The next meeting of the Advanced Photography SIG on Thursday, September 24 will feature Austin-based commercial photographer and author Kirk Tuck. The meeting will be held at the Parish Hall of the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection located at 2200 Justin Lane from 6:30-8:30pm.

Kirk Tuck is part zany advertising photographer, part serious writer and part photonic engineer. His assistants bemoan that fact that he rarely shoots the same way twice in a row, even for the same clients, changes camera and lighting systems more often that most people change underwear and absolutely loves figuring out how to light and shoot things differently. His photographer friends credit his success to “dumb luck”. Case in point: He decided to shoot a CEO portrait with small battery operated flashes, on location, on a tight deadline. Miraculously it worked. So he wrote a web post about it for David Hobby at Strobist.com. A magazine got wind of the post and asked Tuck to flesh it out into an article which then ran both in print and on the Cygnus Publishing website where the publisher of Amherst Media happened to see it and, impressed with the writing more than the photos, asked Tuck to write a book on the subject (Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography) which hit #19 of all books on Amazon.com which led to immediate contracts for three more books.

His latest boook, Commercial Photography Handbook: Business Techniques for Professional Digital Photographers, has just been released.

We think he’s going to talk about the future of the business, where photography is headed, where it’s been and maybe tell some funny stories about screwing up work and having a few successes. We don’t think he’ll be talking about HDRi (which he thinks is the “tube top” of photography) or large format film or microstock (which he is convinced is the work of the devil…). We’re pretty sure you’ll be either interested, laughing hysterically or really pissed off by the end.

Ask him about photographing highways……and his experience with Snow Leopard.

You can visit Kirk’s website at KirkTuck.com and can purchase his books on Amazon.