with hard-hitting questions like:

"Jack, are you aloof or are you just the hardest worker I've known over the last 16 years?"

and

"I want to reflect on the accomplishments because, unfortunately, to a large number of fans you are judged solely on whether you win a national championship in football. But some of us are more sensible than that because you didn't have that opportunity."

No, sorry, I don't have any photos to post. This is about how they take those fabulous color photos of the women in their swimsuits. To call them "swimsuits" is a stretch (no pun intended) of what they are actually for. If someone wearing those beautiful swatches of clothing were to get hit by a big wave, there's a very good chance that the "swimsuit" they are wearing would be ripped away and suddenly the young woman would not have to worry about those annoying "tan lines" that plague those who prefer an "all over" tan.

But, I digress.j

Sometime back in the 1980s I saw a tv show about one year in which the beautiful young women and the photographers and camera crew jumped from one location to the next taking photos for the Swimsuit Edition.

Being a devotee of portrait photography, I was very interested in how those terrific photos were produced. By the time the program ended, I was a bit shocked in how they actually produced those photos. I was surprised, not by how much equipment the photographers employed, but by how basic and minimal their needs was. The photographers got by with a few reflectors and sometimes a flash head mounted on their high-end camera.

You've all probably heard about "the golden hour," that time before sunset when the sun is low in the west and, if you use it properly, you get a gold skin tone from that time of day. If the model (I'll use the word 'model' here for the sake of convenience), has dark skin, then the result will not be a gold tone to their skin, but it can still result in a deep, rich skin tone that gives a radiant glow to their features.

So, here's what I saw in that program...

The photographer didn't waste time changing lenses. Like most good professional photojournalists, the SI (Sports Illustrated) photographer had two cameras hanging from his neck or shoulder. Personally, I don't have my cameras (we're talking pre-digital cameras - all film cameras back then) around my neck. I carry them hanging from my shoulder, and I never had two high-end cameras. The SI photographer had one camera with a wide-angle lens and the other camera with a medium focal length lens. My best portraiture lens was my Nikon 105 lens. It was a fixed lens, not a zoom lens.

None of the SI photographers used 120 film (the square format: 2 1/4 inch by 2 1/4 inch), used by Hasselblad cameras - the one they took to the Moon. They all had high end Nikons or Canons. Some had motor-drive film advance features. Some didn't: they just "thumbed" the lever with their right thumb to advance to the next frame.

Flash heads. Most of the SI photos were not taken with flash. If you remember going to weddings and if you watched the wedding photographer, they all had these weird brackets that they mounted their flash heads on. The brackets were attached to the camera by the "mount" at the bottom that they used to screw their camera onto a tripod when they wanted to used a cable release for shots longer than 1/60th of a second. They would even disengage their bracket from the camera, sometimes, to get their flash head as far away from their lens as possible, to prevent "lens flare" - light that enters their lens from the use of a flash when taking a photo. Lens flare is one reason why the flash from your Iphone results in lousy flash photos - the flash is too close to the lens.

So, back to the beach. The photographer has their nice high-end film camera and the model is standing at the water's edge during the golden hour. The photographer has one or two assistants positioned on either side of the model with round, commercially purchased reflectors that they position to reflect the golden hour sunlight onto the body of the model.

You can purchase reflectors that have different covers you can zip around the white translucent nylon circle of fabric. There are gold reflectors and silver reflectors you can use. Normally, the photographer just uses the white translucent default reflector. Combine a talented professional photographer with a high-end film single-lens reflex camera (SLR), two assistants with reflectors, a beautiful model, and the golden hour, and you have all the makings for a perfect Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover shot.

Lens aperature setting: The photographer will usually open their aperture as wide as they can. A great portrait lens can go as wide as 1.4 and still take great photos. That will blur the background and make the water and sky blend very nicely into liquid sky blues and deep rich water colors. If the photographer wants to have the water drops frozen and in focus, they will set the speed to 1/500th of a second. If they want the water to blur and capture the movement as flowing, they will set the speed of the exposure to 1/30th of a second.

Sometimes the photographer will use their flash to capture the stop action of Cheryl Tiegs or Cathy Ireland as they twirl around with a scarf in motion. That's the benefit of a flash: it stops the action nicely and still gives a rich tone to the exposure. When I'm using my indoor flash equipment with the umbrellas and electronic flash heads mounted on stands, I've learned from a session given by the famous wedding photographer, Joe Buissink, to set the speed of the exposure to 1/60th or even 1/30th of a second. This allows more time for the exposure and gives richer colors.

So, in summary, I was delighted to see how little it took to capture a great photo of those SI models. Great camera + great lens + the golden hour + a reflector or two + beautiful model.

Oh, you have to be careful when taking a portrait of a person when it's sunny. You don't want them squinting. You want to see their eyes and with a natural expression. Most great portraits do not show the person smiling. If it's sunny, position your subject in the shade of a tree and use "fill flash" to allow for their eyes to be wide open. The flash will happen so fast, they won't have time to squint.

Tutorial over.

Move ahead. Try to detect it. It's not too late ... to fling it good.