" My job is to make the lens." "It's the heart of the camera." " Do you take photographs?" " Well, I have a child, so I take lots of photographs of her." " Are there any old pictures of you that mean a lot?" " Yes." "I think it was probably taken when I was in kindergarten." "I was in front of the gate pole at my neighbor's house that looks like a fence." "My feet got stuck between the fence and I have a troubled expression." "This photo capture that moment very well." " Why are photos important?" " When I look at them later on, I begin to reminisce." "I think that's very important for individuals and a society as well." " Photography is something that I do because" "I'm looking for something to understand about myself." "In Egypt, that very much is there." " Politics seems to be at the heart of your work." " My grandfather was an avid newspaper reader." "So I grew up kind of around that and around my family discussing politics on a daily basis and you know, their dreams and their ambitions for the country." "I wanna understand my country." "I wanna understand where I fall in that country." "Egyptians have always been really really sentimental people." "They always love to talk about the past." "This is the essence of an idea that I'm trying to do now." "It's a story about how an entire population of more than 85-million people have always been struggling to do something with their lives." "You know, really simple things like have dignity and respect and I think this is what has always been lacking in Egypt and this is why the revolution happened." " Is it just politics?" " It's a social story and it's a very human story in its essence." "This is where the overlap of politics and just an interest in that comes from." " You seem to spend a lot of time away from the action, shooting faces." " I want people in Egypt to see the people of Egypt." "This is very important for me." "This is what I really care about." "My equipment is in that bag." "It's modest but it gets the job done." "So this is my living and working space." "So we're pretty much, you know, I cook here and then" "I work here and this is my magnetic wall where I do my editing." "What I wanna say is something about alienation and solitude and feelings of people trying to belong and feelings of people that are abandoned by a government or a system and broken dreams after the revolution." "It's about families who lost somebody that was killed or shot by police." "This is Reda when he was about 17." "He's been completely blinded because he was shot by police just off of Tahrir Square." "All he remembers is that he looked up and he saw a police officer and suddenly he was thrust backwards." "He hasn't seen anything since." "He's 19 and pretty young but he was engaged to be married and his life has completely changed now." "She lost her son during the revolution and she was one of the people who were protesting outside the trial for Mubarak hoping that she would see justice for her son's killers." " How did you get into photography?" " I worked in America for about 3-and-a-half years as a newspaper photographer doing everything that you do." "I was doing things that were not very newspapery." "I didn't know I was pushing it but my photo editor would say" ""Laura, the readers are not gonna understand your pictures."" ""People don't get this, this is not what the work is about."" "So I eventually quit because I felt like I wanted to just explore what else I could do visually and I didn't really like being told what to do and how to do it." " What do you look for in a picture?" " Really, with my work, I think emotion is very very important." "Where I'm looking for things that move me and hopefully when people look at them they can be moved by it as well." "I started doing a project when I came to London that was basically just street photography and it was really sort of therapy for me." "When I come to London, I can completely just disappear, and I really like that, I like the fact that you can be free and yeah, it really totally keeps me balanced." " What's your relationship with your camera?" " My relationship with my camera, this is a good question because I don't really think about it much but," "I think my camera's my companion in a way." "My camera allows me, it gives me the excuse to go to places that I may not go to if I didn't have my camera." "So it's a really intimate, important relationship for me." "I even sometimes protect it more than maybe I protect myself." " Do you plan out your work?" " I spend a lot of time on individual situations." "Like I might find a street corner or you know, a particular situation where I stay for an hour, two hours, three hours, however it develops." " Can it get dangerous?" " Sometimes it can be dangerous on many levels." "I think I have become incredibly paranoid about being a photographer and also about being a woman photographer because I usually go out and work alone." "I mean, I'm on my own taking pictures, so I feel kind of vulnerable sometimes." " Does your family approve of what you're doing?" " They didn't, because this idea of a girl walking around with a camera through the streets of Egypt was kind of a bit weird." "So there was that pressure of," ""Why don't you just do a normal job,"" ""have some money, have that peace of mind?"" "I've had some bad times