Some Damn Ugly Photography

News from my photo shoots

Is It Wrong???

Haiti Aftermath 02

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There is a fascinating discussion going on at the Judge’s Table at the Danish Pictures of The Year Competition regarding how much Photoshop is too much when it comes to photojournalism. Apparently, the entry of photographer Klavs Bo Christensen went way over whatever acceptable standard had previously been allowed, and his photographs were disqualified. Now God knows I twiddle the knobs as much as the next guy, but then I don’t claim to be a ‘photojournalist’ either. I’m not gonna editorialize, but check out the story yourself and lemme know what you think…..

FOLLOW LINK:
Too much Photoshop? Judge for yourself

Gee……I’m ‘Blog Famous’…!!!

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I’ve only been doin’ this thing for a short while, but somehow my post about my photo of Jack & Suzy Welch being on the ‘Today’ show got me onto the WordPress.com ‘Blogs of the Day’ Page!

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Zillions of people Blogging and Twittering their little brains out…and I come in at Number 61…!!! I checked my blog stats and the graph kinda showed what went on yesterday…..

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Maybe I’ll just give up on the Song of the Day and blathering on about my photographic exploits and instead just make this the Suzy Welch Appreciation Page!

I Was On The ‘Today’ Show This Morning…..

So I’m just sitting here this morning, eating my flakes, reading The Times, with the ‘Today’ show on in the background…suddenly Suzy Welch is on to promote her new book, 10-10-10, and what do ya know…my shot of Jack & Suzy pops up with my credit and everything!

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Now, my pictures of Jack & Suzy have been published all over the place…in BusinessWeek, on the cover of their books…

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…and the photo used by the Today Show was from the last shoot we did for their website, The Welch Way, but it’s still kinda cool to have it splashed up on the screen before you’re even fully awake!

Ummmm…Does That Come In Horizontal?!!

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(Click on any image to see a full-size version)

Normally with my environmental portraits, I don’t hafta mess with the ‘environment’ too much, but on occasion the ability to move pixels around in Photoshop can come in handy. Today’s post is brought to by Adobe®…..

A while back, Barron’s Photo Editor Adrian Delucca asked me to shoot Fund Manager Jim Melcher of Balestra Capital for the magazine’s Hedge Fund Report section. Now, I’ve shot businessmen in business situations for a couple of decades, so I’m used to heading into yet another office and making ‘art’ where no art can be found, but the offices at Balestra were especially challenging…yes, they were extremely small and of course they were hardly pretty…some might say they were utilitarian at best…but even worse, the company was packing up to move into fancier digs so there was really nothing there that would lend itself to photography, let alone ‘ART’…

The only possible option was to use the small conference room (that doubled as their lunch room) which had a frosted-glass window dividing it from another office. I dunno, maybe the reflection on the glass table would spice up the shot….the room was barely 8 feet wide with a heavy glass table taking up every square inch of space, but it was better than slapping him up against a beige wall and whacking him with the ringlight! So we lit the High-Holy-Hell outta the place and walked away with a nice portrait. I sent my selects (including this one) off to Adrian…..

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…and he sent back this…..

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…and asked if I had any horizontals…or…could we make a horizontal as he had done. Normally I’m pretty good about covering all the angles…horizontal & vertical are kinda standard…but in this case, because the shot seemed so obviously vertical, I didn’t do a single horizontal option. But Adrian was right. Looking at his mocked-up version, I could see it was much more powerful without the busy reflection in the table. So I told him, “Sure! I can do anything…”, and he chose another frame as his select…

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…and I went to work! Besides getting rid of the lights in the right side of the frame, I added a lotta window panes as well as extend the table and wall at the bottom/right. Because of the heavy split-lighting on his upper body, I also had to clean up the shadows on his neck because it sort of looked like a tree trunk in a horror movie. And finally I cleaned up his reflection in the glass table and desaturated the whole shot…the blue was a bit much, even for me. My final cloned & retouched image looked like this…..

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…and here it is, in today’s copy of Barron’s…..

