A zoom lens and a Telecaster went into different bodies of water on different continents, decades apart.
The Telecaster wasn't mine. It was Lawrence's.
Lawrence, Lovro, my brother from another mother, my music mentor — the one who got me playing the East Village clubs back . His Fender. His fault for believing in me. I threw it into the East River after a night at CBGBS, then a few blocks from my home above the mafia social club, 3 am Williamsburg, then an empty lot that is now a yuppie park with artisanal dog walks and QR code menus. Back then it was broken cars and garbage and the kind of life or death dark that doesn't exist much in New York anymore. Tequila. Conviction. Danger. The usual.
This was a secret I kept — Williamsburg and the Lower East Side kept it with me — except Lawrence already knew. Not because anyone told him. Because Lawrence had done the exact same thing with a Gibson. Different decade, different river, same disease. He used to tell that story with these crazy eyes, like he was still a little proud of it and a little horrified. When I eventually replaced his Telecaster with money from trading options and shooting fashion — the Balls of Steel volatility instinct was always there even before the system, and the Fiamma seasons were funding everything back then — he accepted the new Tele without asking questions. He knew exactly what had happened. He just let me think it was a secret.
That is the mark of a real mentor. He got his guitar. He got me back in the room. Recently he came through with a set of lavs — we're shooting a documentary about him. He will mic himself and the freaks we add to the frame, while I light him immortal. The hustle continues.
The lens is a different story and a different decade. A Canon 24-70mm, seized somewhere between Milan and Paris. Too many snails, too much French wine, too many beautiful girls after the Stella McCartney show — you can see what that looked like, or what it looks like in Jacquemus if you want to understand the Paris that swallows your gear — and one Pelican case that had been dragged across Europe rattling everything inside it stiff.
What I didn't know, and what the Vogue guys didn't mention until after, was that the Pelican case was a stool — on the riser. The riser is where you stand to shoot the runway, stacked up with every other photographer trying to get the angle. The Pelican goes under your feet. The Manfrotto monopod goes in your hand — and not just to steady the shot. In Paris, if someone tries to snatch your camera, the monopod is what you have. Filippo the mad genius understands the riser. He was the one who showed me how it actually worked — the positioning, the hierarchy, the real rules that nobody writes down. Riser mentor. You don't get to that level without someone who's already been there showing you where to stand.
They told me about the Pelican after I was already shooting for Vogue. Cheryl found out the hard way too.
The 24-70 ended up in the Seine. The details are fuzzy. I believe excellent 6 euro Bordeaux, top model fishscale yayo, and morrocan hash. The usual reasons a broken fucking lens ended up in the Seine mid Paris Fashion week. A sacrifice to the gods, Gucci, Balmain, and Celine.
I took a different Canon apart later because it wouldn't zoom — not curiosity, not a weekend project, but a stuck mechanism and no money to send it out for repair. I had to understand it because I couldn't afford not to. That's where the methodology starts.
I've shot Canon since I was developing film in a darkroom. 5D Mark II, Mark III, C300, C300 Mark II, C700, 5DS. Every era of the glass. There's a reason you stay loyal to a system — the Canon Professional Services team out on Long Island knows their people and takes care of them, and when you've built a career around a manufacturer's glass you start to understand why that relationship matters. Still waiting on my Alexa — but Frank at Canon stays in the conversation.
I regret the 24-70. The Telecaster I replaced.
What I can tell you is that I wasn't sad about the guitar. I was upset about the lens. Not because of the money — though a good piece of glass is what it is — but because Cheryl had lent it to me. Cheryl, who taught me more about Flashes backstage in three seasons of Fashion Week than I learned anywhere else. Cheryl, who shoots fashion the way a security researcher reads packet captures — systematically, instinctively, looking for the thing that doesn't belong. The lens was hers. The river got it.
I still owe her one. This is a public record of that debt.
The Telecaster I had already taken apart swinging like Darryl Strawberry or Joey Gallo with eardrums ringing. I understood why it went into the river. The lens was a different kind of magical precision. A soul capturer of a different sort.
The Canon I Couldn't Put Back Together
Before the East River and the Seine, there was zoom and sleepless nights I will not get back.
I took it apart completely. Every ring, every element, the shutter assembly, the aperture blades — the whole mechanism spread across a kitchen table in the kind of organized chaos that looks like a crime scene. I had a diagram. I thought I understood what I was looking at.
I was wrong about being able to reverse the process.
What I got from that exercise was not a functioning camera. What I got was a deep and permanent understanding of how a mechanical shutter works — how the timing sequence of the first and second curtains determines exposure, how the aperture blades stack with the exact tolerances that make a lens sharp or soft, how light is a physical thing being moved through glass by geometry.
I never learned that from a manual. I learned it by making the camera unable to shoot.
Cheryl understood this. She shoots fashion because she sees how systems interact — how the model, the light, the set, and the direction create something that no single element produces alone. Every great fashion photographer is a reverse engineer. They look at the output and work backward to the inputs. They break the shot before they compose it.
This is also exactly what red teaming is.
What Fashion Photography Teaches You That Security Schools Don't
I shot New York, Milan, and Paris Fashion Weeks. I worked studio jobs — Clinique campaigns, lookbooks, brand videos. You learn things on a set that you cannot learn anywhere else.
You learn that systems have a fury, a rage, an Italian passion and madness for creation. Lives dedicated to mastery and art. As these mentors all seem to share in hindsight.
A set looks controlled from the outside. It's improvisation. Musle Memory. Mentorship. Disappointments. Failures that lead to euphoric success that breaks us in front of our closest friends and reassembles us as new and evolved. Momentarily Super Human. A metaphorical orgy of creation. Like music on the lower east side in a different era. That occassionally still shines through. There's a lighting rig that does the unspeakable, maybe possessed by the ghost of Scavullo. There's a backdrop that introduces a color cast that the lazy ass Producer didn't account for. There's a model that was ready to throw their pro skateboarder boyfriend off a bridge twenty minutes before the shoot and then experiences spritual rebirth through the viewfinder. Commanding me to visual ecstasy, that can almost be captured. The things we live and die for.
To absorb this simultaneously and find the frame where the universe and these lovably flawed people in it accidentally align.
That is kind of like the job description of a red teamer.
