Brad Trent Photography

Now THIS Is Impressive…

The other day I stumbled across what I thought was just one more way to waste serious time on the web, but instead really knocked my out…PhotoFunia Dot Com!!! It’s a site that uses an online photo editing tool that allows you to upload any photo of yours into one of a couple of hundred (and counting) stock images. Now this ain’t exactly new…I’ve seen plenty of other sites like this in the past…but what truly impressed me was the way PhotoFunia’s proprietary technology automatically identifies the face in the photo and imports it so damned well into the funny face photo montages….and it does it in seconds!

It takes about five seconds to upload the image and no more than five seconds more before you can download the finished montage to your desktop. And it’s all so well done…I’m not kidding when I say this is the kind of Photoshop work that some cases would take me hours! It’s kinda freaking me out with how this type of photo manipulation is advancing…but it’s still a lotta fun!

Check out PhotoFunia…I guarantee you’ll have a blast!

You Can Shoot Here, Or You Can Shoot There…

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I know how much some of you like seeing the behind-the-scenes stuff on my shoots, so as my tour of the Nation’s boardrooms and office spaces progresses, I offer to you my recent session with Gordon Fowler, the President and Chief Investment Officer of Glenmede. What follows is part lighting tutorial, part manipulating reality, but mostly it shows what can be done when you only have ten minutes to photograph a high profile subject and still come away with unexpected, arresting images.

On the location scout I did a couple of days before the shoot I was presented with two things. First, Gordon was extremely busy and wasn’t going to be able to devote a lot of time to a photo session, and second, there were really only two areas that would work as possible locations…

The ‘Art Wall’…

…and the ‘Wood Wall’…

The two spots were literally side-by-side, so by setting up both shots beforehand it would make it easier on Gordon’s time limitations…

We began with the portrait in front of the ‘Art Wall’…

It’s pretty obvious that I changed the overall look and feel by adding some moody blue drama to the scene, but the shot was actually pretty easy to light. Gordon was lit by a fresnel spot (with a full CTO gel) that was almost directly overhead and a second light with a 7″-40 degree grid skimming the wall behind him. The final light was a ringlight (with a full CTB gel) filling in the overall scene. After five minutes of Gordon in the chair, we went around the corner to the wood-paneled wall…

For this shot I wanted to keep things simple and just focus on his expressions, so I kept the lighting pretty open with a gridded beauty dish up high above his face, a couple of skim lights on either side of him and another ringlight adding not only fill, but a nice reflection highlight on the wood that separated him from the background. But the real beauty of the shot was the unexpected caught moment of him just enjoying his coffee and having a laugh before we actually got under way. I finished things off with that tight portrait at the top of the page, but the magazine went straight to Gordon and his coffee cup…

Two setups…ten minutes total shoot time…done!

I Got ‘Behanced’…

Last week I found about a new “…platform for creative professionals that covers all industries…” called the Behance Network and I figured I would take it for a spin. In the time it takes to brew a cup of coffee, I signed up for a portfolio, uploaded a selection of my work and sat back to see what might happen. Well…this morning I wake up to a boatload of emails from all over the World from people who had suddenly viewed my behance page…because the editors at behance had chosen to feature my work on the homepage of ‘Featured Projects’…! Now this has me thinking that just maybe I should have spent more than five minutes tossing those images up there!

You can sign up for your own Behance account at http://www.behance.net

Mola Likes Damn Ugly Photography

The guys over at Mola were paying attention a few months ago when I was interviewed by The Strobist and I mentioned that very often my light modifier of choice is one of their reflectors. They were so impressed, they featured me on their blog along with a few of the many shots I’ve done using the various Mola dish reflectors…

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Steven Spielberg with the BIG (43.5″) Mola Mantti

Edie Falco using the 28″ Mola Setti

Follow the link to the rest of the story on the Mola Softlights Blog HERE

I Drive A Minivan…

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I’ve always been a gearhead…I just love cool cars…I’m glued every week to Top Gear wishing it was me powering along those windy roads behind the wheel of the Supercar of the Week, so it’s just bloody sad that my main method of conveyance is a 2003 Dodge Caravan! Of course, I’ve got nobody to blame but myself…and I suppose it does make much more sense to load my 600 pounds of lighting gear into that functional but ugly-ass Mom-mobile than it would trying to cram it into the backseat of a ’69 Camaro, but it’s still a drag. So when I got to hang out for a day with gazzilionaire investor Jim Glickenhaus in the Top-Secret warehouse that houses part of his World-renowned car collection, I was over the Moon!

