While shooting album covers and magazine layouts for numerous groups – The Rolling Stones, The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, The Doors, Simon & Garfunkel among many others – he also photographed film legends like Rita Hayworth, Dean Martin, and Natalie Wood.
As the primary celebrity photographer for dozens of magazines worldwide, Webster captured entertainers including Igor Stravinsky, Barbra Streisand, Jack Nicholson and American presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
[9] His passion for photography was matched by his love of Italian motorcycles; his personal collection of bikes considered among the world's finest.
His younger brother, Mona Roger Webster, is a conceptual artist, real estate investor, and long time resident of Venice, California.
He attended Beverly Hills High School, with the expectation that upon graduation he would follow his father's admonition to enroll at Yale University and pursue a stable career in finance.
A childhood friend and Beverly Hills neighbor, Terry Melcher, son of Doris Day, was a record producer in the burgeoning music industry.
Record distributors found it distasteful and threatened to pull it; it was Adler's idea to slap a sticker on it, playing into the notoriety but also making it palatable for family-friendly stores to stock.
He shot Bob Dylan’s legendary 1965 press conference at Columbia Records studio on Sunset Blvd; he framed Simon & Garfunkel in L.A.’s Franklin Canyon Park for the cover of their iconic Sounds of Silence album.
In December, 1965, and again in March, 1966, Webster corralled The Rolling Stones for two photo sessions which resulted in the covers for Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) and the world-wide (except the United States) album Aftermath.
[12] He was present at the Monterey International Pop Festival; his pictures of Laura Nyro, Janis Joplin and The Who captured their era-defining stature.
He stayed there for the next few years, overseeing a golden age in album art work, as listeners became as enamored with the record sleeves as much as the music.
He would on occasion accept an assignment to shoot actors on location – Jack Nicholson, Sean Connery, Jeff Bridges, John Belushi among them.
Befitting his wide-ranging interests, subjects for his photo shoots expanded into the realm of the other fine arts: writers Ray Bradbury, Truman Capote, classical giants Igor Stravinsky and Zubin Mehta submitted to the Webster treatment.
It was during this period that Webster joined Leonard Koren, founder of Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, as president and chief photographer.