A few months ago I had the pleasure of photographing Mohammed El-Erian for the cover of Futures Magazine. El-Erian is currently the CEO of PIMCO, one of the world’s largest bond investment management firms (with a portfolio of over $1.35 trillion in assets).

Driving down to New Port Beach at 5:00 in the morning, I knew that I wouldn’t have much time with him. My assistant and I got down there by 6:00 (the sun was still barley up), we were set for the shoot by 7:00 and by 7:20 we were already packing up to leave.

While Mohamed was a relatively nice guy with a good sense of humor, it’s always a rough way to start off a shoot when your celebrity talent says “I hate photo shoots. You have no more than 20 minutes of my time, so let’s hurry up and get this over with.” Needless to say, we quickly zoomed thru our 4 lighting setups and Mohamed was pleased at how “painless” our shoot was. His personal assistant even told me later that week the he actually liked the way he looked in our photographs!

Now, if I can only figure out how to focus in on just a tiny piece of that PIMCO bond portfolio…