Portraits: Luis Falto

There aren’t a whole lot of people that entered the cigar business in 1995 that are still around. It’s not that 20 years in the cigar business is impossible, rather, there were so many people trending the cigar business in the mid-1990s thanks to the cigar boom, most of who had little chance of surviving. Luis Falto is one of them. In February 1995 he went to La Aurora to see if the Dominican’s oldest cigar company would make cigars for him in small batches—20 years later, his Falto cigars are still being made at La Aurora.

While there are actually a lot of different blends, particularly because each vitola within a line is blended differently, it’s a relatively small amount of production annually, with some regular production items limited to 4,000 cigars per year.

This portrait was taken in Dallas, Texas using a Canon 5D Mark III and a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens set at f/11. The shutter speed was 1/125 second at ISO 100. There were two sources of light: a flash on a stand to the right of Falto and natural light from the sun that was directly behind him. The photograph was color corrected in Adobe Lightroom and adjusted for color, contrast and sharpness using custom actions in Photoshop CC.

The biographical info was written by Charlie Minato, the photograph was taken by Brooks Whittington, who wrote the photo details.