Popular Photography Magazine

Photo: PORNCHAI KITTIWONGSAKUL/AFP/Getty Images In case you missed it, yesterday was Valentine’s Day, one of those holidays that either reminds you of how lucky you are, or makes you want to hit yourself over the head with a 300mm lens. For all of you out there feeling the later, this goes out to you.

What’s at the core of your work? We are not selling a product, we’re selling an emotion, so we have to capture emotion in a way that anyone can identify with. It’s not as easy as it sounds. We can’t always show faces because someone may not want to buy a greeting card with someone else’s mug on it. We’re always thinking about how we can communicate in a clever way and reinvent the standard, clichéd, greeting-card look. What’s your biggest challenge?

Creating a strong portrait of an executive is a daunting task. Business magazine photographers often have only a few minutes with their subjects, so most shots are scouted and planned in advance. And when a portrait needs to convey authority and power, funky poses won’t do. Yet despite these limitations, magazine photographer Brad Trent finds a little spontaneity and adds a dash of drama by pulling back the curtain, and the camera, to reveal the wizardry of his set, including his lighting tools.

Canon has been known to announce the development of new lenses well before they hit the market and their latest tease comes in the form of a very interesting pro-super-telephoto lens. The EF 200-400mm f/4 IS USM extender looks a lot like the rest of Canon's beige pro lenses. But, it has an integrated 1.4x extender that can be turned on and off. That means it can be both a 200-400mm and 280-560mm lens in one body.