Jim’s day job as head of the investment firm Glickenhaus & Co. allows him to pursue a hobby that unless you are the head of such a company, you couldn’t afford the entry fees! Jim collects exotic cars. The BEST exotic cars! He is particularly well-known as a Ferrari aficionado, with a stable that includes a 1947 Ferrari 166 Spyder Corsa, a trio of ’67s…the Dino Competizione, a P3/4 and a 412 P…and then there is the Ferrari he is most famous for…the 2006 Ferrari P4/5 by Pininfarina.

The P4/5 is a one-off that Glickenhaus envisioned as a modern version of the Ferrari P-series. But how do you redesign what many consider to be the finest sports car of all time? Glickenhaus went to Pininfarina, the car designers & coachbuilders long associated with Ferrari, and laid out his design concept…he purchased the last Ferrari ‘Enzo’ in existence and told them to redesign the Enzo in a style similar to his 1967 Ferrari 330 P 3/4. Now the Enzo cost him close to $2 million dollars…but the final project…with more than 200 components designed especially for the P4/5…would add an additional $4 million, not that Glickenhaus thinks it’s a bad investment, as he said, “…it would not amaze me if, in 50 years, the P4/5 goes for $100 million…”

Some of the other cars in Jim’s collection include a Duesenberg J446, a Stutz DV-32, the Ford GT40 Mark IV J6, a Lola T70 Sl 71-32 and the 2009 Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione, but ohhhh those Ferrari’s…..

Why Would David Dorn Wanna Look Like Me?!!

I’ve known David Dorn, the SVP for Digital Strategy at Rhino Entertainment for a lotta years, but aside a few snapshots I did at his wedding, I’ve never shot him before…until this week. He had a last-minute trip to New York and an odd request…he saw the recent rather moody portrait of me and wondered if I could do the same for him! So I fired up the studio and the above portrait was the result…but the question now is, who looks creepier…Me or Dave?!!

Getting In Close With Marty Whitman

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I’ve photographed Marty Whitman…the Founder, Co-Chief Investment Officer, and Portfolio Manager of the Third Avenue Value Fund…twice before, so when Adrian called me a couple of weeks ago to go back to the well for the third time I knew I wanted to do something completely different from what I had already done. Marty is a very cool guy…he always did whatever I came up with, whether it was to play tennis in the halls of his office, or pose under a fish that he caught on a company retreat…but this time I really just wanted to focus on Marty and do a study of just him without all the props and surroundings…..

While I was looking around the office for a place to shoot, I noticed kind of a quirky scene where they had pushed a bunch of chairs in front of some file cabinets so they could install a ping pong table in their cafeteria…

It made for another cool shot that bears a striking resemblance to a photo I did a few months ago of Neil Barofsky, the head of the TARP Fund. Maybe my next long-term photo project should be file cabinets across America……?!!

What Your Choice of Camera Says About You…

I very rarely simply re-post stuff I find on other blogs, but there’s no way around this one. The Shutterfinger blog has the most astute…and accurately funny…dissection of the kind of person who buys a particular brand of camera. For those of you more affected by Attention Defisit Disorder, the Cliff’s Notes version has Canon owners switching to Nikon, Nikon owners switching to Canon, Sony owners believe in the Easter Bunny, Pentax owners are cheap, Olympus owners have no friends and Leica owners are, of course, poseurs with Hasselblad envy! But those are just the broad strokes and I implore you all to head over to Shutterfinger for the complete read!