but I don't think as bad as many other people have had." " What's the future for you?" " To continue doing work that is important for me because of the subject matter." "But I don't think I'll ever be rich." "It's important to have people around me that really believe in what I'm doing, and recently my parents have been that and it's made really tremendous difference for me." "When they see pictures and they're like," ""Laura, we're really proud of you."" "I mean, this is really, for me this is really good to have the support of my family." " Do you ever think of the people who make your lenses?" " Completely honestly, no I never do." " You just take it for granted?" " I absolutely do." "It's like the farmer and the apple." "You don't think about the farmer when you're eating the apple, it's exactly the same thing." "I'm not thinking about the person that made this when I'm using it." " Japan was formative for me." "When I came here as a 23-year-old," "I didn't know much of anything." "Coming back 30 years later, realizing the year-and-a-half that I spent here and how important that was, it was what created who I am today." "The sense of ritual and then going out into the town where it's completely chaotic, and those contradictions again are what really really excited me about being here." "What is special for me is this is one of the few rock gardens, a Suiseki garden which means a dry garden, in this part of Japan." "These eight rocks in this garden represent eight gods." "It's a paradise garden." "Shakkei translates as "borrowing scenery."" "So at one time, the scenery that was being borrowed here was probably that hillside, that cliffside." "Here we have a prefab school that's been built right outside of the grounds of this very contemplative space." "Contemporary, the ancient, they all work together and I'm interested in that." "I'm interested in juxtaposition, I'm interested in artifice, and that's carried through with my work for 30 years." "The Japanese sense of architecture, the Japanese sense of space, is something that's always interested me." "That's the reason I came here." "I have a recollection when I was a kid going into the chaos of my room and going into my older brother's room and he was obsessive, he was a mathematician, and everything in that room was arranged on the desk." "It was perfectly arranged, and I felt so at peace in that space." "My interest in Japan is not only in historical buildings but also in the artifice of nature." "This tree has been manipulated and contorted to such a point that it frames the pavilion down below." "It's a wonderful example of how the Japanese use nature in a very artificial way." "My dioramas are very similar in terms of working with the animals when they're in deep storage." "I had access to the Smithsonian archives, and they have all of these taxidermy animals in these crates." "It's the whole idea of going out into nature, killing these animals, bring them back into this human realm and for display purposes, reanimating them." "And that is a very interesting idea." "It's perverse, but it's wonderful in its perversity." "I'm interested in the history of optics especially, and who but the Japanese and the Germans have perfected it to such a level." "What is it about that compulsiveness, that obsessiveness, between both cultures that allows them to create these fine finely, finely-crafted objects?" "The idea in Buddhism is that nothing can be perfected, and yet, I think the Japanese in terms of the way that they approach lens-making for example are attempting to achieve perfection." " I look at the lens very closely, and try to understand its feeling." " Is there anything that you dream about that you'd like to take pictures of?" " I'd really love to photograph secret, and maybe even dangerous places." "I read about something that happened at the remote base at the South Pole." "There were two buildings three-meters-apart, and one had a bathroom." "On a short journey from one to the other, someone disappeared and was never found." "The challenge of taking a photo to capture the mystery of that place, of that brutal, freezing environment, a place I would never normally be allowed to go, really interests me." " The one that's most well-known is probably the Unabomber's cabin." "I photographed the cabin in sichew after it had been discovered, put on a truck and shipped out to California." "That was a secret place, nobody else had access to that, and I decided because of that access that I wanted to make it something else." "It was this very simple, iconic shape." "A cabin in the woods, and that to me, its banality was interesting to me." "I photographed all four sides of the cabin, thinking about it as mugshots, and the whole idea of architecture being put on trial, this was the major piece of evidence in the trial, but I decided to complete it and I found the site," "and what the FBI had done is they put a chain-link fence around where the cabin used to be with signs saying," ""No Trespassing, Danger" in the middle of the forest." "So you have this bucolic setting, with this chain-link fence describing nothing." " Is there anything else you'd like to have a go at?" " If I had the chance, I wouldn't mind being an actor." " And who would you like to play?" " Ultraman." "I haven't grown up yet." " That way, that