Rangefinder Magazine
February 2006

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Profile: Shaw McCutcheon Lou Jacobs Jr.
Marine Specialist

Shaw McCutcheon was a child when his father became an editorial cartoonist with the Spokesman-Review in Shaw’s hometown of Spokane, WA. Journalism runs in the family: His grandfather was a world-traveling foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, a great uncle was a novelist, and famed New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley was his ancestor. Shaw wanted to be a reporter early on and was news editor for his college paper at the University of Denver. “That was in the mid-1960s,” he says, “the Vietnam War was raging, and it was an interesting time.”

After graduating high school in 1969, Shaw moved to Boulder, CO, where he edited and photographed for a monthly alternative journal. In 1972 he attended the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University (still a top school in its field) and received a master’s degree in journalism. After plenty of job hunting, he applied in person at the Memphis Commercial Appeal and was hired by the paper to cover three counties in northwestern Tennessee. As a reporter he exposed a corrupt sheriff, captured an escaped convict and took numerous photographs for the stories. Shaw left the newspaper in 1979. He then traveled to Costa Rica and South America with a friend. After six months, they ran out of money in Bolivia. Shaw’s cameras were stolen in Columbia, and on his way home he borrowed cameras to document their 10-day overland passage from Columbia to Panama. He says the series became the “first real sale of my photography.”

Back in the U.S. Shaw decided to try freelancing and moved to New York. He says, “My career was economically uninspiring, and I lived cheaply. I sent query letters by the dozen, and rejections came back by the dozen. My photo portfolio was very thin, and I got ho-hum responses from magazines and agencies. Eventually I decided to market myself as both writer and photographer, and I became a regular contributor to Islands, Travel/Holiday, Yankee and others.

“I began piggy-backing magazine assignments and covered Nigeria for a Texaco annual report; Cameroon, Chad and Egypt for CARE, which, with the U.N., became regular clients. I averaged $200 a day plus expenses, including a car and driver, and it was exciting to be in remote and exotic places. The next year I did South America again, then Africa, and finally a round-theworld trip that included nine countries, mostly third world.”

Shaw’s additional adventures in travel photography include speedboating on the Amazon, exploring pre-history in Bahrain, and cruising Lake Nasser with Nubian fishermen in southern Egypt.

Six armed men once entered his motel room in Lima, Peru, and took all his money. “Fortunately, I’d left my cameras at the CARE offices. The men discussed taking me hostage but decided I wasn’t worth the trouble.” Despite the occasional setback, Shaw says working for CARE was a pleasure, adding, “Their car and driver took me anywhere I wanted to go.”

Shaw’s last trip involved three months of advanced preparation. He started an assignment in Brittany for Travel/Holiday, followed by a yachting story on the Riviera for Pan Am, and then did work for CARE in Chad. He covered rebel territory in the Sudan, and did stories in Kuwait, Hong Kong and Japan for Boating magazine. This saga was satisfying but not as financially rewarding as he had planned.

Back in the States, he shot Tall Ships parading in Newport, RI, from a high bridge, and sold his work to Motor Boating & Sailing for an eight-page story. A few months later they hired him to do more Tall Ships coverage in Quebec. More stories followed for Islands, and eventually he ended up back in Bolivia, where there was a general strike. Shaw went skiing at the highest ski area in the world (over 17,000 feet up) and sold an illustrated article to Powder magazine.

During the next few years on staff for CARE, Shaw lost interest in “a political office” environment. Eventually he was hired as a senior editor at Boating magazine, where he says, “They taught me boats.” That was 1987, and he stayed at their Park Avenue offices until 1990, writing features, editing columns, and covering boat tests in words and pictures. “I had never taken a formal photography course, and it was at Boating that I really began to hone my vision and techniques. A picture of models fishing off a luxury boat taken from a helicopter became my first cover. For early interiors aboard a 74-foot motor yacht, I simply turned on all the boat’s lights, and used tungsten film in a Nikon with a 35mm lens. The color was too warm inside and too blue outside, but we used it.” Shaw began placing Vivitar 283s on slave eyes around boat interiors, like he had read in photography books.

Shaw left the magazine in 1990 and moved to Boca Raton, FL. By this time he had become acquainted with dozens of marketing directors and CEOs in the marine industry and offered them his services. “What I realized was that as an editor they fawned all over me, but as another vendor, I had to fawn all over them. At the time, recession squeezed photo budgets and it was a tough couple of years.”

By observing photo assistants he had hired, Shaw’s sharpened his lighting and shooting techniques. He explains, “With large yacht interiors it’s better to use room lighting as the key, then fill with small tungsten lights. My assistant suggested using 50-watt clip-on lights instead of strobes, and he bought a dozen at Home Depot. This was a whole new approach for me, because the clip-ons didn’t overpower the boat lights, and I also directed the light with Cinefoil snoots.” Shaw also learned to use 80C and 80D filters to cool the color temperature of tungsten lights.

When he graduated to shooting large yachts, Shaw discovered new financial opportunities photographing production boats from companies like Sea Ray, Wellcraft and Bayliner. “But,” he says, “I had two young daughters, and the large yacht niche was considerably less populated by photographers. There are currently only a handful of nautical specialists, mainly because clients aren’t used to $2000 day rates, but large yacht owners are less demanding than publications, and I could still earn $1200 to $1500 a day.”

For a while Shaw shot with a 4x5 Linhof, and he still uses a Rollei 2¼ system. He recently purchased a Fujifilm 6x8cm GX 680, a medium format with limited swings and tilts. Shaw says, “Most commercial clients demand wide-angle shots to make ship interiors look larger. Newer yachts have dozens of ceiling lights, so I only have to brighten wood paneling with small clipons. I shoot with daylight on yachts with large windows, and I set strobes on the dock or outside decks and try for a feeling of sunlight from one side.”

Night shoots often last until dawn and can be exhausting, so in daytime Shaw sometimes masks an entire boat with 53- inch Savage Super Black backdrop paper and uses tungsten sources for interiors. His favorite light is at dusk when warm light inside is countered by cold blue light outside. Shaw’s preferred photo situation is hanging out of a helicopter door five feet above the water, shooting up at a boat, and then climbing to 200 feet for straight down shots. “I shoot these in 645 format getting 30 frames on 220 Fujifilm Provia. The best time for aerials is about 15 minutes after sunrise in Florida when skies are more likely to be clear than in the afternoon.

“Most good boat photographers hang big gyroscopes from the camera to reduce the effects of helicopter vibrations,” Shaw says, and adds a chopper review: “The Robinson R-44 is highly maneuverable with the right pilot, but when they are affordable, Bell Jet Rangers are more stable. The best photo platform is the Hughes 500. It’s the Ferrari of the helicopter fleet.”

For interior work Shaw feels that film quality is superior to what he gets when shooting digital. With skilled color management in Photoshop, he says that digital does well, but asserts, “Art directors with digital images have nothing to check color against. My monitor and theirs may differ. Film can be scanned and color corrected with the original for comparison. But clients love the immediacy of a shot zapped to them in a nanosecond. I’ve used digital on editorial jobs, and I remember the story a friend tells about shooting a boat interior for a magazine cover: He sent it by Internet to the editor 500 miles away, and was asked to move a chair a couple of inches, and rearrange magazines on a coffee table. The photographer shot it again on film, and everybody was perfectly— and precisely—happy.”

In addition to nautical subjects, Shaw McCutcheon is a very versatile photographer. His website, www.smcphoto.com, lists his other areas of photographic expertise as architectural, corporate, editorial, industrial and lifestyle. He prefers freelancing to an office job any day.