The year is 1987 and I’ve just taken over as president of Hasselblad USA after being with Polaroid for over 17 years.  Hasselblad was just in the process of kicking off a workshop series with a young commercial photographer I’d never heard of, Dean Collins. I had spent virtually all of my Polaroid career, at [...]

WARNING:  It’s a Monday morning rant…
I accept that we live in an instant gratification world. I accept that Twitter has changed the way we spell. I’ll even accept the gr8 words U can cre8 to cram a full paragraph of thought in2 140 characters.
However, what I refuse to give up is my belief that nothing [...]

Last week good buddy, Michael Corsentino, was in Orlando visiting his mother.  We decided to get together and spend some time just hanging out. He drove over from Orlando.  Sheila, Michael and I had dinner together and then he and I proceeded to get into a marathon conversation about photography.

New photographers don’t realize how small [...]

Every year Summer School gets a little better thanks to the feedback in the survey we do a week or two after the program ends. After last year’s school we heard requests for more hands-on shooting, more marketing and business and several suggestions to make the program more centrally located. Well, we’ve managed to do [...]

 I found a great quote from Andy Warhol that got me thinking…
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
Whether you’re just starting out as a professional photographer or aspiring to be one, there’s very little that happens in this industry by itself. You’ve got to be proactive and you’ve [...]

We know time is your most valuable commodity and there’s never enough of it.  So in putting together this year’s program we took the key points from everyone’s feedback following last year, and built a new Skip’s Summer School!The three top requests from our 2011 post-program survey were more hands-on training, more marketing/business and a more central location. 
There [...]

I woke up this morning with every intent of a post about the tricks many photographers use to get natural expressions, but my first stop every morning is email. There was a sad email from good buddy, Tony Corbell, about a mutual friend, Jonathan Exley, who recently passed away.
Tony was much closer to Jonathan than I was, [...]

One of the chapters Tony and I share in our careers is working together at Hasselblad. I hired Tony out of Brooks Institute to come to New Jersey as the first Dean of Education for Hasselblad University.  I still consider talking Tony into giving up his view of the Ocean and mountain side in Santa Barbara for [...]

With the post yesterday about Dean Collins, you can’t really talk about teaching lighting today without Tony Corbell’s name coming up. Tony and Dean worked together for years. Thanks to Profoto, there’s a lot of great material out there, starting with two videos I decided to stack as part of today’s post. They feature Tony [...]

After every convention, workshop or trade show you attend everyone is always left with a level of optimism and energy to make changes in their technique, marketing, management style and grow their business. But, there’s always the challenge of getting sucked back into your daily routine and within a few days your energy and spirit [...]