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Livebooks.com Site of the Week…..

Big Ups to the folks at livebooks.com…..my new website was just put up on their “Sites of the Week” page…

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I gotta say…the kind or responses I’ve been getting with the new design was everything I could have hoped for and the guys at livebooks really made it all possible. And it was their idea and constant pushing that convinced me to do the blog as well. Great company, great product, great results and thanks to Ryan, Adam, Jason, Taylor, Matt and all the others who worked with me to make this all come together so well.

You Wanna Shoot Where?!!

Note: Click on any image to blow it up REAL big!

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Often, getting a corporate mind to put aside the literal and think like I do isn’t always that hard…sometimes you just have to ask…..

In today’s BusinessWeek is the story on David Johnson and Conmed that I went up to Utica to shoot a couple of weeks back. It was one of those jobs where BW photo editor Sarah Morse and I talked about what might make a cool shot, but neither of us had any real idea what was possible or if there were any eye-grabbing visuals strong enough to anchor the story. Conmed manufactures medical and surgical equipment and the story was about in order to streamline production, they went from long assembly lines that cranked out warehouses of product to compact U-shaped workstations that filled orders as-needed. We knew that showing the workstations was a must, but production lines are rarely as groovy as they appear in the movies…still, after getting the tour, Bo and I slapped on our hairnets & bunnysuits and went to work on this…

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Now, the workstations were OK and they got us this shot…

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…and Dave loved it ‘cuz it showed off their new production facilities and how they used new ideas to solve a manufacturing problem, but for me it was more of a ‘point picture’ and I knew there was more we could do to sell the idea of individual, hand-assembled production. I suggested to Dave that we look at a couple of other locations I had briefly seen on my walk-through that didn’t involve the production facility. I convinced him that we could use one of the production teams showing the final product in a more graphic location and still convey the idea of the story. One location was a bank of ‘windows’ just off the reception area in their plant…

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…and that was nice, but still a bit too sterile and corporate. The real winner was down a hallway that linked two parts of the building…an circular elevator bank that was covered is shimmering white tiles surrounded by acid-green walls!

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And here is the final spread…..

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The combination of the sterile white tiles and scorching green walls just screams medical and the nice balance of the workers blue smocks and Dave’s blue shirt made for a perfect image.

And as usual, to finish things off, I gotta get into the fun!

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The Ones That Got Away…..

I hafta remain pragmatic about what I do and who I do it for, because while I strive to always photograph my subjects in the most artistic and intelligent ways, I know that often what is best is not necessarily what is right for the job at hand. It’s hardly news that photographers constantly bitch & moan about how their images rarely get shown properly, but the simple fact is that most guys like me (if they’re doin’ their job right) come away with so many great situations on a typical shoot that it’s inevitable that something has to end up on the cutting room floor…well, if there was a cutting room floor any more! And it’ll still tear me up inside, but I understand that due to the restrictions of space and editorial integrity, what sees ink more often than not is not what I would print if I lived in a totally ‘Brad World’. Oh sure…perhaps I should be sticking up for artistic integrity and all that, and if I lived in another time, I might even pitch a fit and go to war over how I feel my photographs deserve to run…Hell, back in the day, Eugene Smith repeatedly quit Life Magazine whenever they would even as much as crop one of his photographs, but last time I checked this wasn’t exactly the Golden Age of Photojournalism…..and even he came back to the fold once he calmed down!

I was thinkin’ of this because of two recent stories I did for Barron’s…the first was the story I did on Stephanie Pomboy…allow me to show you what ran…..


(full-size image here…Stephanie Pomboy)

…and then there is the one that got left behind…


(full-size image here…Stephanie Pomboy…bigger)

Hey…I get it! I absolutely understand how Barron’s might wanna run a photo where she looks ‘pretty’ instead of ‘edgy’, or how the final choice about what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’ may be decided by seemingly arcane parameters…..but I still hafta hold my fire sometimes. It came up again this week with another Barron’s shoot, this time with the CEO of Bristol-Meyers/Squibb…

What Barron’s ran…


(go here for the full-size image: Barron’s – James Cornelius)

…and my pulled-back select…..


