Exposures . . .
By
John Terence Turner
Stock Asylum Columnist
Feb. 1, 2007
©
2006 John Terence Turner
Sometimes, during a shoot something happens that yanks it from the routine
and predictable into the remarkable and pleasing. Some magic occurs
that makes everyone smile when they see the results.
That happened to me with this shoot.
I had been hired by Honeywell to photograph the rollout of the first 737 for their corporate magazine (they make a lot of the avionics). The first of a new line of jetliners is always a big deal at Boeing. The top executives show up along with executives from airlines that have ordered the plane. U.S. Senators, Representatives and perhaps Washington's Governor also make an appearance. Many of the workers who built the first aircraft are there to see their handiwork rolled out and praised.
 There's no substitute for proper exposure. John Terence Turner managed to capture this image only because he had a spot meter available to take a light reading off the body of the airplane. ( © John Terence Turner ). |
There are speeches and the shiny jet is pushed out of the giant hangar into the cool, cloudy air of the Northwest U.S. Then, everyone mills around and looks at it. They take pictures of themselves standing in front of it. “Look ma, I built this!”
The politicians shake hands and hustle votes, the executives smile and imagine the profits the plane will earn and everyone is happy.
The hangar is nearly dark until the announcer starts the program. The enormous room is filled with the shiny aircraft, the dignitaries and hundreds of Boeing workers.
Then the theatrical lighting kicks in and spotlights optically fondle the fuselage. Because the hangar is essentially dark except for spotlights moving across the skin of the plane, it is tough to shoot. Still, I blasted away with hope in my heart, figuring that the best shooting opportunities would happen once the plane was moved outside. I was using a hand-meter with spot attachment. I seemed to be the only shooter using one.
The hangar doors slowly opened as the plane was rotated on a large circular plate built into the floor. Miraculously, what had been a typically dark, gray Seattle day had suddenly transformed into one with sunshine pouring from a giant hole in the cloud-cover.
The hangar’s door faces north and the sun comes from the south in Seattle. Nonetheless, the sun was so bright it flooded through the widening gap between the hangar’s huge doors.
The sun arrived, the glorious sun, that savior of shoots since the time of Matthew Brady in the Civil War. It warms, it illuminates, it creates shadows and it makes pictures better. It did all that for this picture.
The fuselage was unpainted aluminum, pristine except for the red, white and blue stripes along the length of it. The shiny surface bounced the sunlight onto the doors and rafters above, making the plane look like an aeronautic diamond. The bright light silhouetted a sea of Boeing workers in the foreground. They looked like extras in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” All that was missing was Richard Dreyfuss and a soundtrack by John Williams.
 Turner was told that Boeing's ad department tried unsuccessfully to duplicate this image before agreeing to pay the photographer his asking price. ( © John Terence Turner ). |
I took a light reading off the part of the fuselage that wasn’t directly reflecting the sun and blazed away. I got about a half dozen frames before the doors opened so far that the composition was spoiled.
Using the spot-meter let me get a reading from a specific area of the plane. Had I relied on an in-camera meter, I would have used a much different reading. With such contrasty light, the final image would have looked entirely different and probably nowhere near as interesting.
Today's cameras have wonderful meters that work well in moderately difficult lighting. However, every camera must settle on one exposure to the exclusion of other possibilities. The final choice may or may not be the optimal one for a particular situation.
Professional photographers spend countless hours learning how to get exactly what they want every time. When your livelihood is at stake (which it is on just about every important assignment), you cannot throw the dice and depend on decisions made by a computer chip. Even with Photoshop, there is only so much that can be done to save a missed exposure.
This shot became a double page spread in the Honeywell magazine.
Since I also shot occasional assignments for Boeing, I had a large print made and sent it to the office of one of my contacts at the company headquarters.
A considerable time later, I got a call from the advertising department at Boeing. They were interested in using the shot in a large ad announcing a milestone in 737 production. They told me about the use and, after some research, I gave them a price. “Way too high,” they said and the conversation ended.
Weeks passed. I was on a shoot for a trucking company in Colorado and was taking a much-needed afternoon nap because I had been up since well before dawn. The phone rang. It was Boeing's ad department. They wanted the picture for the use we had discussed.
And, they accepted my original price.
Later I learned via a Boeing photographer that they had contacted all the photographers at the rollout for a comparable shot. None existed. Then they decided to duplicate my picture by having one of their photographers re-shoot it. They were unsuccessful and finally came back to me.
The use was a double-page spread in TIME magazine, worldwide. Ever conscious of the bottom-line, they ran it in black and white to get a better price from the magazine. It was a good payday for me.
(John Terence Turner has been shooting stock photography for 20 years. His work can be seen at Getty Images, Alamy and, of course, The Stock Asylum, where his column appears twice a month. He lives and works in Seattle, WA.)
Turner's web site can be found at: http://www.johnterenceturner.com.
For more of his images: click here.
For all of Turner's columns: click here.