Andrea Jung in the London Sunday Times

Last weekend I had a nice spread published in the London Sunday Times…Andrea Jung, the CEO of Avon…

Palm Beach + July = Very, Very Hot !!!

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Back in July, Eric Godwin, the Photo Director at Bloomberg Markets magazine, asked me to head down to Palm Beach to photograph Chris Cline, a billionaire Coal Baron and head of Foresight Energy, one of the country’s largest producers of coal. As you can imagine, Palm Beach in July is just about as hot as a coal furnace, but with added humidity! Add to that our location…Cline’s 164-foot yacht, ‘Mine Games’…and we were in for a hot time in Florida!

Kaz and I got in a day early and on our scout we immediately were made aware of the quirks of trying to photograph a portrait using a prop as big as a yacht…the boat was in a rather tight slip with very little room to maneuver for good angle and the boat itself…while certainly large and luxurious…offered few spots to do the kind of shots I had in mind. But a couple of locations did jump out…


…this spot…shot from inside a hedge and through a bunch of tall grass…would let me stack up the boat behind him.

…and I thought it could be almost regal having him descending this staircase…

And I guess the Art Director was thinking the same thing when he named the story, “New King Coal”…..

One thing became very apparent as soon as the sun rose in the sky…since the entire deck was gleaming, shiny white…even slathered up with an SPF-50 sunscreen, my white ass was gonna fry like a lizard on a rock in the desert! I spent a lotta time re-greasing myself during the day and did a good job of not turning into a human lobster, but there was one place I neglected to coat…the inside of my nostrils! All that sun bouncing up and into my nose gave me the most excruciating sunburn I can remember, so for any of you who may have seen me after I got back from that trip with a finger up my nose…furiously scratching away…now you know why!

Big Jet Engines

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A couple of weeks ago, Adrian DeLucca at Barron’s asked if I wanted to shoot a cover story featuring Louis Chenevert, the CEO of United Technologies…the only problem was, United Technologies didn’t want to let Louis leave the office and go play with any of the cool toys UTC makes…like the really Big Jet Engines that I knew they had sitting at the Pratt & Whitney plant right across the river from their corporate headquarters in Hartford! But after a little back-n-forth with the folks in corporate communications at the company, I convinced them that since I had shot at UTC many times in the past and I knew the offices were Death on Toast…very functional, but not exciting in the least…a location scout was in order! And after only five minutes of poking around the Testing Facility Hanger, this was what I found…..

Now all three locations would be perfect for both my cover and the opener for the story, but the problem was, we were only going to get Louis for ten minutes…tops…..and he was showing up at 8:00AM, surrounded by assistants and P/R guys whose main mission in life was to make sure I didn’t get a second longer than what was promised! That meant Kaz and I would have to set up everything the night before and for the shoot, move our subject from shot to shot quicker than we have had to do in a long time. Here’s how things looked…..

Fun At The Fair!

Yesterday I channeled my inner farmer and hit the Harwinton County Fair, complete with ox-pulls, carnival rides, corn dogs and a whole mess of chickens and horses and cows and bunnies! My iPhone (set to ‘Hipstamatic’, of course!) has recorded some choice bits for you to enjoy…

Killer Attack Rooster…

Very Friendly Horse…

Sleepy Bunny…

Tiny Donkey…

Girls Sitting With Cows…

Terrifying Rides…

Whac-A-Mole…

Dead Guys…

…And The Best Damned Potatoes You’ve Ever Seen!!!

Now I know that still pictures hardly do justice to a good carnival ride, but if you watch this video long enough, it might generate enough vertigo to make you sick….

Do you feel like judging a few chickens?!!

Not a fan of chickens? Then how about braving the crowds to look at the prize-winning bunnies?!!

And if all that wasn’t enough fun for ya, The Flying Wallendas were even on hand cheating death for the 7,496th time!!!