way, that way." " I don't take snapshots." "I take pictures of my family sometimes, but the whole idea of the history and memory, I'm interested in history." "I like to be surprised." "And this current project that I'm doing on the Civil War has really engaged me and I'm using the technology of the time and that to me is a very exciting thing." "A lot of my work starts out in a documentary place, but then it goes someplace else." "And when that works, when a viewer comes to it and thinks," ""this is something I don't understand,"" "and spends time with it to try and understand it, that image for me is working." " Are you proud of your lenses?" " Yes, very much so." "There is a big baseball stadium called the Tokyo Dome." "It has a camera that shoots down from the high position called the bird's eye." "This camera uses my lens." " Do you have a secret dream?" " My dream?" "My dream is to become a professional baseball star, of course." " Aren't you a bit old for that?" " After all, age cannot stop your dreaming." " When I first started, and it was obviously the desire to go to all the big events, so I've done the big events." "World Cup soccer, which is probably my favorite." "The Olympics, winter and summer." "And it just goes downhill from there." "So now it's more the photography." "The photography is very, it's a driving aspect for me now." "I mean, it is luck, there's a lot of luck involved." "It's just a question of, are you prepared to take that chance when it comes to you." "I've done more than one World Cup final and been sitting there picking my nose 'cause it's all been happening down the other end, so, you know, I tend to think what goes around comes around." "It was a rainy day and Cambridge University were playing a Japanese university." "No one wanted to do it." "You know, I went, shot the game and then I kind of left early, which is a cardinal sin for a sports photographer, leaving before the end of the game." "And on the way to the car," "I just bashed out a couple of frames, jumped in the car, and I saw that frame and I thought," ""That's a pretty good frame."" "When you're photographing something that's gonna happen for a fraction of a second, there's no luxury to redo it." "I think skiing is a particular challenge because you end up having to ski the course which is designed for the athletes." "You ski it because you can get to see all the positions." "You can look at where you think the action photograph will come from." "It's all about preparation." "If you're not prepared then you're gonna get caught out or you're gonna make a mistake because you didn't have the right lens with you." " I've been working for over 34 years." "I am an advanced design lens manager, and I oversee a group of people designing the latest lenses." "I like most sport but I like soccer best." "I started playing when I was quite small." "The game is about balancing individual skills with the team and that's fun to do." "It's a lot like the way we work." "In optic research and design, we try to support the work of individual with a team effort." " When Canon came out with auto-focus, it basically levelled the playing field between the guys who were extremely good at follow-focusing and the guys who couldn't follow-focus but loved photographing sports." "Basically a 600-mil and a 428." "That would be something that you would work with." " For professional use, the big long lenses should be both as lightweight and durable as possible." "They need constant updating." " You know, these lenses, it's good actually." "Very shortly I'll just be able to do this, you know?" "I don't have to go to the gym anymore, you know?" " It's tricky because reducing weight and making it stronger are opposite." "How to resolve this is a big deal, but it's a challenge I enjoy." " You know, now I could just ponce around with this little baby which gives me another 10 years, or it gives my spine another 10 years." "This for me is kind of a new toy to use and adapt to the way I'm shooting." "You know, it's a zoom lens." "That means I have an incredible range." "I can go from a 200-millimeter lens to an almost 600-millimeter lens." "It makes coffee, and the latte's not so good so maybe those lens mysters can sort out a latte function on this thing but it does a lot." " I did fine-tuning on auto-focus and the image stabilizing system used in sports like football, baseball and motorsports." "I like pictures that have good focus, but also can catch both the movement of the athletes and the facial expressions." "That's the best." "When people started using digital cameras, there was no cost limit to how many pictures you could take." "You could take as many as you like." " That gives me the freedom to go with an idea, and just try and work it 'till I thought I got it exact." " How many frames did you shoot to get this one?" " You know, I shot a lot of images." "Oh man, I don't know." "1,200-2,000 images." "You know, the beauty of working for someone like" "Sports Illustrated, they're looking for great photographs." "They're not necessarily looking for man-crossing-line every time." "I've always tried to push forward and find different angles." "The one thing that's happening with sport, particularly large events, is that you become controlled." "So you're only allowed to go to one pen, and you wanna go up