"You have to be daring," says Christine Choy, Chair of the Graduate Film and Television Department at New York University. Born in the People's Republic of China, Choy came to the United States by herself at the age of 14. Trained in architecture, she entered the world of filmmaking at 22, cleaning and cataloging film for a radical organization called Newsreel. When the riots broke out at Attica prison in New York State, according to Choy, the all-white male staff felt uncomfortable going there to shoot. With just a day's training on the use of the camera, they gave her a few rolls of film and sent her and a girlfriend upstate to cover the rebellion.

"He was so upset that his footage was never broadcast," says Choy, "that he gave me his film." Combining it with her own interviews and animation, Choy made her first film, Teach Our Children, which won First Prize at the 1974 International Black Film Festival. Since then she has made over 40 documentaries about social and political injustice. In 1989 she was nominated for an Oscar and won several other awards for Who Killed Vincent Chin , and this year she was awarded Best Cinematographer at Sundance for My America.

A self-taught cinematographer who learned to shoot by "making mistakes," Ellen Kuras emphasizes that women DPs have to trust their instincts, find the confidence to overcome any challenges that arise, and try not to be intimidated by men. Armed with a background in anthropology and still photographyand a Fulbright Scholarshipin 1983 Kuras set her sights on the Lodz School of Film in Poland. When she couldn't get a visa, she decided to get involved in documentary film.

"I worked as a production assistant and an associate producer. I tried to get as much experience as I could." In 1985 she decided to make her own documentary, which is still in progress, about a Laotian refugee whose father once worked for the CIA.

"I was more of a director at that point," Kuras explains. "I'd gotten someone to shoot for the first five days, and when I saw the dailies I realized that they didn't have what I was looking for. So I decided to shoot it myself."

A couple of years later, when a friend's cameraman couldn't go to Cambodia to shoot her thesis film, Kuras convinced the friend to let her shoot it. At the time, she was "very scared. I didn't know how to meter correctly, and I didn't know how to do a lot of things. But I knew that I had to trust my eye and my feeling about the situation and how to depict it." The film, Samsara, was shown at festivals around the world, and won Best Documentary Cinematography at the FOCUS Awards in 1990.

"I really had to ask myself some key questions: What is this scene about? What does Tom want to say? And how can I best show that with the camera, lighting and movement?" Besides having no experience, Kuras faced the challenge of shooting Swoon on "no money." She explains, "We had a doorway dolly, shot on regular 16mm and had only enough film for one or two takes." But again she followed her instincts, and it paid off. Kuras won the Best Feature Cinematography Award at Sundance in 1992 for Swoon. In 1995 she won the award again for Angela.

"You have to be thick-skinned, have strength and stamina," says Nancy Schreiber, only the fourth woman to be admitted to the American Society of Cinematographers. "It'll be a rough road. You have to be willing to sacrifice your personal life at the beginning and to take any job to get experience." Schreiber, who had no technical background at all when she began, says, "The last thing my mother ever thought I would become was a technician. It just wasn't a woman's thing."

While majoring in psychology, Schreiber ran a movie theater at the University of Michigan that showed foreign and underground films. That's when, she says, "I got the bug." After college she moved to New York and took a six-week crash course in filmmaking. On her first film as a production assistant, she did everything from getting props and costumes to assisting the gaffer.

"It was haphazard that I got into the electrical department. During production I was the best boy electric because there was just nobody else. I had no idea about anything. I just did it and found I had an aptitude for it."

Lured by the magic of lighting, Schreiber became a gaffer. Ten years later, she hit a brick wall when trying to get paid shooting work. "It was very hard for women in those days. The only women shooting were in news and documentaries." But Schreiber was tenacious. She made her own documentary, Possum Living, which gained critical acclaim on the festival circuit and in The New York Times. "All of a sudden," she says, "everyone thought I was a documentarian."

After shooting documentaries for three years, Schreiber realized, "People wanted to put me in a little box. I was worried that people would not hire me in other arenas if they thought I was just doing documentaries." Determined not to let anyone box her in, Schreiber began shooting music videos and student films, while doing "classier" documentaries like the Amnesty International World Tour, featuring Bruce Springsteen, Sting and other celebrities. After shooting two feature films, Schreiber got an agent and her career took off. Chain of Desire, which she shot in 1991, was nominated for an IFP Spirit Award for Best Cinematography, and she won a Primetime Emmy for Celluloid Closet in 1996. Schreiber continues to shoot features, documentaries and music videos. "I'm not a snob about just being in features," she says. "I love spending hours lighting a set, but I also like shooting from the hip. There's an excitement and energy and spontaneity that you don't get in other kinds of filmmaking." Being the DP for Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography (1993), was not only a great honor, says Schreiber, but also enabled her to explore the high-definition medium.

