My lecture this Thursday July 29th about the ‘Secrets of Great Portrait Photography’ at Adorama in New York City is nearly sold out, but I’m holding half a dozen seats for any of my blog or twitter followers. So if you’re can’t get in, let me know and I’ll try to get you in.

This is a new lecture with focus on all aspects of what it takes to create a great portrait, from concept to execution to post. Ways to give your portraits extra polish with production value that looks more expensive than it is. Emphasis will be placed on the ‘concepts of lighting’ that you can apply to your own work.

Hope to see you there…

Secrets to Great Portrait Photography

An Evening with Brian Smith
Thursday, July 29, 2010   5:30PM – 7:30PM
Price: $25.00
Registration deadline for this Special Event July 28, 2010

Each attendee will receive a $25.00 coupon at the Seminar in exchange for a copy of their registration receipt. The coupon will be valid for 30 days towards the purchase of any merchandise when presented at either Adorama’s retail store at 42 West 18th Street, New York, or for an online purchase at www.adorama.com

Event Description:

Great portraits capture the soul and spirit of your subject. This Special Event with celebrity portrait photographer Brian Smith will focus on ways of breaking down barriers and secrets of working quickly to capture the great portraits, whether you have minutes, hours, or days to get the shot. Brian will share the lessons he’s learned over the past 30 years as a top magazine portrait photographer capturing the faces of the famous, infamous and even the un-famous. He’ll break down the approach he uses on editorial, commercial and personal projects from concept to execution to post, on productions large and small. Simple choices in lighting can affect the mood of an image, so during this evening’s presentation, he will detail his problem-solving approach to lighting and how he customizes his lighting to a particular situation, using light to create bold iconic portraits on location. Brian will show you ways to remain fresh and passionate about your photography, and the evolutionary steps you can take to allow your personal style to evolve as you move your photography to the next level.

Special Event Sponsored by Adorama and Sony

Alison McCreery’s POP Photography Blog features a great piece on the role great story-telling photography may play in the Future of Publishing “Can Architecture Photography Save Publishing?” in this wonderful interview of Mark magazine’s award-winning graphic designer Thomas Miller and San Francisco architecture and interior photographer Joern Blohm.

It get’s me thinking: Can Each Photograph Save 1000 Words?

Photographs by Information Based Architecture for Mark magazine

Photographs by Iwan Baan/Courtesy of Vitra for Mark magazine

Photograph by Yong-kwan Kim for Mark magazine

Kudos to designer Thomas Miller, Mark magazine is truly a beautiful publication. Thanks to Rob Haggart of APhotoEditor.com for pointing out this great blog.

Please join all the major photography trade organizations by saying “NO” to the NYC Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting (MOFTB) plan to assess a $300 fee for film permit application processing. This is three hundred buck whether you’re doing a three month-long feature film with a crew of hundreds or a 15-minute still shoot with a crew of one.

For a feature film that’s nothing. But in a time that the magazine industry is particularly hard hit and everybody’s budgets are getting pared to the bone, it may me whether a shoot happens or not. This is a poorly conceived idea coming at the worst economic time and destined to place the heaviest burden on those who can least afford it. In short it’s a BAD idea.

All the major photography trade organizations: EP, ASMP, APA and NPPA will be at a hearing next Thursday, June 3 at 2PM at 125 Worth Street auditorium. If you are in the city that day, your attendance would be greatly appreciated!

If that’s not possible, please do the next best thing and sign the online petition saying “NO“!

Photographing People with Sony Artisan of Imagery Brian Smith this Saturday, May 15th in Dallas, Texas. Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Brian Smith has been photographing with the famous and infamous faces of celebrities for magazines and advertising for the past 25 years.

Ritz University Special Event
WHERE: Embassy Suites – DFW Airport North
2401 Bass Pro Drive, Grapevine, TX 76051
(972-724-2600)

Space is limited Sign up early!
Cost: $25 Per Person, Per Session
Visit any the Ritz/Wolf Camera & Image to register
No phone registrations – You must register in person.

Session one: Saturday, May 15, 2010 (10:00 AM – 1:00 PM)
THE CELEBRITY PORTRAIT: 15 MINUTES WITH FAME
Smith will share his favorite celebrity portraits and the stories behind them and he will discuss the importance that lighting, styling, hair & make-up and location play in adding production value in producing better environmental portraits that can make your work stand out. Smith will show how photography can give everyone their 15 minutes of fame whether they are famous or infamous globally or just famous in your world.

Session Two: Saturday, May 15, 2010 (3:00 PM – 6:00 PM)
PORTRAITS ON LOCATION: CAPTURING PERSONALITY AND PLACE
Great environmental portraits capture both personality and place. Brian photographs noteworthy and notorious celebrities in the locations where they live, work and play. Smith will show how he photographs subjects on location so that the environment adds another dimension to the shoot citing examples of how he approaches shooting on location whether it’s a large production shoot of a famous subject or simply the someone he runs into on the street while traveling. The seminar will discuss location lighting and tips on selecting the best location to add visual interest to your photographs.

Whether you are a professional photographer or just want to shoot like one, join us for either of both of these informative seminars.

The Creative Coalition will host an exclusive one-night-only sneak preview of my portraits of performing artists from the entertainment industry with an exhibit of the ‘Art & Soul’ project in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress on April 29th. ‘Art & Soul’ is the cornerstone of The Creative Coalition’s arts advocacy campaign to focus national attention on the need to secure federal funding and support for the arts.