high, it's a bit of a cat and mouse game." "Wanting to sneak behind the security guards and go upstairs." "Instead of being down on the field shooting the same thing that 300 other photographers were gonna shoot," "I wanted to do something which was different." " The reason why I started taking photographs was because I was deeply inspired by the famous" "Japanese photographer Ken Domon." "He approaches his subjects quickly without letting them know." "Just like a thief." "Even the blurry or out of focus picture was better if it captured the emotion on the face." " When you're doing a portrait of somebody, you're in complete control of the scene and how you're gonna photograph them." "It's a very different dynamic." "And then you obviously have to interact with the subject." "Michael Phelps I had a reasonable relationship with, and I was always explaining to him what I wanted to do and he was very up for the ideas that I had in mind." "I don't get up at four in the morning and swim for three hours and then sleep for the rest of the day." "I read the newspaper, I walk the dog." "These guys aren't doing any of that." "They're just focused 100% on trying to be the best." " Sport is all about winning and losing." "So one of the most important thing a sports photographer does is get the sense of that in the face and the body language of the athletes." " Winning is what everybody wants to see." "But I mean, losing I think is probably a bigger life lesson." "And in sport it's black and white." "Dealing with losing is a very interesting subject, I think." " Sport also bonds generations." "I can talk to my young workers about it." "It helps stimulate conversation and makes for better communication." " Is there a future in still photography?" " People still ride horses." "They just don't use them to get down I95 now." "So there will be a space for photography." "The industry changes, it's changed rapidly in the short time that I've been around and involved in it." "Experience is something that I now use heavily to persuade people to employ me." "All the new toys help you." "They don't take the photograph for you yet, but they definitely help you capture an image." " I never stop learning." "Especially when we were working on the new project." "Sometimes experience isn't enough, so I have to find a new way of thinking." "The young are quick to embrace new ideas, so I have to work to keep up with them." " Do you train the young workers?" " Yes, I teach them what I know and to work as hard as I do." " And what's the most important thing?" " Love." "When I shout or yell at them, it's with love." "If they can understand that, then they will work better and harder." " When I first started," "I was an operator in manufacturing." "Learning the basics of the camera." "Now, I'm an assistant leader of the team." "I specialize in lenses for television cameras." " To learn communication skills with co-workers, that was the most important thing that I ever learned." "When things get difficult, always remember that other people as well as you are trying to do their best." "Technical skills are one thing, but the emotional support is important in work and in life." " I don't exactly know why, but I feel relaxed when I photograph temples." "I think taking photos of the temple helps sustain my motivation." "Our family had four brothers, and my father used to take pictures of all of us growing up." "Before my father took me to Samyo Temple," "I wasn't really interested in cameras, but because of it, I became very curious about photography and so my father taught me and he was rather strict." "He was really specific in the use of light and shadows, but you can't appreciate those sort of things when you are small." "My father would look at my photos and say," ""That's not it."" "These are pictures of a three-tier temple that I love." "This is an example of the photo contests that my father and I used to have." "My father took this one, and the long shot of the greenery was mine." "Mine has a two-dimensional effect, but my father's has a 3D feel and has much more depth." " So who's the better photographer?" " To tell the truth, my father wins." " Why are photographs important?" " On 3/11, when we had this devastating tsunami, the images in papers and on television brought the reality of it all into my mind." "My grandmother lives in Miyagi Prefecture which is near the epicenter." "I couldn't get in touch with her for a week, and we didn't know whether she was still alive but the photos gave us a lot of information until we found her safe." "The images were very important." "Not just for us who lived through it, but for future generations." "I feel it's important that these photos exist as a testament." " Looked like semaphore for a minute." "Okay, thank you." "Or I just open it up slightly." "I was working when I was like, 17, 18, and I got some jobs at Chaton Studios as a special stills photographer." "I just liked the family feeling on set and I went to film school." "At film school there were a couple of fellow students who went on to make movies, and I came in on their coattails." "My real break was this sort of anthropological documentary in Peru which was so dangerous the director was hospitalized." "He nearly died, and I nearly died during the making of this documentary." "Just awful." "And