George Finkbohner for Business Alabama Magazine
Posted under: In June I was very excited when I received a call from the art director, Marie Katz, of Business Alabama Magazine to shoot the cover photo for their August issue. They adhere to a certain consistent style, very shallow depth of field, when it comes to their covers. More on how I shot this image below.
My subject was George ‘Skip’ Finkbohner, an attorney in Mobile, AL who went to trial and received a $192 million dollar jury verdict. Skip was a great guy to work with and was very receptive to direction.
Alternate shot for cover that was also used with the story.
When I am outside, I am usually trying to over power the sun. So this shoot presented a fun challenge for me. How can I shoot outside early in the morning with a strobe and still get that shallow DOF they were looking for, thus giving them their style meshed with mine? Well, luckily for me, the Canon 7D, plus a Pocket Wizard Mini TT1 syncs at 1/500s with an Einstein 640 strobe equipped with a Pocket Wizard MC2 receiver (that was a mouthful). So the 1/500s allowed me to get the outside ambient down to exposing the background at f/2.2 (Canon EF 50mm 1:1.4 lens) while my subject was standing in shade. He was under exposed so that is where the super low output power of the Einstein 640 came in with a medium octa softbox. Everybody wins, they get the shallow DOF and I get to use a light outside because, well, just because I can. An ND filter would have helped but I don’t carry one around because I am not typically shooting shallow with strobe outside with bright sunlight.