any DSLR.
great images, great examples June 23, 2010
J. Kew (Vancouver, British Columbia Canada)
Review by Thorsten Gohl (member-Vancouver InDesign User Group)
The Hot Shoe Diaries - Big Light from small Flashes by Joe McNally (New Riders)
This is just another great book! Joe's first book "The Moment it Clicks" was already something special, great images, but this book is even better.
Joe has a way to explain things on a different level, to make it fun, to make you want to try it out yourself. I would say that a beginner has a harder time to understand parts of it, but it would still be worth to look through it. The first chapter explains step by step what is important to know. Not too many words and too much explanation, just enough to get the most important information.
Of course, the images that Joe presents in his book are amazing. They give you good examples of what is explained in the text. Some even show how it looks with flash and without flash, just to show the difference and make it even more clear. He does not go into detail about the old school lighting techniques, but he somehow explains it in his own way: "How to light an Elf" or "Make the Available Light Unavailable" are great parts of this book, explaining very easy the way of lighting in different scenarios.
At the end he even talks about having two lights available. Again, great images, great examples and such great stories behind the images. If you look at the image, it seems easy, but it is not. Joe makes it fun and tells you how it is possible to create this image! It is important to know beforehand what you want to create and Joe is putting a lot of thought into that. You just love his sketching!!!
I could write a story about each of his images, about his humor, about his way of seeing and creating, but I think everybody should find out for themselves. This is a great book that is hard to put down once you start it. Enjoy it!!!
Nikon users only - almost June 16, 2010
Jackomo (CA, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A good book by a great photographer, wonderful images and lots of interesting insight. However, it is all about Nikon cameras and flashes, so for those of us that don't use Nikon, a lot of the good information is useless or at least takes work to transpose and make useful. That's really a shame, it would not have been hard to either write this in a more general way or have some co-author "translate" things to at least 'the other' big camera maker Canon. (Note: I own Canon gear but would be just as happy with Nikon gear, I'm not a Canon fan boy or Nikon hater. Both are exactly equal in my book, I just could not afford to buy one of each)
So, had I known that it's so Nikon focused, I would not have bought the book, and I'm glad I did not order his other book at the same time. And I won't. There's just too much camera and flash specific writing that has no value for me with my Canon gear. Unfortunately.
That aside, and if you can get past his sometimes patronizing, sometimes overly forced beer-drinking-buddy like writing style, there's a lot of fun and interesting info from the front lines of photography in here. The images are fantastic and I do take good value information with me, I just wish it would be either more generic (i.e. not all based on model numbers) or - well - based on Canon gear :-D
The value of the information is greater than the style and gear shortcomings, so 4 stars seems to be fair. 5+ stars if I had Nikon gear.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 185
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