"[citation needed] 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.
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.
Technically it gave them a three-dimensional quality and full rich tonal range that the work of his contemporaries lacked, but more importantly his photographs always flattered the subjects, even in something as mundane as a group shot of guests.
When combined with the other window and dual flash photos in the leather-bound album, the finished product had the polished look of a Hollywood movie.
Not needing a "brick and mortar" studio allowed him to work for many years out of his Silver Spring home with just a reception area and room for meeting clients which lowered his overhead.
Monte's teaching style was based on the idea of keeping the technical side of wedding photography simple to the point of being instinctive and effortless, allowing the photographer to focus 100% of their attention on interaction with the clients and putting them at ease.
With that simple-to-grasp technique it was possible to capture every shot at a wedding reception with stunning 3D and perfectly controlled ratios and exposure as instinctively as focusing the camera.
Devising similar easy to learn "1-2-3" techniques for posing people and finding the most flattering facial angles allowed Mr. Zucker to effectively teach complex topics like lighting and posing at large venues like a PPofA National convention to an audience of hundreds in a way they could later go home and duplicate successfully.
That made him very popular as a speaker and instructor but also opened him up to criticism by some as having a rigid, non-creative, rule-based "paint by numbers" or "cookie-cutter" approach.
He embraced both with the same enthusiasm and lack of creative restraints he had as a teenager discovering photography for the first time, and shared his experiences with others via Zuga.net, a website collaboration with a former full-time assistant Gary Bernstein who had struck out on his own in 1972 and become a recognized fashion and celebrity photographer and author.
His "retirement" was short-lived, and up to the time of his death he remained a popular speaker and teacher, sharing his enthusiasm for the new digital capture and editing medium without the creative restraint of the conventional style of portraiture and wedding coverage which had made him a renowned photographer who was universally recognized by just his first name.
Unusually for a photography magazine columnist, Zucker mentioned aspects of his personal life in his columns, including his diagnosis of terminal cancer.
Survivors include two daughters, Tammi Zucker Thurm of Greensboro, N.C., and Sherri Heller of Sacramento, CA; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.