The Moment It Clicks: Photography Secrets From One of the World's Top Shooters

uh, surprising. Yeah, that’s the word. The subject here was David Wojnarowicz, now deceased, a painter, filmmaker, and activist. He was making kind of tribal art at the time, so I made an urban version of the village campfire out of a Department of Sanitation trash can. (Had to swipe it off the streets of the city and throw it in the back of my van. It was like a kidnapping. Pulled up, looked around, and threw it in. The van smelled awful for days.)

    This was guerrilla filmmaking. We had a permit, but no police protection in what was then a very dicey neighborhood, nor did we have FDNY approval to set a fire. We got the lights ready, set the fire, and shot like mad.

    He can’t be lit with just the fire. Too iffy, and he woulda been all sorts of unsharp. So we nestled two battery-operated strobes into the base of the fire, aimed up at him and lighting the whole scene. I also put a couple of ungelled strobes behind the rocks on either side of him. They do two things: separate him from the background, and give me an extra measure of sharpness.
     
    I was lucky I did this, ‘cause the fire got big quick, and burned through one of the strobe cables near the blaze. Bye, bye light! Wasn’t aware of it at the time, of course. But without those wing lights, we would have had very little strobe punch, and thus very little sharpness in our screaming subject.

    When dealing with an exposure situation like this, you have two things you have little to no control over: the deepening sky, and the very erratic fire. The strobes give you a bit of leverage, and it pays to keep the subject just on the edge of the firelight, in semi-darkness, where your strobes can take over and freeze him, while your shutter speed takes care of how much or how little fire you’ve got raging in your picture.

    David was a character, to be sure. He wanted a fake Uzi machine gun, and his blue painted face was entirely his idea. I was fine with that, the odder the better in my book. We were chatting after the shoot and he asked me who I was going to shoot next. (All the artists down there knew each other, and knew Life was doing a story.)

    I replied that I was shooting a portrait of an artist who had undergone sex change surgery and whose art tended to relate to that specific experience. He nodded knowingly, holding the phony weapon, his face glowing blue. “You’ll have a good time photographing her. She’s really weird!”

    In New York, weird is relative.

     

    David Wojnarowicz
    Put the Light in an Unusual Place
     

    “Using the flash freezes him, but allows me to use a slower shutter speed, which blurs the world outside the car. This sends a message: fast-moving, powerful man on the go.”

    I spent a week with corporate big shot Larry Tisch as he was preparing to buy CBS. I needed a lead, something jazzy to kick off the story.
     
    I put the flash in an unusual place—outside the limo, aimed at the backseat side window (it was attached using a Bogen Magic Arm, which let me clamp the flash to the limo, right by the driver’s rear view mirror).

    This wasn’t frivolous. I had good editorial reasons. First, it gave me the main light off-camera (and as I mentioned before, direct flash is a disaster) and it also gave me control over the look of the picture colorwise, because the flash was gelled to make it slightly warm.
     
    Using the flash freezes him, but allows me to use a slower shutter speed, which blurs the world outside the car. This sends a message: fast-moving, powerful man on the go. Also, he was in the backseat of the limo. Another bunch of messages: power, money, and very importantly, the photographer is right there with him, behind the scenes, inside the fence. It says to the reader: Stay with the story, you haven’t seen this before.

    Sheesh, you mean I can do all that with one lousy flash?
     
    You can, until the driver forgets the light is boomed two feet outside his window and squeezes left onto 5th Avenue, splattering it against the rear view mirror of a double-parked van.

    I only had one flash with me, so I turned to Tisch and said, “You know, I think we got it!”

     

    Larry Tisch
    Filter!
     

    Bruce Dalrymple

    30 magenta plus full green equals good sunset.

    Uh, wanna run that by me again? In English?
     
    One of the tough things about digital is the Fluorescent white balance setting. I use it, monkey with it, push it up and down a bit, and can still get results that look like I’m shooting through an