Bruce Thorson spent 25 years in newspaper photojournalism as a photographer, photo editor, mostly in Oregon, and director of photography at the St. Paul (Minn) Pioneer Press. An award-winning photographer, Thorson has received recognition from the Associated Press, The Best of the West competition and the National Press Photographers Association. His photographs have also appeared in Sports Illustrated, People Magazine, USA Today, Oregon Business, Nebraska Life and various other publications.
Thorson teaches photojournalism - basic digital photojournalism, advanced digital photojournalism and in-depth photojournalism projects, taking students on domestic and international documentary projects. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Oregon and a master's degree in visual communications from Ohio University.
Outside of his teaching duties, Thorson continues to stay active as a photographer working as a contract photographer for US PRESSWIRE, a sports newswire picture agency supplying his sports photographs to editorial outlets around the world.
Including sports photography, Thorson enjoys documentary photography of people, their culture, their relationship to the environment and the social impact on their lives. In the world of news photography often comes tragedy and disaster; in the world of documentary photography often comes the joy of life and living, traditions and rituals, rites of passage and celebrations.
Early in his career as a photo lab technician at the Eugene Register-Guard, Thorson was mentored by Brian Lanker, a Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist and a two-time winner of the prestigious NPPA Photographer of the Year award.
Thorson's teaching philosophy is that if you can shoot sports, you can shoot anything. You don't have to become a sports photographer, but it gives you the ability to anticipate the moment, react to the moment, use light effectively and understand action, reaction and emotion.
Bruce participated in the August 2012 MediaStorm Methodology Workshop. He had the following to say about his experience:
The MediaStorm methodology workshop is all about high-quality storytelling. I already had a certain level of proficiency with audio, video, still images and putting it together into a multimedia story. This workshop showed me how to take those skills to a higher level. I teach at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the students will benefit from what I have learned. It will help them produce multimedia stories that will get them jobs; it also will help them become entrepreneurial photojournalists, who will know how to self-publish.
Brian Storm is brilliant and so is his staff. Together, they provided all the workshop participants with terrific information from leading with sound to developing a character, from connecting with an audience to developing a company, from story project specifics to workshops and training, from post production to editing by subtraction to client models and much more. But most importantly, as Storm says, it’s ultimately about how to be great every day. Anyone wanting to take his or her multimedia storytelling production to a higher level needs to attend this workshop.