I decided on horseback that I'm not gonna do this," "I'm gonna do commercials." "I met Brian Gibson who's an old colleague of yours." " Yeah." " And Brian and I did a bunch of commercials together, and then he got a feature." "And then Tony Scott got his first feature, The Hunger." "And then I got lucky and then I got a phone call and I picked up the phone and said," ""Are you available to speak to Francis Coppola?"" "I thought it was someone of the crew just..." " So that was a big break." " It was a big break." " Were there a lot of surprises?" " Well yes, I mean, I went to calministori studios and it was supposed to start shooting in six weeks." "So I knew that it should be busy at this point." "There were no sets built, there were just two, two chippies, two carpenters idly banging nails into a piece of old timber." "And I thought, "This doesn't look like a real film at all."" "And I met Francis and we got on like a house on fire, and he looked me in the eye and says," ""This film is going to happen."" "And I said, "Absolutely, I'm your man."" "But in fact, it was a scam." "And all the people involved in the film had written their own contracts that they'd be paid off for enormous sums of money if the film didn't go." "Francis was the one who had to shoot and he insisted we shot and he did." "And so on the first day, when one of the actors didn't turn up because he had script approval and there was no script, Francis said," ""Well we'll shoot everything from his point of view."" ""And then when we get him we'll do the reverse."" "So that's how we started." " Did you think that was the norm?" " I knew it wasn't the norm, but I thought it was a good way to get going." "So I just went with it, I thought, well, let's shoot it that way." "I mean, this guy's much better than I am, Mr. Coppola." "So he liked that attitude." " So you really learned the business by the seat of your pants." " Totally." "They come, they will see this." " What are you looking for when you choose material?" " Well I mean, I've done those big films where it's actually complete rubbish and you're only doing it for the money and it made me very unhappy indeed." "But I'm trying to do something which excites me on a dramatic level." "I'm far more interested in how I respond to the script as a story." "The best thing is when you go on location, sometimes I'll volunteer with a designer." "We'll go there and we'll walk around with the script in our back pockets or in our heads but, and we'll see what we can find and for me that's the best way to look at things" "is though a lens." "It's a shortcut to my subconscious." "When I'm taking the photograph, I feel something directly." "On Get Up Up, this film I just finished last week," "I did over 40,000 which is not that difficult with motor drive and stuff." "Tate Taylor who directed it, he wanted to have some time-lapse, and I found these scientific time-lapse cameras that use, actually Canon Rebel still cameras inside them but they're powered by a solar panel." "So I could put it in the Mississippi jungle and set it and it will take a picture every five minutes and switch off when it gets dark." "That's serious business, to trust your equipment and trust your lenses." "And so then I saw that" "Canon was going into my game and I was interested to see what's up." "This film I've just finished, the first day shooting was in a helicopter." "It used a purpose-built ALEXA M in the nose of the helicopter." "I said, "What lens is on this thing?"" "And they said it's a 10-to-1 Canon." "30 to 300." "And I said, "Oh all right, that's interesting."" "And then I saw it projected, it was just beautiful, just gorgeous." " My name is Setsuko Sotome, and I'm making lenses for movie cameras." " Do you enjoy your work?" "Is it fun?" " Well, it is very challenging because a lens is very delicate." "So it needs a lot of concentration." "I enjoy the work but I wouldn't describe it as fun." "A cinema lens weighs over 5 kilograms, so it needs a lot of strength." "It's hard work." "I've been working for about 30 years." " Have you ever chipped a lens?" " Yes, but it happened when I first started." "I've only had one lens rejected this past year." " Are you a perfectionist?" " Not with everything." "I collect coffee cups." "I've got 30 of them." "Well, china heals me." "Unlike lenses, they're all different shapes and that attracts me." " Would you like to make some yourself?" " Maybe, when I'm retired someday." "I assemble every part of the lens from top to bottom on my own." "I'm the only person in my department who does this alone." "There are many women who assemble some units from the lenses but I don't think there's any one woman who can assemble from the beginning to the end." " Two different lenses have different characteristics." "The character of flare, for example." "Sometimes, try as you might, with some modern lenses you can't get them to flare." "Whatever you do." "Billy Bids had described how he invented backlight." "He was just testing some new lenses and everyone had broken for a picnic lunch and he turned the camera on Mary Pickford and the was backlit by the California winter sun." "At that point, no one had ever photographed in backlight." "Everyone went, "Wow, that's great!"" "And it was a lens test that introduced him to beautiful backlight through Pickford's