"Don't tell anyone how easy this is," Wegman says.

He walks back to the camera -- a $30,000 digital Hasselblad he just started renting by the hour. The equipment's still new to him -- he repeatedly fails to locate the trigger-release cord, the thing you squeeze to shoot a picture -- but he doesn't seem to mind. He squeezes and 10 seconds later an image pops up on a computer monitor. He peeks over at it. Grappling with unfamiliar machines is nothing new for Wegman. Indeed, several times in his career -- most famously in 1978, when, at the invitation of Polaroid, he began photographing his first dog, Man Ray, with a large-format Polaroid camera -- his experiments with new technology led to new ways of seeing, reinvigorated the way he worked, and helped introduce him to a wider audience. Once he's studied the image on the monitor, he and the rest of his studio crew return to the platform for some more rearranging.

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