Featured Artist: Omar Ramos


Current artist feature by Omar Ramos

"I received a call from the creative department of Mutual Omaha Insurance. Really nothing out of the ordinary. I was clearly thinking that they wanted me to do headshots which is my main calling card. The surprise was they wanted me to photograph The Dallas Cowboy’s Hall of Famer #22 the NFL’s all time leading rusher Mr. Emmitt Smith!

Now I’ve been a Dallas Cowboy Fan from the days of Tony Dorsett and Roger Staubach so I was immediately floored about my assignment. Experience has told me never to do anything dramatically different when hired to photograph celebrities and athletes. The main reason you are hired is because they have already seen your work either on social media or your website.

I have been using Cheetahstand modifiers for over ten years and have come to rely on their color consistency, even light output and travel durability. Paired with my Speedotron 2403CX studio lighting packs I am pretty much ready for anything.

For Emmitt I used two of my favorite modifiers to create the clean image look that
Mutual Omaha’s creative team requested. The 65” DP65 White Deep Umbrella is easily
my signature modifier for all my commercial and editorial work that I do. It provides such
a clean wrapping light that I can shape to create immensely detailed portraits.

For our main backdrop images we had one 65” DP65 umbrella with a 65" diffuser on top of our subject and another to camera left for our key light. For Emmitt’s gray backdrop photos we only used one “65 DP65 on a Cheetahstand C10 light stand with a silver 32” reflector to our subject’s right."