Whether it was a world-renowned beauty like Cindy Crawford . . . “What I always say is the way Herb photographed you is the way that you wished you looked when you got up in the morning,” Crawford said . . . . . . or singer-songwriter k.d. lang . . . “I think Herb had a way of understanding how to exude the beauty within,” lang said. “I really do. He knew the balance of the soul and the body, and where the beauty was.” “I presume there got to be a point where people really wanted him to take their picture?” asked Braver. “Oh, absolutely,” said Charles Churchward, a former design director at Conde Nast. “You know, everybody wanted him to take their picture!” Ritts’ friend Churchward thought it was time for a book that celebrated the man as well as the work. “I think people want to know more about who’s behind the camera and something about them,” Churchward said. “And I think that’s what makes them last. And that’s why I wrote the book.” Churchward said that Ritts, who grew up in L.A., introduced a new kind of glamour photography. “Herb had been raised with light, with the beaches, with the sun,” he said. “Everybody before that was in the studio shooting and controlling everything. Suddenly he was able to take the same things outside and make people more natural and yet still have that glamour.” Ritts’ photo of his pal Richard Gere – snapped while the two of them were waiting for a tire to be changed – helped launch both their careers in 1978. Ritts once told CBS News, “Three months later, Vogue, Esquire, Mademoiselle had run all the images from the gas station that I’d taken, which was kind of interesting. And I got paid for it.” Soon, he was getting photographing everyone, from Tom Cruise to Julia Roberts . . . hanging out at Vanity Fair’s Oscar party . . . and hosting his own celebrity-studded birthday bashes. In fact Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere (who were married for 4 years) met at one of Herb’s parties. She said Ritts was just fun to be around: “I mean, he was a mensch,” Crawford said. “I don’t know if you know that word. But he’s just a good guy. He was a total sweetheart. He loved people.” She still remembers the shoot for one of his most famous pictures . . . a bevy of supermodels. “The girls, we were jokingly [calling] it ‘Naked Twister,'” Crawford said. “And I think Herb knew all of us individually, and was friendly with all of us, and that there was a comraderie.” Another Ritts pal talked him into branching out. “Madonna suggested to Herb that he photograph one of her videos,” said Churchward, “and he never did anything like that. But he was game to try anything.” They made her “Cherish” video, and he shot “In the Closet” for Michael Jackson. But it’s his photographs that will be remembered most . . . on display recently at L.A.’s Fahey/Klein Gallery, where an overflow crowd gathered to remember their old friend, and his world.