American Photo Magazine Cover Story

Table Top Hero

Photographer Jody Dole creates stunning still lifes by carefully etching shapes and reflections with a masterful control of light. The secrets of his craft are a career's worth of experience and the latest in digital wizardry .

Jody Dole 's compact but efficient studio is set up in his circa-1840 house in Chester , Connecticut , a picture-postcard-perfect New England town about two and a half hours north of New York City . Dole moved his family there in 2002, a year after witnessing the World Trade Center attack from his home in Manhattan 's Meatpacking district.

Long interested in digital photography, Dole shot the cover of American Photo's first issue on the new technology back in 1994. For this month's cover shot of the state-of-the-art Canon EOS 1-D Mark II, featured in our Editor's Choice round-up of top digital SLRs (page 58), we thought it appropriate to ask him to apply his talent once again. The goal was to create a "hero" shot of the Canon camera that captured drama and emotion. Dole's solution: a multi-image digital compsite made with his own camera of choice--the Nikon D1x digital SLR. (Dole is organizing a Nikon-sponsored digital photo workshop at the Connecticut River Museum in Essex , Connecticut , set for July 2005. visit www.jodydole.com )

Dole lit the Canon with an LTM Prolight 1200 HMI, a 1,200-watt movie spot that he says "is perfect for digital photography because it's daylight balanced and rich in UV light, so you get great color saturation." The key, he says, is breaking up the light--in this case with a glass brick, an old trick he learned while shooting cosmetics ads for television. "You have to get the brick to modulate the light just right," says Dole, "or you'll burn out highlights." He used silver reflector cards to bounce light onto the camera's top and sides, adding dimension to the shot, and a brushed steel background to create a sense of cool strength. His Nikon D1x, tethered by FireWire to a Power mac G5, was fitted with an AF-S Zoom-Nikkor 28-70 f/2.8D lens. For fast review of images on the camera's CompactFlash card Dole also used the new Epson P-1000 digital photo viewer. (See Digital Storage and Memory, page 82.)

The final image consists of four different exposures--one each for the background, the camera, the reflections on the camera, and the Mark II's Canon EF16-35mm f/2.8L USM lens. "When you're aiming for perfection," Dole says, " you get each element just the way you want it….. then put it all together with Photoshop CS!"