curls." " One of your most famous pieces of work was Angels in America." "What were the big challenges there?" " Well, the script was sort of white heart." "The documentary journey of a young man or young men dying of AIDs, to Roy Cohn talking about paradise, and then to do a sequence in which a poor young man at death's door is visited by an angel." "I realized the problem we had was that on stage there's limitless space." "An angel couldn't drop into the same set, and there's no problem with her wings." "I mean she has a six, eight-foot wing-span." "That's no problem, it's just a stage, there's a bed, there's a guy in it and she can hover over him and do whatever but on film she can't drop into the room which has got a ceiling and four walls." "And my brain wave is we would had to have two sets." "We had to have the normal set, and then whenever she flew in we had to have a set that was 400% bigger." "And of course, the producers were ready to kill me but it was the way to do it, that suddenly the bed was bigger, the furniture was bigger, the room is enormous because it was another world." "It was how I visualized it." "I find that if I take pictures as I'm working, it sparks something off when I look at how I might change something, how the lights working, how the color might be." "For technical reasons, I was always horrified by the lack of communication between the cinematographer and the lab." "You know, some poor bastard at 3AM being given reel after reel of negative and making quick color and lighting adjustments which could make or destroy your career." "And I said to HBO and bless them, they paid for it." "They bought me an enormous professional printer with color calibration and I made 70 prints." "The end result being that you can get what I want as a cinematographer." "At least I have that satisfaction." " Was it a major decision to start shooting digitally?" " In a way I couldn't wait." "The last chemical film I did was The Help and I couldn't get dailies for two or three days and we were shooting under pressure and we were photographically very difficult situations for me, like Viola Davis with a blonde little baby girl in her arms" "and how was I gonna keep that contrast range?" "Was I keeping the keeping the contrast range?" "I couldn't tell." "I thought I was but there was no immediate feedback." "So it doesn't matter how much you've shot." "I'm always nervous and I need feedback and I saw that digital, if it could only get good enough, would be that immediate feedback." " Does it make you braver as a cameraman?" " Yes, insane." "I mean, just little light bulb braver." " What makes, for you, a great photograph?" " Well it's gotta be something to do with the content," "I think." "Even if it's a photograph in which you don't understand the context." "There's something about the human face or body that can be so beautiful or so striking or so mysterious, or the light." "It's something that just captures you." " What have been your inspirations in your working life?" " Truffaut." "That's the sort of film that I had to just see again and again." "Photographer after photographer." "People who make extraordinary from the very ordinary." "And you see such beauty, not because it's manufactured but because somehow they see it, nobody else does." " So did you bring any photos that have good memories for you?" " Well, not so much for the memory but I brought photos of my cats." "I like this one very much." "It was taken right after he was groomed and had his hair cut." "My father used to like animals very much." "Especially cats." " Is your father still alive?" " No, my father died of cancer 15 years ago." "I don't have any picture of him in his later years." "So yes, it hurts me that we didn't get to go to more places and take more pictures together." "As a reminder, I keep his hat and give a glass of water to it every day, and my cats drink from them." "I think my father's spirit is giving water to the cats." " Is that why you take pictures of your cats?" " Yes, I think so." " You told me you've never seen the lenses you've assembled being used, so what does it feel like?" " I've assembled over 100 of these." "So I thought maybe I'll be tired of seeing them, but when I see as a finished product in use," "I think it's very cool." "I'm thrilled to see the product I put together." "I think it looks great." " Now we're doing better, come back a little bit more." "There you go." "Now let's just, let me see here." "My handsome assistant as you put it, angle the head, there you go." "Yes, straight." "Well the most important thing is communication in my photography and so I try to basically involve the talent in my vision and share every moment." "Now let's just, let me see here." "Chin up for me just a little bit." "Angle the head a little bit more." "You can never make them feel or have any sort of sense that you are not in control and don't know what you're doing 'cause they'll eat you alive." "Let's bring the front end of this out." "Let me get my camera." "Yeah, I don't know what I'm doing yet," "I'm just making it up as we go along." "Bring that forward to me." "I always loved white shirts on..." "We did that the last time with Diahann Carroll actually." "We did a dark shirt, but a man's shirt which looked great." " Yeah, I love it." " Yeah, I think this