Brad Trent Photography

Drumroll Please !!!!!

The Redesigned Website Is Up !!!!!
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You’ve probably noticed my participation here at Damn Ugly has been sketchy recently, but after a couple of months of all-night design sessions, resizing images and portfolio editing, my new website is up & running!!!

Brad Trent Photography

This is the third website design I’ve put up and by far the best. Quite honestly, the format of this site is exactly what I would have wanted years ago, but the technology just wasn’t there. Until now I’ve been using a Livebooks design, but this time I worked with Rob Haggart’s web design company, ‘A Photo Folio’ to implement the changes and we went live over the weekend. While everything about the architecture of the site is new, I incorporated a lot of the basic design elements from my previous site in this new project.

The first major change you will see is that I’m no longer hamstrung with a single, small image window…the images are much higher resolution ands now dynamically resize as you change the size of your browser window, or…even better.…you can click the ‘Full-Screen’ button at the lower left of your monitor and view the biggest, sharpest possible images I can offer! Navigating with the Thumbnail view is also much faster since you can see larger thumbnail images and they pop up ten times faster than the Livebooks version ever did. And I really like being able to navigate forwards and back by simply clicking on the left or right of the image…as you roll your mouse over the image, a ‘+’ or ‘-‘ icon appears and you can click and go! You can also access the thumbnails by placing your mouse in the middle of the screen and clicking when the grid icon appears. I don’t even know why I’m explaining this because the site design is so intuitive it just seems natural! But if you have any problems getting around the site, just ask a five year-old…it’s been years since I’ve met a kid who couldn’t figure out the internet!

Finally, having these hi-rez images allowed me to add a couple of galleries that I plan to have a lotta fun with in the future. My ‘Artificial Portraits’ and ‘Light Tests’ will allow me to show more of those behind the scenes moments that normally get archived to a hard drive, but offer insightful looks at the nuts & bolts of my shoots.

So head on over to www.bradtrent.com and tell me what you think!!!

Brad Trent
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The iPad Portfolio Era Begins…

As some of you already know, the past couple of months have had me furiously redesigning my current website with the folks at APhotoFolio.com and yesterday Rob Haggart, Mr. APhotoFolio himself, informed me that they have become the first photography website company to deliver custom designed iPad sites, built using HTML5, for all of their customers. Check it out…

A Photo Folio – First To Deliver iPad Sites

As I sit here resizing TIFFS down to JPEGs for my new site, I hafta wonder if the next thing I’m gonna be doing is purchasing a carload of iPads to act as my portfolios?!! Given how labor intensive, not to mention expensive, printed portfolios can be, having everything on an iPad just might make sense! I dunno…it’s all very early in the game, but if I can get over not having a printed book of BIG prints to show an art director, who knows?!!

And now, here’s a quick look at a sample page from my new website, which will be up as soon as I finish resizing those damned JPEGs…

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FUCK HOBOKEN !!!

OK…so we’re out in Hoboken freezing our asses off this morning and I decide to do a quick portrait of the guy I was shooting on the sidewalk outside of his building…and yes, I knew that maybe I would need a permit, but we were only gonna be out there for fifteen stinking minutes and besides, it wasn’t like we had a twenty-person crew and motor homes and generators….but of course, just as we were ready to get going a cop pulls up and barks out, “You gotta permit for this?!!”…”No”, says I, pleading blissful ignorance of the complex photography laws of the fine State of New Jersey (insert all the sarcasm you can muster), “…but do you think you could let us slide?”. You already know the answer to that one, and he tells me I have to go Police Headquarters and fill out an application…

Off I go, meandering through the pothole-ravaged roads of the square-mile hamlet only known because Sinatra was born here, but when I get to the Cop Shop they say I’m in the wrong place…I hafta go to City Hall! OK…I walk the two blocks to City Hall, but once there and after waiting fifteen minutes in line, the Town Clerk (a snottier jerkoff you will never meet!) tells me it’s the Police who approve all film permits and besides, it takes three days and there is a $700 fee!!! I explain my situation and that I’m not shooting a ‘Film’ and that I’m working for a magazine, not Dreamworks, but he could give a rat’s ass…he ain’t budging. So one more trip back to Cops where, you guessed it, they shoot me down in flames!

So the photo of Bo that sits at the top of this post is all I have to show of the dump beautiful town that is Hoboken!!! I suppose that if that asshole Town Clerk sees this, I just might get a bill for $700 since, technically, I did shoot there, but I’ll take my chances and simply avoid Hoboken for the rest of my time on Earth!