A romantic driven by her passion for the arts, Claudia Raschke came to New York from Germany in 1983 to become a dancer after receiving a degree in Fine Arts. The course of her life changed when a friend asked her to help him shoot a student film. "When the director said, `Action!' the entire crew, like magic, became invisible and only the actors were performing," she recalls. "That was the spark." In cinematography she had finally found a medium into which to channel all of her passions: "I have choreography with the camera movements and the actors. I have painting with the lights, and I have sculpting by creating three-dimensions on a two-dimensional plane."

Because she didn't have a technical background in filmmaking, in 1985 Raschke enrolled in a two-semester intensive program at NYU. She soon found a mentor, Diana Taylor, who took her under her wing. "She taught me so many things" Raschke says of Taylor. When she first asked Taylor how to get into the business, she replied, "Get your hands on whatever you can and shoot and shoot and shoot." Raschke took her advice and continued shooting student films at Columbia University while working as a camera assistant.

By 1990, Raschke had an agent. She put together a better reel, upgraded to DP in the union and shot her first black-and-white feature, Charlie's Ear, in 1991. Since then she's shot a feature a year, in addition to TV and documentary work. Shooting Bob Balaban's The Last Good Time (1993) allowed Raschke to combine her romantic sensibility with her passion for dance.

Tami Reiker represents a new generation of women cinematographers.

"I totally planned my career every step of the way," she saysunlike other female DPs who came to film through different fields. Driven by the goal of becoming a director, Reiker went straight to NYU's film program after high school. "After directing my own film [at NYU], I realized that I was more attracted to visual styling than acting." It was while working as an intern on a feature, Forever Lulu, that Reiker decided she wanted to be a DP. She had met her first role model, DP Lisa Rinzler. "Because of this experience, I never even questioned that there weren't female DPs." After graduating in 1987, Reiker worked as an assistant and joined the union. A couple of years later she decided to buy her own camera. "I knew that buying my own camera would jump-start my career, so I took out a big loan and bought an Arri SR." The next step in Reiker's carefully plotted career was to get an agentone of her own choosing.

"For two years, whenever I would get a job that I knew one of [this agent's] DPs was up for, I'd tell the producer to call and tell her `Tami Reiker got the job.' By the time I sent my reel to this agent, she said, `We hear your name all the time.' " She was signed immediately.

Reiker says she has followed the careers of the women DPs ahead of her, particularly Lisa Rinzler and Ellen Kuras, to find her path to success. And it seems to be paying off. Since 1992, Reiker says, she has been so busy shooting feature films (including 1994's The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love) documentaries, music videos and commercials that she has no time for a personal life.

"It's a bitch to be a woman in this field," says Choy. "Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, you're guilty until proven innocent from the get go." When Choy was hired by HBO to make a documentary about people living on L.A.'s skid row, she was told that her camera work wasn't good enough and was forced to hire someone from Hollywood. Using union people doesn't work in such a situation, Choy believes, because "you have to really mingle with these people and win their trust," which requires hanging out with them at all hours of the night. After the cameraman shot 50 to 60 rolls of film that Choy describes as "distant" and "useless," she went to the flophouse at four a.m., shot some film, shipped it back to the producers and "they loved it." Directed and shot by Choy, Best Hotel on Skid Row won four awards.

Gaining the confidence of Hollywood producers is another problem for women DPs. Unlike directors, who make creative decisions, producers want a guarantee of expertise based on past experience. Producers seem perfectly willing to take a chance on male DPs who've never shot big-budget films, although they are still reluctant to hire women with similar, if not better credentials. "Ultimately people still doubt that you can accomplish the task," says Raschke. "When you go to an interview or onto a set, as a woman you are incompetent until you prove you know your stuff. As a man, you are considered competent until you are proven totally incompetent. We're not given the same chance because we don't have a track record yet. If we had lots of female DPs winning Academy Awards, nobody would doubt us."

Schreiber says that although there seem to be more opportunities for women DPs in New York, the attitude in Hollywood, where the stakes are higher, is different.

Despite their difficulties, these women do believe that times are changing, albeit slowly. Half the students admitted to NYU's Film Program today are women, compared with 10 percent five years ago. More women are producing and directing films; and though women DPs may still seem an oddity in Hollywood, they are beginning to meet with big-budget producers. Finally, if this year's Academy Award nominations were any indication of a trend, there's hope for women DPs. As more independent films are acknowledged by the Academy, women cinematographers have a better chance at an Oscar nomination. Maybe then producers will stop viewing them as "women," and start seeing them as the talented filmmakers they are. MM