I had the opportunity to shoot Columbus’ #1 plastic surgeon for a marketing campaign. I had never done a shoot like this…. I am used to stressed out women in white dresses… not doctors in scrubs. After scrubbing in (which I was not expecting), I put on my little booties and set up the lights. I took my nice studio lights… but ended up just using the modeling lights for some of the shots… too much power coming out of the D4 pack. When I was using the strobes, I was shooting at f/8 and this is the look I got….

This puts everything in focus, which is fine. Looks like the way your eye would see it. But, I like the look you get with a shallow depth of field…. so thats when I went to using just the light from the modeling lights. Shot at f/1.2 on my 50mm…. and this is what you get….

All the focus goes to his eyes, and makes him very personable, which is good for a doctor trying to get some business. The background becomes a lot less distracting, while all along still screaming ‘operating room.’ I used another one of those big operating lights that you see in the top right to shoot some light onto the wall in the background. This really helps because if that light was not there, his head would sort of melt into the background as it goes to black.