New Work – Robert Nardelli

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My tour of the nation’s boardrooms continued last week when I got to spend some time with Bob Nardelli, the ex-CEO of Home Depot and Chrysler, who is now at Cerberus Capital Management, one of the largest private equity investment firms in the country. His new gig has him running the Cerberus Operations and Advisory Company…a little portfolio that includes about 50 companies with combined revenues of nearly $50 billion. With that as his day job, it’s not too surprising that I was not going to be given a lot of time to do what I do, but I was further hamstrung when the location I wanted to shoot him in was deemed ‘too public’ and instead my only choice was…the boardroom.

The boardroom is always the first place I’m shown and usually the last place I wanna be! The person giving me the office tour typically says, “We’ve done a lot of photography in here!”, which makes me wonder why they think I would want to go where thousands have gone before, but beyond that, most boardrooms are just not that photo-friendly. They can be High-Tech or Old-World and as well-designed as possible, but there’s no gettin’ around the monstrously large table that inevitably takes up the bulk of the room. And even the best boardroom is usually kinda bland, overlit and without much drama. So to overcome these little obstacles I decided to get a bit dark and moody and make a shot that was more cinematic than real…..

…then, for a quick secondary photo, I decided to do one of my Artificial Portraits (above) that I could also serve as a nice setup for a tight portrait…..

Don Draper Wins A Clio? Big Deal…I’ve Got A Clio!!!

OK…so on Sunday night, just as ‘Mad Men’ was lassoing its third consecutive Emmy for Best Dramatic Series, I was over on AMC watching that nights episode where our hero, Don Draper, wins his first Clio Award (and the apparent pain & suffering that comes with the honor). Well, maybe pain & suffering is a bit strong, since as Don does a victory lap around a bar with his trophy, all the gals in attendance are clamoring to spend the night with him! And that’s when it hit me…wait a second…..I have a Clio, and the damned thing has never managed to get me the ladies like it did for Don!!! I kinda think I got a raw deal…….or maybe I just need a tailored suit, a high & tight haircut, and a skinny tie!

I Shoot Kaz…Kaz Shoots Me…..

A few weeks ago, the folks at Resource Magazine got in touch with me and asked if I would be interested in contributing to a photo essay they’re doing on Photographers and their Assistants. The idea is for me to shoot a portrait of my assistant and then have the assistant shoot me. I thought it sounded like an OK way to spend a day, so on one of the hottest days of the year, Kaz and I trucked a few hundred pounds of gear up to the roof and I did one of my Artificial Portraits of him, then we went back to the air-conditioned comfort of my apartment where he did a particularly scary shot of me…

The story will be in the Fall issue which comes out in early October…I’ll let y’all know when it drops!

How’d You Do That?!!

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Ever since I posted THIS Song of the Day last week, I’ve been getting e-mails from photo geeks around the World asking me about the shot of Kate Tucker in that field. I’ve had more theories tossed my way than I ever could have imagined, from the type of lighting…did I use an HMI spotlight or studio strobes or small, battery-powered flash units…to whether or not Kate was even in the field…a lot of you actually are convinced she was shot in the studio and stripped into a stock field shot! All of this speculation knocked me out, especially since the truth is that it was a kind of a throwaway that neither Kate or I thought was working, so we bailed on it and moved on to another idea after only five or six frames!

So…for your photo-geeky viewing enjoyment…here’s a breakdown of the shot and the post-processing steps involved in making it look the way it does…

We shot this on the Hasselblad H1 with the Leaf Aptus 75 back which gave us this very normal, if a little flat, RAW file. To keep the lighting dramatic, the only light I used is that Profoto beauty dish (with a grid) you see above her head. It was powered by a Profoto 7B at about half power which nicely darkened the mid-day ambient light down to mimic twilight…

Next, I had to do a bit of cosmetic retouching and obviously the light boom and sandbag had to go, but since I grey-balanced the shot heavy on the blue side, I had to bring back the vivid red of the dress and yellow tone of the guitar. I also lowered the contrast and added a bit of shadow detail using the ‘Shadow/Highlights’ adjustment because I knew that a few steps down the line I would be amping up the levels and contrast a lot…