Entertainment for the evening’s star-studded event will be The Creative Coalition’s one-night show by the same name, ‘Art & Soul’.  The show, written and produced by multiple Emmy Award-winning producer Tom Fontana (Oz, Homicide:  Life on Street) starring Co-Presidents of The Creative Coalition, Tim Daly (Private Practice) and Dana Delany (Desperate Housewives); directors Barry Levinson (Rain Man) and Spike Lee (Do The Right Thing); actors Adrian Grenier (Entourage), Omar Epps (House); Marlon Wayans (White Chicks, Scary Movie), Ashley Greene (Twilight), Cheryl Hines (Curb Your Enthusiasm); Steven Weber (Brothers & Sisters); Wendie Malick (Confessions of a Shopaholic, Just Shoot Me);  Richard Schiff (The West Wing), CCH Pounder (Avatar) and legendary news anchor Morley Safer (60 Minutes) among others to be announced.

The portraits of artists including Anne Hathaway, Samuel Jackson, Alyssa Milano, Zooey Deschanel, Tony Bennett and Kerry Washington are accompanied by handwritten personal testimonials from each individual, expressing the positive impact art has had on their lives which will appear in a book to be published by Filipacchi Publishing, the book division of HFM U.S. The exhibition is sponsored by Sony and Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. and it will showcase 20 photographs from the project printed by Duggal Visual Solutions.

“We are proud to enlist the members of The Creative Coalition to bring arts to the top of the American agenda,” said The Creative Coalition Executive Director Robin Bronk. “Art & Soul is The Creative Coalition’s initiative that brings together today’s greatest artistic voices and storytellers to illuminate the importance – to every American — of support for the arts and efficacy of arts in education.”

PDN’s 30 2010: Our Choice of New and Emerging Photographers to Watch

Thursday, April 15
Seminar: 6:30 – 8pm
Reception: 8 – 9pm
SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street
Free and open to the public

I’ll be appearing in a panel moderated by Holly Hughes, editor of Photo District News, with photographers chosen for the 2010 PDN’s 30 will offer their perspectives on getting started in the photo industry, how they go their first jobs and paid for their first promotional efforts, as well as what they learned in school and what they wish they had been taught. Panelists include three photographers from PDN’s 30: Adrian Mueller, Elizabeth Weinberg and Wayne Lawrence plus Men’s Health deputy photo director Jeanne Graves and Sony Artisan of Imagery Brian Smith.

Presented by the BFA Photography Department at SVA, Sony, Kodak and the ASMP.

I was just reading a PDN Pulse post about San Francisco photographer Ken Light.  Ken won a judgment in February against Al Gore’s cable TV network Current TV for unauthorized use of an image. But Current TV has appealed a small claims court award to Light of $500 plus $88 in court costs for unauthorized publication of a 1994 image of Texas death row inmate Cameron Todd Willingham.

Current TV downloaded the photograph off the New Yorker website and published Light’s portrait of Willingham on its website without permission, but is balking at paying up claiming news photographs are free to use under “fair use” which is not the case.

Al should know better. His wife Tipper was a news photographer for the Nashville Tennessean until he was elected to the Senate in 1976. Tipper definitely knows better. Tipper have a talk with your husband.

This is an inconvenient case. Pay up, Al.

The Copyright Action website details the ugly truth behind two possible changes to UK copyright laws. Going a step beyond the ugly-enough Orphan Works bill proposed in the U.S. last year, the British version essentially strips away rights of creators:

“The quaint notion that the author alone has prime and inalienable rights over his/her own work, must be able to restrict usage, negotiate a fee, prevent usage they consider immoral or distasteful, or assert their moral right to attribution, is about to pass into history. This is the biggest change in UK copyright law in 150 years. It also punches holes through the Berne agreement, international copyright law and TRIPS.”

Making bad news even worse, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is proposing a new code for personal information online that is a virtual ban on public photography which ONLY applies to professional photographers:

“Mindful of the damage this would do to tourism and how much it would piss off Joe Public to be told he can’t use his cameraphone in the street to make humiliating snaps of his drunk mates for Facebook (and quite possibly subsequent orphan use by Rupert Murdoch), ICO have decided that this lunacy shall only apply to pro photographers, a small enough constituency to castrate with impunity.”

Worst Bills Ever!

Maria Piscopo interviewed me along with my friends  Brian Smale, Robbie McClaran and Shawn G. Henry about changes in the editorial photography market for her piece ‘The Business Of Editorial Photography: Telling A Story With Images” in the January 2010 Shutterbug Magazine. 

I’ll be speaking about the Future of Editorial Photography to students at Brigham Young University on January 20th.

The lecture is free and is open to any professional photographers in the area.

The Future of Editorial Photography
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
Time: 7:00PM
Location: Room 3108 JKB (Jesse Knight Building) Brigham Young University, Provo Utah

Seminar Topics:

• How to get and keep the attention of photo editors and art directors at top magazines
• How production value can make your work stand out
• How to charge properly for digital processing
• What are the best things you can do in a slow economy
• How to maximize re-licensing, syndication and reprint revenue
• How will the shift to online content will affect rates
• What you should know about editorial that nobody told you

Editorial Photography is undergoing rapid change, yet the death of magazine photography has been greatly exaggerated. Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Brian Smith, President of Editorial Photographers, will discuss how to maximize the creative and commercial rewards while avoiding bad contracts, stagnant rates and rights-gobbling appetites of multinational media corporations.

Thanks for generous support provided by: