Hall won three Academy Awards for Best Cinematography for his work on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), American Beauty (1999), and Road to Perdition (2002).

He was also Oscar-nominated for Morituri (1965), The Professionals (1966), In Cold Blood (1967), The Day of the Locust (1975), Tequila Sunrise (1988), Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), and A Civil Action (1998).

At the time, however, Hollywood only allowed the camera crew to be filled with people that were on the International Photographers Guild roster.

[4] After graduation Hall collaborated with his classmates, Marvin R. Weinstein and Jack C. Couffer, to create Canyon Films in 1949.

Following a year of working as an assistant cameraman, he was awarded the chance to be the camera operator on the television series Stoney Burke.

Then, in 1964, he shot his first feature-length black and white film, Wild Seed, which was made in roughly 24 days with producer Albert S. Ruddy.

[5] In 1968, Hall filmed Hell in the Pacific for director John Boorman, which was not a box-office success but has since become a cult classic.

To make Butch Cassidy visually compatible with the time period, he used experimental techniques, such as overexposing the negatives in order to mute the primary colors when printing it back (Hunter, 2003).

[4] In 1973 he shot the police thriller Electra Glide in Blue, followed by Smile and The Day of the Locust in 1975, the latter of which earned him his fifth Oscar nomination.

Around the same time he teamed up with noted cinematographer Haskell Wexler to make a commercial production company (Vinson, 1987).

After his work on Tequila Sunrise, he picked up his old pace, making Class Action (1991), Jennifer 8 (1992), Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993) and Love Affair (1994) one after the other.

American Beauty, his first collaboration with director Sam Mendes, highlighted his "unique use of the hand-held camera to capture the film's heightened reality and almost dream-like atmosphere".

[11] Hall met actress Katharine Ross on the set of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and became her third of five husbands in 1969.

[12] His third marriage was to costume designer Susan Kowarsh-Hall, whom he worked with on Road to Perdition (2002), from an unknown date until his death.