will look good." "But I try to keep a happy medium with me still being in charge and that's how I really get my portraits." "That's beautiful right there." "Just a little bit..." " Yeah." " That's always where the tension shows up first, is in the jaw 'cause the jaw is like..." " Also, I have a humongous jaw." " No no, see I think you've got a great jaw." "Actually, your face is perfect." "It's the kind of jaw that's an easy jaw to light." "For a DP or somebody, it's perfect." "It can be a big jaw but it's an easy one to just cut." "Number six." "This is the real secret of the arts." "Always be a beginner." "Number five, sleep, it's overrated." "You can sleep when you get home." "Well you know, I've shot for so many years in the movie business, shooting motion picture campaigns and personalities, and I've been teaching for the better part believe it or not of almost 30 years and being able to share my vision" "with those that are passionate and are starting to get involved and engaged in photography has been a big thing for me." "The bottom line is," "I'm not interested at all in what you know, I'm interested in what you don't know to push you to that next level." "You can't teach people how to have an eye." "There have been these great cases and that's really the reward for a teacher." "When you can actually turn that light switch on." "To bring that talent forward is so exciting and so rewarding at the end of the day and you see that you've actually changed someone's life." "That's great." "You still look great." "Wet your lips for me." "Now real strong, right down the barrel of the lens here." "Yeah that's better." "Chin up just a tiny bit." "In 1968, growing up in Kansas City," "I borrowed a friend's camera and I said," "I have third row seats to Jimi Hendrix in concert and I wanna take some pictures." "And I shot two rolls of film back then and the following morning processed the film in his basement-turned-darkroom and when I saw this image come up magically on this white piece of paper," "I was totally hooked." "In the early days, all my pictures were pretty interchangeable." "The lights were like right over the camera." "They all looked like postage stamps, so to say." "It really wasn't until I started moving the light off the center of camera." "My early shoot with Tom Waits for example." "And when I started creating a relationship between my harder, harsh shadows and my strong highlights," "I started seeing something that I found interesting and I started thinking, "Well you know I'm gonna try that"" ""on my next shoot" and started to pursue that, and then all of a sudden it became part of my repertoire." "For me it was about having irreverent disregard for detail shadow, I was never about the Codec moment." "I was really about shaping and forming a face with light and shadow, and that's how I kinda developed my style." " Not bad for a 48-year-old, right?" " He's gonna bring the gloves up." "We're gonna go mainly just real dramatic light." "This is still the executioner." "Before The Alien." " This is history." " It is history." " Before The Alien." " I know." " Really, the executioner has retired." " Yeah, well he's now The Alien." "So give me a kick in the dark eye there, Brian." "Really good, right down the lens." "Angle the head just a little bit this way." "Perfect." "We live in an exciting time and the overall picture of photography has changed so greatly from the early days." "Better, yeah, stronger." "After switching to digital," "I pretty much know when I've got the picture and that frees me up as an artist to maybe get out of my staid style and push myself a little bit further." "There was a kid, there was a doorman at the hotel where I was staying that was a model with one of the agencies and he knew who I was and he was getting off work at four o'clock and I said, "You wanna run uptown?"" ""I've got a camera to play with for a couple of hours."" "And I went up and I shot some pictures with just natural window light and a reflector and I just couldn't believe how well digital sees light in low-luminance and it made me realize that this is obviously where everything is going." "Film never was capable of making those captures." "Good." "Oh those are great." "That's fantastic." " Do the stare down?" " Do the stare down right now." "Better, yeah." " No wonder I've been beating these guys." "I've been scaring 'em!" " This will be pretty cool and we'll get this all oiled up and then sprayed." " Does he bullshit you?" " Sometimes, yeah, he bullshits you." "You gotta bullshit you to sort of kind you over to get you to the next level." ""You're doing well, you're doing well."" "But he's still trying to get the best, you know?" "So he gets you to think that you're almost there, so that's the bullshit." "He's a big bullshitter, and that's good." " Really piercing eyes right through the lens." "One of the great things about working with personalities is the opportunity to realize their vision sometimes." "One of the last times Michael called me and he said," ""You know, Greg, I have these pet tarantulas"" ""and they have just shed their skin."" "He said "I think they might be great for a shot."" ""I don't know what we'll do but can I bring the bodies?"" "Because they're just like a shell, like snake when it sheds it skin." "Then we actually ended up gaffer