Two of the five most talked-about cigars of the year have something to do with the person you see below. Robert Caldwell has quickly grown from the guy who provided high-end hotels and restaurants in Miami with cigars to someone who runs one of the fastest growing cigar brands of recent memory. After establishing Hotel Humidor, Caldwell teamed up with Christian Eiroa for the Wynwood Cigars brand, a project he departed from in 2013. Since then, he’s launched another company of his own, the innovative and sometimes controversial Lost&Found project, and is the only brand to have cigars made by both Drew Estate and Ernesto Perez-Carrillo Jr. From his entrance into the larger cigar scent in 2012 until now, he’s earned a reputation for using his shirt buttons as more of a suggestion, a trademark not captured in the photograph below.

This portrait was taken with a Canon 5D MkIII and a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens set to f/2.8 and 1/125 of a second. The ISO was set at 250, and it was taken in open sun on a cloudy day with filtered sunlight being the only light source. The photograph was converted from RAW in Photoshop CC and converted into black and white using custom actions.

The bio for this post was written by Charlie Minato, the photograph and photography notes are all produced by Brooks Whittington.

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Brooks Whittington

I have been smoking cigars for over eight years. A documentary wedding photographer by trade, I spent seven years as a photojournalist for the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star Telegram. I started the cigar blog SmokingStogie in 2008 after realizing that there was a need for a cigar blog with better photographs and more in-depth information about each release. SmokingStogie quickly became one of the more influential cigar blogs on the internet, known for reviewing preproduction, prerelease, rare, extremely hard-to-find and expensive cigars. I am a co-founder of halfwheel and now serve as an editor for halfwheel.