I’m Gonna Be Teaching At Santa Fe…

Mark your calendars kids, ‘cuz in July Mr. Damn Ugly is gonna be jetting off to teach a workshop at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops! Reid Callanan, the High Priest of Santa Fe, has invited Ronnie Weil and I to teach a week-long program called ‘The Editorial Portrait’…..an intensive class that will let us show a group of young photographers what it takes to shoot for an editorial client. We’re still figuring out the curriculum, but I’m getting tired already! I figure by the end of the week, if the students don’t have a very good idea of what it takes to be an editorial portrait shooter, they never will! The week will be a non-stop cycle of shooting and critiquing work…every day new assignments are given out and the students have to adapt immediately and come back with great imagery. I’m looking forward to kicking some young photographer ass!!!

The fun begins July 4th and you can read all about our workshop HERE!

Song of the Day – Kate Tucker Sings for Her Supper!



DOWNLOAD: On The Radio

I’m tag-teaming a Song of the Day along with a bit of good, old fashioned log-rolling today. The song is a previously unreleased acoustic version of ‘On The Radio’ Kate Tucker and Mark Isakson layed down for Seattle’s Bumbershoot festival last year. The log-rolling is explained below…..

Kate has finished recording White Horses, her new solo album, but she need a bit of help. Being an indie artist often means little details like coming up with the last few bucks to press CD’s, promote the album and loading up the tour bus sometimes force her to employ extraordinary measures…in this case, hit up folks on the internet for whatever they might be able to contribute! Kate has put together a Kickstarter Funding Video…complete with ‘prizes’…in order to raise the final $5000.00 she needs to put White Horses to bed. If you toss her a few measly bucks you can get a signed CD and a bit of good Karma…for 50 bones she’ll unlock the vault and give you her bootlegs from her first album, the out of print Eros Turannos, and a few more goodies…$500 and she’ll record an acoustic version of any of her songs, dedicate it to you, post it on YouTube, and send you an exclusive mp3…..and for you seriously High Rollers, a grand will get Kate to play a concert for you and 40 of your closest & dearest friends (!)…two grand and she’ll sing for you, and cook you dinner and get you drunk (!!)…and if somebody were to kick in the whole five grand…well, I think it goes without saying that if anybody hits that target, Kate’s gonna have a friend for life!!! (Or it means she sold herself into slavery…I’m not quite sure…..)

I’m asking all of the friends of The List to head over to ‘Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is! Kate Tucker Sings for Her Supper!’ and watch the Kickstarter video…and if you can, show her a little love. And then pass it along to a few friends. It’s a lot more interesting than those damned LOLCats videos that keep filling up my inbox! And let’s be honest…the more true artists like Kate out there might mean we have to endure less of Lady GaGa…!!!

Check out more of Kate Tucker on MySpace

BusinessWeek – Over & Out

I just heard from my friends at BusinessWeek…the entire Photo Department has just been fired and the phones in the Art Department are starting to ring, so they’re probably all gone too….

1:00PM UPDATE: Everybody in the Photo, Art and Graphics departments got fired……

4:10PM UPDATE: I dunno if this has anything to do with the days events, but I just heard that the 43rd Floor is on fire…for real!!!……

Ron Burkle For BusinessWeek

It’s kinda bittersweet to be posting about a job I just did for BusinessWeek on the same day I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop regarding the expected job cuts, but what the heck…it might just be a long time before I have another BusinessWeek story to talk about, right?!!

Last Tuesday, I get a 7:00AM wake-up call from one of my favorite people in the whole World, Sarah Morse…the magazine just got an eleventh-hour OK to shoot Ron Burkle, the supermarket Gazillionaire, and would I be available…like right now…to shoot him?!! I was literally getting ready to head out for a location scout on another gig, but sure…I can call and get Bo’s lazy ass outta bed and the two of us could hang with Mr. Burkle for a bit. And I actually knew a lot about Burkle…he was a huge Democratic fundraiser, a regular on the New York Post’s Page Six, he owns the Pittsburgh Penguins, he hangs out with Bono and Diddy and Leo and various Supermodels…and he recently bought Sky Studio, a triplex photography studio with it’s own swimming pool that I used to rent, as a New York pied-à-terre for about 17 million bucks and that’s where we were gonna do the shoot! Of course, we were told that he would have very little time for the shoot and I wouldn’t get to meet with him until he arrived, but that didn’t matter. Even with a ten-minute shoot window, I figured I should be able to pull something kinda cool off…..

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The backlit, cantilevered staircase gave us a grand entrance focal point and we quickly saw it as the perfect location for our opener. Thank God Burkle showed up wearing a suit and not the jeans and polo shirt his publicist had promised!

After an extremely quick five-minute shoot on the stairs, I asked Ron if we could have a few more minutes to shoot him up on the roof…he graciously obliged and this was the result…..

You can read the article, ‘The Other Ron Burkle’, HERE and y’all stay tuned to see if I have any more BusinessWeek stories to relay in the future!

More Cuts At BusinessWeek???

