Monte Zucker M.Photog.Cr., Hon.M.Photog., API, F-ASP (born on September 1, 1929, died March 15, 2007) was an American photographer. He specialized in wedding photography, entering it as a profession in 1947. In the 1970s he operated a studio in Silver Spring, Maryland. Later he lived in Florida.
He was Brides Magazine's Wedding Photographer of the Year for 1990 and United Nations Photographer of the Year for 2002, and one of Canon's "Explorers of Light". Additionally, he was a prolific author and teacher, with monthly columns in magazines such as Shutterbug. Several manufacturers made equipment bearing his name, most notably Westcott's "Monte Reflector" and ALM's "Monte Zucker Pneumatic Posing Stool".
Unlike many photographers of his generation, he readily embraced new technology, particularly digital photography and Adobe Photoshop, featuring digital techniques in his columns right up until the end of his life, and relating them to earlier methods. He did a series of traveling workshops taught by himself and Eddie Tapp, who covered Photoshop techniques.
Quotations
He noted in one column that one of his maxims was "See the finished picture before you even snap the shutter!", repeated at each of three training seminars attended by, amongst others, British photographer Barney Douglas, in the United Kingdom in the late 1980s, but at the same time he stated of a digitally retouched image, "Did I have this in mind when I first created the image? Yes and no. I wanted to create something artistic, something special. Did I know how I was going to do it? Not really."
"If you like the way it looks, go with it! I liked it and I did it! Of course, it takes a lot of experience to develop good taste. When one is just starting out it's easy to like something without knowing if it's really good or not. That works some of the time, but an educated opinion usually works better."
Early career
Monte Zucker started doing photography in high school in Washington, D.C., shooting for friends who remained loyal clients over the years as they became successful and affluent professionals and businessmen. By the early 1970s he had specialized in wedding photography, working almost exclusively for the most affluent members of the Jewish community in the Washington, D.C. area, primarily shooting weddings and bar mitzvahs.
Innovator
In the 1960s most formal portraits were taken with large cumbersome pack and head flash units, with wedding reception "candid" photos taken with a single flash on camera and dimensionally flat lighting.
What set Monte's work apart from his peers was the innovative use of daylight from a north-facing window and a reflector for his formal posed portraits using backgrounds he had hand-painted on linen roll-up window shades to mimic the look of Old Master painters. He cleverly marketed this style as an "Old Master Style" which appealed to his niche market.
By the late 1960s color had started replacing black and white for shooting weddings, and electronic flash guns replaced flash bulbs. A technical shortcoming of color was a much shorter range on the prints which could not reproduce the full range of detail in a photograph containing a bride in white dress standing with the groom in a black suit when a single flash on camera was used. Familiar with conventional studio lighting, thanks in part to training with New Jersey photographer Joe Zeltsman, Monte understood that the solution to the shorter range film was to control the range of the scene with two lights; one off camera for modeling (key light), over a foundation of even centered light (fill) to control the tone of the shadows. With the invention of the photo-cell trigger which allowed wireless firing of the off-camera "key" flash, Monte utilized the technology to create studio-like lighting "on the fly" at wedding receptions using two identical direct flash units, one mounted over the camera as fill to control the shadow tone and a second optically triggered key light for 3D modeling which he mounted on a rolling converted medical IV stand, a clever solution to the logistics of working with the off-camera light.
The difference in the realism of the photos both in tonal range and 3D modeling that dual-flash candid shooting provided revolutionized wedding photography and created a new career for Monte teaching others how to duplicate his style.