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Mpls Photo Center Instructors

Tom Arndt, Film, Darkroom & Documentary Instructor

Tom has persistently chronicled everyday life in Minnesota since the early 1970s. His straightforward and insightful black-and-white images reflect the state geographically, emotionally, and spiritually. Arndt is Minnesota's leading documentary photographer of the last 35 years. The exhibition includes 75 photographs from the MIA's permanent collection and from the artist. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition. Tom holds a monthly Wednesday F-Stop group meeting, at the Center, fostering community and peer review.

Steve Bye, Adobe Certified Instructor

Steve teaches Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and Fine Art Printing classes. His strength as a teacher is in making difficult concepts easy to understand, a skill learned while at Hewlett-Packard as a trainer, engineer and manager.

Kyle Camerer, Studio Lighting Instructor

Kyle Camerer has taught Editorial and Fashion Studio Lighting at the Mpls Photo Center for almost three years. In that time Kyle's imparted his professional knowledge to over 200 students with studio and location lighting techniques in the Center’s Lighting Lab where classes are held. He primarily teaches digital photographers skills they need to light subjects in the studio and on location where unique lighting is required or natural light is unavailable.

Chris Faust, Project Instructor

Chris is best known for his panoramic photographs of landscapes. From 1990 to 1996 he created a series of black-and-white images of new suburban development, especially in Minnesota, USA. Many of these depict new structures and spaces not yet fully-formed, and not yet inhabited by people. A frequent theme in these and other series is the intersection of human beings with nature, and places where the two interact in visually provocative ways. An example is "The Edge, Eden Prairie, MN" which is in the collection of the Walker Art Center.

Aaron Fenster, Darkroom and Digital Lab Instructor

Aaron Fenster is a self-taught photographer living and working in Minneapolis. He graduated from UW-Madison in 2005 and since then has focused countless hours on his photographic pursuits. Having learned the principles of photography using digital cameras, Aaron has spent the past year exploring the beautiful world of film and the darkroom. The Minneapolis Photo Center has been a photographic home to Aaron for the past three years.

Jana Freiband, Travel & Nature Photographer

Jana Freiband has been creatively involved in photography, as an artist, teacher, editorial contributor for newspapers, magazines, print, and art exhibitions. Photographing nature and the landscape has been an ongoing project, at home in Minnesota and through international travels.

Carlos Gonzales, Portfolio - Sports

Carlos Gonzalez has worked as a staff photographer at The Star Tribune for over a decade. He has covered a variety of sports venues ranging from prep school and college events to the Summer and Winter Olympics and the NFL, MLB, NHL, and NBA. His work has been published in numerous newspapers, magazines, as well as the America 24/7 book project. His magazine credits include Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report, Rolling Stone, National Geographic World, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and Sporting News.

Lacey Prpic Hedtke

Lacey has a BFA in Photography from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, where she found her place in the history of photography, squarely in the 19th century. She writes and reviews for Art Review and Preview! Newspaper, l'etoile Magazine, Library Journal, LIBREAS Library Ideas, and Art Libraries Society of North America Reviews.

Curtis Juliber, HDR Photo Imaging

New York City native Curtis Juliber previously worked for 16 years at Apple Computer in various sales and marketing roles, working with many Twin Cities's ad agencies and publishing organizations. He has an MBA from Minnesota State University and a BSE from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Curtis has been working with digital images since 1994 and is always investigating software technologies to enhance his digital darkroom.

Layne Kennedy, Editorial Instructor

Layne Kennedy's photography covers a wide range of subject matter and locations. Specializing in magazine feature assignments, his work has appeared in over a hundred different magazines world-wide on subjects as diverse as Wolves in the Northern Hemisphere to boat builders in the Caribbean. His strong sense of abstract design, combined with journalistic story telling imagery, makes him a favorite among picture editors. Clients include: National Geographic Society, Life, Fortune, Business Week, Audubon, Sports Illustrated, Outside, Newsweek, Smithsonian, Nikon and Forbes. Layne's image collection is represented by CORBIS.

Scott Knutson, Food, Product & iPhone

Scott Knutson is a principal owner of InsideOut Studios. He's a 25 year veteran of commercial photography both within the corporate world as well as on his own. He also has spent time as a creative director, and as a video producer/director. He specializes in Food and People photography and splits his time between the studio and working on location. Away from the studio, he and his wife manage their team of 5 college kids and escape whenever possible to travel, stay in B&Bs and explore new restaurants.

Peter Latner, Film & Darkroom Instructor

Peter Latner has been a photographer and teacher for more than 30 years. His photographs, devoted mostly to the cultural and geographic face of the American Midwest, stem from long-standing interests in American history, geography, landscape and sense of place. He is the recipient of three McKnight Photography Fellowships, three artist grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and a Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship. His photographs have been exhibited widely and are in many public and private collections.

Rich Ryan , Strobist-Portable Strobes

Rich's career has spanned from staff newspaper photographer to location photographer for trade journals, corporations and non profits. Along with his current location assignments, Rich is a adjunct professor at Ai Minnesota, where he teaches Location and Editorial Photography. Other than having his worked used to wrap fish, his images have been featured in Graphis (International journal of visual communication). Rich has a personable easy going style.

Richard Sennott, Documentary Instructor

Richard Sennott has been a photographer at the Minneapolis Star Tribune since 1987. His assignments have taken him into conflicts in Bosnia, El Salvador, Iraq and the West Bank, as well as to historic events in the Midwest. Sennott's artful independent documentary work has earned him two McKnight Photography Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His work has been published in Life, Newsweek, Time Magazine, the New York Times and the National Geographic Traveler.

Emily Steffen, Wedding Photography Instructor

Emily is a wedding photographer with a passion for living her life conquering her dreams and goals! She has built her business around her style and uses that to create an online media market for attracting brides year after year. Her easy going personality and romantic wedding images are what make her one of the most sought after wedding photographers in the Twin Cities area. She has been published on the ever so popular nationally known wedding blogs Style Me Pretty and The Wedding Chicks along with features in MN and WI Bride locally.

Chris Welsch, Documentary Instructor

Chris Welsch's award-winning photos and stories have taken readers from the steps of Mongolia to the Badlands of North Dakota. His writing and photography have won seven gold medals in the annual Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition. His work has been published in more than 50 daily papers and National Geographic Adventure. From 1987 to 2008, Welsch was an editor, writer and photographer at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In 2008, Welsch was awarded a one-year Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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