The sad news racing through the photo community this morning…or at least the small portion I find myself a part of…is that another sweeping round of axings layoffs at BusinessWeek is imminent. I suppose my acting surprised might seem a trifle disingenuous, but since Bloomberg assumed the reins back in December and the initial firings were announced, things seemed to be stabilizing and I was hoping (against hope?) that the friends and colleagues I have known for years would be spared further cuts, but with word that a new design team is in place and both the New York Post and Daily Finance reporting that as many as 30 more people might face the chopping block as early as tomorrow, it’s probably time to face the fact that the magazine I knew is due for some pretty big changes.

Sue Bloom gave me my first assignment back in October of 1988. Roxanne Edwards (then the Photo Director) took a chance and gave me my first cover story a few short months later. It was in 1991 that I began working with the current Photo Director, Ronnie Weil, when she sent me of to shoot the CEO of Pepsi. And Larry Lippman, Kathy Moore, Scott Mlyn, Anne D’Aprix, Sarah Morse, Andrew Popper, Mindy Katzman, Lori Perbeck, Regina Flanagan, Kat Malott, Burte Hughes, Sandra Torres…throughout the years these photo editors and researchers have been like family. This is one of very few magazines I have worked for where I could drop by and feel like an insider and that my opinions and viewpoint actually mattered. I’ve been allowed access into some pretty amazing executive suites over the years…culminating in Ronnie and me getting to spend an afternoon in the Oval Office just a few months ago for our Obama cover story…and I’ve had the opportunity to produce some rather interesting work. I honestly can’t tell you how many covers I’ve shot for them, but it’s gotta be North of thirty by now, and through it all it’s been a wild ride. Now all any of us can do is see how the next act plays out…..

bwcovers

Eyes & Hearts For Haiti

My friend Howie Shneyer has organized Eyes & Hearts For Haiti, a charity auction to benefit the victims of the Haitian earthquake. Howie runs Aperture Pro in Miami and through his deep connections in the photo and art community, he has received over 160 photographic prints and artworks and all proceeds from the auction will be donated to Friends of the Orphans, a group who has for more than 40 years worked to end the vicious cycle of poverty by giving safe and loving homes and brighter futures to children in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Eyes & Hearts For Haiti has set up an eBay Auction site to bid on the lots, but should you be in South Florida, there will also be a silent auction held this Friday March 12, from 7:00-10:00 PM at Aperture Studios, 385 NE 59th Street, Miami 305-759-4327. I’ve got a few of my photographs in the auction, including these of Evander Holyfield and Steven Spielberg…

…but the wealth of great photographers who have donated prints for the auction catalog is pretty impressive…..

Greg Gorman

John Eder

Arthur Elgort

Wayne Maser

Henry Diltz

Jeff Licata

William Coupon

Douglas Kirkland

So please, check out the List Of Available Lots or the Facebook Page that Howie set up and if you feel so motivated, bid early…..and bid often!

The Barron’s Roundtable – 2010 Edition

I’ve kinda been neglecting to include any actual photo-related posts lately, but a lot of what I’ve been shooting hasn’t run yet and until it does, it’s gotta stay under wraps, but here is a recent job I did for Barron’s…..

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I’ve been shooting the Barron’s Roundtable cover for a lotta years now, and every year the challenge is to reinvent how to photograph these ten fund managers in new & compelling compositions that will work for the cover, an inside spread, a couple of weeks worth of feature portraits and if that’s not enough, another cover that runs mid-year…all in a little over an hour! The entire production takes a boatload of planning before we even show up at the location…this year’s meeting was at The Harvard Club…but the main trick is keeping to a schedule that will allow us to get all that work done with only seven or eight minutes per person. It’s one thing to make an interesting portrait of a person given those time constraints, but add in all of the different final uses, the fact that most of the images will have to be assembled into group shots in Photoshop and the meeting room we were using as our ‘studio’ was so old that there was only one fifteen-amp electrical circuit for the whole room which meant we had to rent just about every battery-powered strobe in Manhattan to light the two sets, when we’re done it felt like we had gone to war!

Since we always do the actual shoot very early in the morning, before the meeting starts, we always give ourselves a pre-light day, and this was what we came up with for our cover test…..

…then, on a second set, we put this together…

The ‘fun’ part on a shoot like this is always convincing these very buttoned-down investment executives to trust me when I ask them to do whatever it is we’ve cooked up for the cover. This year, the little metaphor we were trying to hammer home was ‘looking around the corner’, so we rigged a few foamcore panels and had each person playing with that idea…..


…Dr. Marc Faber


…Mario Gabelli


…Bill Gross


…and Kelly, touching up Oscar Schafer!

All of which came together inside as this Photoshop-realized group shot…..

With that part done, we quickly moved to the second set for a few tighter portraits which would result in these images that ran in the following weeks……

I’m Disgusting In China…?!!