(full-size image: Mr. Trent’s Pick)

Again…I get it…really I do! My select is crying out for a full-page treatment and even though my choice may better fit the dark, somber theme of the story, I know it’s a hard sell to show an image as pulled-back and airy as this when you’ve only got a quarter-page of real estate to plant the photo in…but it still hurts like Hell, and even after all this time, I still complain and fight for more! And even though both of these shoots were for Barron’s, I’m not piling on them…in fact, of all of my clients, they usually are with me 100% when I suggest a select…it just happened that my two most recent examples of this kinda thing fall on them…..but when you get right down to it, my portfolio is littered with photographs that have never been published. I’ve actually shown my book to editors who have assigned the images in the book who ask me who I shot them for! That’s when you really feel the knife twisting between your ribs…when six months after the fact, the guy who didn’t use a shot tells you it’s way better than what actually ran…

And I’ll just keep smilin’…’cuz no matter what…..we still had fun, right?!!

…..Wow!!!

OK…so my new site has been live since February 24th…nine days…and I just discovered how to use the feature that allows me to pull web stats in order to see the traffic that visits the site…..

1728 ‘unique’ visitors…2798 visits…45,608 page views for a total of 48,997 ‘hits’…!!!

Besides here in the States, I’m gettin’ hits from Canada, England, Germany, Ireland, Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Japan, Austria and Poland…Poland?!!

All in nine days?!!

Wow!!!

So tell your friends…write your congressman…pass the address along to an art director you know (!)…but let’s keep the hits a comin’…!!!

Brad Trent Dot Com

Bring In The Clouds!

I have always said “Life is good if you love what you do…” and even after all these years (and the occasional bitching and moaning I have been known to do every once and while when things don’t go exactly the way I want) I can still say that I do love what I do. I recently shot a job that could have turned out a lot different if I had simply stuck with the cards that were dealt to me, but instead I pushed a bit and turned a crappy situation into a pretty cool shot.

BusinessWeek SmallBiz hired me to shoot the founders of First Global Shipping…a kind of international messenger service that operates like FedEx, but uses commercial airlines to move their packages. FGX lives up to what SmallBiz is all about…it’s a very small business! When I checked the place out on a scout, I found that they operate their entire operation out of a small, unadorned loft in Chelsea. Nothing glitzy, fancy or even remotely interesting in terms of a photographic setting…so I had to come up with something a bit more showy. I convinced Kathy Moore, my photo editor, that I could pull off a bit of fun, but she would hafta open up the purse…I needed a backdrop and a bunch of airplanes!

When we returned, the only space big enough for our purposes was their ‘light-ops’ area…this is where they log in shipments before they get sent to the local airports for transport. This more or less meant we would be shutting them down for as long as we were setting up and shooting. And of top of everything else, we basically had to push everything in the entire area out of the way and up against the walls in order to make the space usable.

With the background in place, we then had to suspend the toy airplanes…..I hafta admit…this part of the exercise was not thought out as well as it could have been, but I always carry way more stuff than I need and we managed to rig everything…eventually!

Bo & Kaz as stand-ins….notice how Bo never looks at the lens when I fire up the ring light!

The two founders of FGX, James Dowd and Justin Brown, were really into the whole idea…..small business guys are like that…they don’t have a team of p/r guys overthinking every little thing that may or may not happen based on what they do in the public eye. I can guarantee the Chairman of FedEx wouldn’t pose with toy airplanes! But FGX ain’t that kinda company yet. In fact, their communication manager, Chevon Drew, was Twittering the entire time we were shooting and later put the whole thing up on the FGX Blog!

James & Justin lovin’ the business!

The story came out this month in SmallBiz…..you can check it out…HERE!

And this is how it all came together in the end…..

To see the BIG version of the final image, click HERE!

Long day…fun shoot…and I still get off on how I make a buck!