taping them to his forehead and this became one of his iconic images later on in life." "The stories and the memories that I have, the memoirs of all the years are extraordinary." "I have such fond memories like of Betty Davis and the times that we spent together editing pictures sitting in her living room and the stories that went back and forth." "I share them with friends and all when we're together, funny little quips and stories but it's something that" "I think is really between the talent and myself." "The styles today have changed so greatly." "They're much looser." "They're much more of a casual nature which was never what I did." "See now let's open that shoulder up to me, there you go." "And now bring your face up, and now three-quarters come out this way just a little bit there, that's good." "Now come into her." "All the way, there you go." "And you don't need to look at me, you can look off right here, there you go." "Open your chest up to me even more, there you go." "More." "I think my work is very staged, very calculated." "Extremely orchestrated, it's really about fine-tuning, more like a painting, like a sculpture and that's really the style that I developed and that's what I became kind of known for." "We'll get a chill down here, let's just go outside for five minutes and freshen up, we'll come back in, we'll look at some videos." "I see more emotions from my teaching these days." "Thank you all very much." "On Friday night which is the last day of my workshops," "I put together a slideshow of 10 to 12 of each of the students' work." "Seeing that on the big screen for the first time and looking at their work, then I get really emotional." "One of the things I always talk to my students about is that never think you've taken that successful picture." "I know that every time I look at my work I find something that could be improved, could be changed, could be challenged." "And I think that's what keeps driving me." "Once you're so confident that it's all gonna be a perfect show and a home run, that's when you fail." " The lens I most recently designed was a correctional system of the Subaru Telescope located in Mauna Kea in Hawaii." "The primary mirror is eight-meters-wide, and my lens corrects the light that the mirror absorbs." "It's a very high-accuracy lens." "One of the biggest in the world." "And it took two years to make it." " What got you interested in this line of work?" " I liked watching movies and TV very much and was interested in creating those visuals." " What movies did you like?" " I like science-fiction movies a lot." "I love the Star Wars series, the Star Trek series, and I really love 2001:" "A Space Odyssey." " How far can a telescope see?" " I'm not an astronomer, so I don't know all of the details but it could reach the galaxies that are close to the beginning of space, billions of light-years away." " If you could take a photograph from anywhere about anything, what would it be?" " I'd like to take photos of the Earth." "I'd like to look down from a space station or a satellite." "I think that'd be very beautiful." " Do you think there's life out there?" " I think so." " What kind of life do you think it is?" " Well, it's hard to imagine, but it could well look like us." " Why do you say that?" " Because there's no evidence that says Earth is the only special planet with life." " So how do you feel about that?" " Both excited and scared." "Because it's hard enough or people on Earth to understand each other." "I can't imagine what it would be like if we met people from a completely different world." " Looking back, is there anything in your career that you would have done differently?" " I don't know, I would have had more theory." "I wouldn't maybe have detoured so much into the photo-journalistic world and maybe stayed in the art world." "But I'm very thankful for how things have worked out." "I mean, it's been a fantastic journey." " We live in a world where everybody's a photographer." "Does that change the way you see your job?" " No, I think it's great that everybody's a photographer because it means that, I actually know how to photograph so my photograph should stand out." "You know, you've gotta use all the tricks of the trade and then of course, you do need to have the latest and greatest lenses if you're going to capture, you know, a guy flying through the air." "It is down to the photographer, 100%." " Is your craft hard work?" " At the end of the day, I'm beat." "I just want to go home and lay down." "It aches everywhere." "Legs, back, knees, head." "Everywhere." " Do you think you're getting too old for it?" " Maybe." "I feel a lot older than I really am." " What area of photography have you not worked in that you wish you had?" " Believe it not, wildlife and landscape probably 'cause I've always made a joke that I've never been able or successful at shooting anything that couldn't talk back to me." " I tell myself I don't like you, and I'm gonna rip your head off and it gives me that natural look without me trying to fake it." " Yeah, yeah." " Are your children interested in photography?" " Yes, my oldest son is in Africa on a photo safari." "He has more expensive equipment than I do." " Are the pictures any good?" " No, not really." "But he seems pleased." " Can you imagine a life without a camera?" " No."