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

‘attaboys.’”

    Career advice for the freelancer.

     

    Lou Piniella & Ron Luciano
Think Romance!

    “Then I start thinking…Beauty and the Beast! They’re, you know, like, in LOVE! My mind starts racing. They’re gonna go upstairs and do it!”

    It helps to be a bit of a romantic sometimes. I was shooting the
A Day in the Life of Hollywood
book and one of my stops was to make pictures of Alan Menken getting a BMI music award for Beauty and the Beast at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
     
    For a photographer, an award ceremony is a non-starter. Uhh, lessee…should I cover the award ceremony, or should I go get that long overdue root canal? Hmmm….

    Anyway, Menken wins the award, and the photogs close in and go disco, shooting flash so motor-driven fast they must have had Honda generators strapped to their belts. I’m in the mix, doing the same thing, thinking, man, the movie might be a hit, but this picture I’m getting closes out of town.
     
    The furor calms down, and Beauty and the Beast walk away. I walk away, too, but then I start thinking…Beauty and the Beast! They’re, you know, like, in love! My mind starts racing. They’re gonna go upstairs and do it! The Beast must have an enormous schvenstalker! They’re heading for the elevators!

    Luckily, the Bev Wilshire hotel has a sweeping staircase with two sets of steps. Beauty and the Beast lumber up one, and I sprint up the other. They get to the elevator bank and…there’s Joe!
     
    I got a frame that was a double truck [ 1 ] in the book.

    [ 1 ] Double Truck: A double truck is a two-page spread.
Eddie Being Eddie
    First time I ever saw Eddie being Eddie was at the 1980 Democratic National Convention. Eddie is Eddie Adams, of course—shooter, legend, raconteur, hero, rock star, sage, keeper of the “Shit List,” friend, mentor, and (occasionally) irascible old coot.
     
    I didn’t know him back then. I was a newbie, and he was Eddie. He seemed pretty gruff. I was scared of him.

    But I did notice him going around with this galoot of an assistant who obviously didn’t know anything about photography. Curious. The guy was big enough to play linebacker for the Chicago Bears, and in fact, probably did, but a photog he wasn’t. But the guy was big. Real big.
     
    So the last night of the convention, President Carter, ever the populist, decides to walk through the convention floor to the podium instead of using the back hallways like the elitist sumbitches most politicians are, and it drove the Secret Service nuts. Tension was high. People were jammin’, trying to get a piece of the man from Plains, and security was determined not to let that happen.

    What did happen was about a 100-yard free-for-all scrum across the length of the convention floor. Cops and G-men formed a flying wedge and drove forward, trampling all in their path. Conventioneers pushed back and mayhem ensued. I tried to get a picture by standing on a collapsible chair. Bad move. I went down, hard. Got nothing.
     
    My one memory as I fell was Eddie Adams wading through the crowd like Moses with a Leica, astride the shoulders of his linebacker assistant, who was making short work of the respectable delegates from the great states of Alabama, Connecticut, and Rhode Island by simply picking them up and tossing them aside.

    I was lying on the floor with the skid marks of peoples’ shoes all over me and my gear and thought, “Son of a b!&¢# knows what he’s doin!”

    “My one memory as I fell was Eddie Adams wading through the crowd like Moses with a Leica, astride the shoulders of his linebacker assistant….”

     

    President Carter
Not Everyone’s Gonna Love You
    “Not everybody’s gonna think your stuff is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Put a picture out there, and anybody who sees it can say anything they want about it. It isn’t the business for a thin skin.”

    At the Daily News , we used to edit by projecting the negs on screens. It was a brilliant way to edit B&W, ‘cause reading the neg instead of the contact sheet would give far better info about sharpness and quality. Editors like Phil “Stanzi” Stanziola were terrific at essentially reading in reverse…the negative instead of the positive.

    When your stuff was on the screen, of course, the standard comment from passers-by would always be something like, “Whose $#!% is this?” It would go downhill from there, especially if something was, you know, soft. (I’ll leave that range