One of the cool things about the blog is the ability to look at the stats to see exactly who is wasting time in here, and one sort of weird thing has happened in the past few weeks…suddenly I’m getting a lotta hits from China and the blog is being fed into translate.google.com for English to Chinese translation! The only problem is, when I see how what I post gets translated, I hafta wonder if Google is getting it right! ‘Damn Ugly Photography’ comes up as ‘Disgusting Photography’ and ‘The Home Of The Song Of The Day List’ results in ‘But To Date Name List Song Home Page’…!

I dunno…I should probably just be happy that there are people half a World away checking out what’s sitting at the top of my iTunes folder!

Charlie Rose for BusinessWeek

As the new era at Bloomberg BusinessWeek begins, so does a new stable of columnists, and one of the first new names added to the masthead is the revered television interviewer and journalist, Charlie Rose. We had the pleasure of photographing him in his TV studio…at the table…for his new column portrait.

Happy Holidays !!!

Click image for the full-size card!


A Parade of Guys in Suits…..

It seems like in the past few years the overwhelming majority if the people who have stood before my camera have been businessmen….so much so that I’m beginning to have dreams of long lines of guys in suits! I have a bit of a backlog of recent shoots that I haven’t dropped on the blog, so before the holidays take over I figured I had better clean out the closet and put few of them up…

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Henri de Castries for Barron’s

This weeks cover story on AXA Group CEO, Henri de Castries…

AOL Executives for BusinessWeek

With the spinning off of AOL from Time Warner, I was sent to shoot CEO Tim Armstrong and his inner circle at the New AOL for a feature story in the first issue of the new Bloomberg BusinessWeek…

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong

Jon Brod – Vice President of AOL Ventures

Jeff Levick – President, Global Advertising and Strategy

Bill Wilson – President, AOL Media

Brad Garlinghouse – President, Internet and Mobile Communications

IndexIQ for BusinessWeek

And finally, one more BusinessWeek story. For this one one, we went down to NYU and shot the principals of IndexIQ, a Westchester-based hedge fund with a former Time Inc publisher at the helm and an NYU finance professor at it’s chief investment strategist.

Seated: Professor Robert Whitelaw. Standing (L-R): Adam Patti, Anthony Davidow, Sal Bruno

CEO Adam Patti

Shooting Kate

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I have taken a rather long time to talk about the two shoots I did with Kate when she was in New York back in October…partly because I was waiting for her to finish her new album, but now that ‘White Horses’ is in the can, I guess this is a good time to bring them up.

Kate was in town for CMJ and we knocked around some ideas for a cover shoot that involved horses…she was thinking of calling the new record ‘White Horses’…so we took a drive up to Connecticut to look for some horses…but the horses didn’t wanna cooperate and with the sun rapidly falling outta the sky, we had to change direction and came away with these shots…

A few days later, back in the city, we talked about doing something a bit edgier and since, like all rock stars, she was staying at the Chelsea Hotel, we thought we might try a commando-style shoot in the halls. Johanna Cranitch, of Johanna and the Dusty Floor, has been singing back-up with Kate and she joined in the fun. We managed to get off one shot in front of Harry Houdini’s eyes before a security guard kicked our asses back to Kate’s room…..

…but once we were in the room, the light pouring in through the windows gave me more than I needed……

Remember…Kate’s album comes out next Spring, but you can pre-order a limited-edition signed and numbered copy of White Horses and receive a free gift from Kate right now…just check out the ‘NEWS’ section on her Website for details.

Todd Oldham For BusinessWeek

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I had the opportunity to spend some time with multi-faceted designer Todd Oldham when I shot him for a BusinessWeek story that documented his nasty public breakup with Old Navy. It’s been a long time since I’ve met someone so completely at ease and refreshingly upbeat, especially given the drama he’s been put through for the past couple of years in his dealings with Old Navy.

One thing that came out of this whole mess was that since Old Navy had most of his trademarks tied up in a contract dispute, Todd couldn’t really work on anything besides book projects. The good news is that he just released a fabulous book, Kid Made Modern, that I would whole heartily recommend to anyone with kids! The book has over 50 craft projects inspired by modern design masters such as Alexander Calder, Noguchi, Charles & Ray Eames, George Nelson and on and on and on and I can’t think of a better way to introduce young minds to art & design. Christmas is coming….are you parents listening?!! Check it out at Todd’s Website (where you can get an autographed copy) or over on Amazon

Although the time we had was short, it was truly inspiring to be able to hang out with Todd for a while.

Let’s Back Up A Little Bit…..

A couple of weeks back, I shot Stuart Janney and John Hilton of Bessemer Trust for Barron’s…but the cool part you didn’t get to see was the location across from St. Patricks Cathedral…go on….click on the photo below for the really BIG view…I dare you!