Lubetkin Communications' Corporate Photojournalism Division Scores Two Magazine Covers in Three Months

I have to toot our horn a bit here. I've been making photographs for news organizations and corporate clients going all the way back to my work as photo editor of the Christian Brothers Academy yearbook Pegasus in 1974. (Aside: w00t! CBA has an entry in Wikipedia!)

My dad, Murray Lubetkin, was a professional photographer. He taught it at the Central Institute of Photography in Newark, and later at the Photo Division at Fort Monmouth.

He taught me photography back when light meters were optional equipment on Minolta SLRs (I still have his Minolta SR-1 with the little bracket where the add-on light meter is supposed to sit.) For years, I thought the Rule of F-16 was the only way to figure out exposure.

We spent many happy hours photographing fall leaves together, and he was always especially proud that we used one of his autumn leaf photos in that 1974 yearbook -- with the only photo credit line in the entire book (I insisted on it.) One of his particular photographic obsessions was light reflected through displays of colored glass objects in retail stores, and I confess to trying to repeat some of his work there.

Anyway, he fueled my enthusiasm for photography. Later, I managed to irritate the photographers at the newspaper I worked at by being one of the only reporters who could take his own picture (and I got more than a few spot news photos of fires and car crashes in the paper). Later, as a corporate PR minion, many of the pictures I made for Conrail appeared in newspapers around the country, and a night photo I took of the railroad industry's first "just-in-time" train, KZLA, from Kalamazoo to Lansing for General Motors, made not only the cover of Progressive Railroading, but also was used to illustrate a William Greider article in Rolling Stone.

Well, it's been more than 20 years since that photo made the cover. During the final 10 years of my corporate PR career, I relearned photography in the digital world, and produced publishable photos of news value for Standard & Poor's and the three banks where I sat for five years.

In recent months, I've been very thrilled that our corporate photojournalism is still delivering high impact imagery for business publications.

Photographic assignments we took on for SBN Publications have landed our work on the cover of the October and December issues of Smart Business Magazine's Philadelphia edition.

October 2007 Smart Business Cover Photo of Judy Spires, President of Acme Markets	December 2007 cover photo of John Grierson, president of Delaware Valley Division of Pulte Homes

Any shooter will tell you that getting covers like this just inspires them to do more, and do better, and it definitely perks me up and reinvigorates my desire to produce great quality photojournalism that will make my clients happy.