Now came some color correction. Leaf RAW files are inherently flat and need a lotta help to get the kind of color I like in my final images, and in this case, because of that very blue white-balance I did, I inserted a Color Adjustment Layer and added 20 Red to the shadows and 20 Cyan to the highlights…

…then I added a Selective Color Adjustment Layer and really increased the Blue and Cyan levels…

Next, I pumped up the contrast in the Curves and Levels Adjustment Layers…

…and the contrast went up even more when I duplicated the image layer, converted it to ‘Soft Light’ and applied a healthy dose of the High Pass filter set at a radius of 150 pixels…

With the higher contrast, the High Pass layer added a lot of drama, but I still felt I had to draw more attention to Kate, so in a final step I created a new Overlay Layer (filled with 50% grey) and I ‘burned’ down the horizon line, the grass on either side of her and a bit of the sky, then I dodged the grass directly around her to make more of a spotlight effect…

That’s it…a simple photo in only seven steps!!! And here are all of those steps…side-by-side…one final time…

Wine Reviewer of the Day

Those of you who know me, know I’m a serious wine geek…and I have just found my new favorite wine reviewer…Sadat X, from the Super Fly Hip-Hop group Brand Nubian!!!

Now THAT’S the Shit!!!

AOL Shoot for The Hollywood Reporter

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Through a wonderful bit of logrolling, I recently added The Hollywood Reporter as a new client when Alysia Lew of AOL (who I met on my BusinessWeek shoot of AOL executives last Fall) got me to shoot David Eun, the new president of AOL Media and Studios. Here’s a little of what we did…

Kaz sitting in for the main shot…note the hanging cable from the light we clamped up in the ceiling…

…and the resulting final image…..

A new graffiti mural in the reception area…

…and David getting ready to attack the photographer…..

The original test from the ‘Monster Wall’ shot at the top of this post…

And finally, here’s how the magazine opened the story…..

Stop the $300 Permit Fee !!!

I’m gonna jump on my soapbox and make an appeal to all photographers who live or shoot in New York City. Today is the last day to register with the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting to speak out at the hearing on June 3rd against charging fees for all still photography permits. Every editorial and advertising photographer uses the type of equipment that under current rules requires a film permit from the city and up until now those seeking a permit simply were required to carry $1,000,000 in liability insurance, but the new proposal is adding a non-refundable $300.00 ‘application’ fee for every time a permit is pulled to shoot! Given the razor-thin profit margins photographers are working with these days and the budget tightening our clients are faced with, a $300.00 permit fee will seriously hamper location shooting in the city.

I will be speaking on behalf of EP, ASMP, APA and NPPA, but the more photographers who get up and let their voices be heard, the better! If you’re available to to go the hearing being held June 3, 2010 at the 125 Worth Street Auditorium, you must register by TODAY…contact Dean McCann of the Mayor’s Office at 212-489-6710 or by e-mail at applicationfee@film.nyc.gov and if you can’t make the hearing, please vote “NO” on this online petition.

Damn Ugly Photography Gets Lit Up By The Strobist !!!

Damn Ugly hasn’t had this many hits in one day since he went to DC and photographed The President…and even then I don’t think the graph went that high! This morning, David Hobby, also known in photo circles as The Strobist, interviewed me last week and posted it on his blog at 8:00AM this morning….

Brad Trent on the Fake Reality of Portraits

His post today…and the launching of my new website…have resulted in a major traffic jam clogging up the interwebs! I could only hope and pray to get this kinda action on a daily basis, but since I’m trying to get people signed up for the Santa Fe Workshop Ronnie Weil and I are teaching, I’ll take whatever action I can get!


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!!! EDIT !!!
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Damn Ugly made it to the Top 100 Blogs of the Day on WordPress!!! #27…and climbing like a rocket!!!


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