10/19/2019
Rescue Magazine is the predecessor of Fire Rescue Magazine, and this image was created for the Rescue Magazine Premier Issue in my father's garage. We needed total darkness, so we shot in the middle of the night. I owned one strobe light, a brand new Cambo 4X5 camera and I built a large rear-projection screen specifically for this shoot. We borrowed Firefighter Turn-Out Gear and hired Byron Taylor to model for us. I shot the background image the night before on 35mm slide film, processed it, selected the best and loaded it into my step mother's slide projector. Exposing the sheet film was complicated. First, with the shutter in B-mode and in total darkness, I opened the lens and popped the subject with diffused strobe light from the left side. Leaving the shutter open, I burned in some fill-light from the right (maybe 10-15 seconds, because it was tungsten and color-gelled). Then, Art Director, Bob Schmitt, turned off the fill light and I dropped the black drape (that protected the rear-projection screen) to the floor and burned the background in for a full 45 seconds. We developed this sequence over a dozen or so Type 55 4X5 Polaroids, and when we felt everything was right we did it 8 more times on 8 sheets of 4X5 Ektachrome 100 transparency film, one at a time. Byron stood perfectly still for a full minute for each exposure sequence. We worked into the wee morning at this and left everything set up in case we needed to reshoot the next night. Early the next day I drove the film to the lab in San Diego and waited the 2 hours it took to process the film. When it was ready, I spread all the film out across the massive light table at the lab and panicked when I saw a fogged sheet. The rest of the film was perfect and we chose this one as the hero on Bob's light table. We didn't have Photoshop yet. We composited onto a single sheet of film. I was 27 and that's kinda what it was like to be a fledgling photographer in 1988.
