How I take headshots. Behind the scenes.
I’ve always enjoyed taking photos of people and now have really fallen in love with taking photographs with purpose. I found myself photographing a few actors some time ago and the idea that a headshot I took could land somebody a role that they were born for makes me excited and brings me motivation to keep excelling at what I do - creating images that take your career further.
This blog post is here to walk you through my simple process and just to show you a few moments from behind the scenes.
Setup
In the clips above you can see me setting the equipment up. I love studio lighting as it gives me the most control over where the light falls. Ideally, I choose a room that can be completely blacked out, however, a partially dark room works just fine. I use constant light sources and not a flash as I can use these lights for both photography and filmmaking, and it helps when filming timelapses as there’s no flashing! :-)
During the shoot, I aim to produce a couple of different looks. This can be done by changing the outfit, lighting as well as the change of background colour.
I often find myself choosing neutral colours for the background as they really help the subject to stand out.
However, headshots can be created for different purposes and therefore experimenting with colour can work really well too.
Photoshoot
There are a couple of things that I ask my clients to think about before shooting and here’s a list:
What is the purpose of the shot?
What sort of look/mood would you like to go for? Serious/neutral or uplifting?
Types of outfits - bring a few. Ordinarily, plain colours work best, but it is best to have a few options on the day.
Once the client is on set, we go through these points and decide together what the shoot is going to look like.
Retouching
My approach to retouching is that anything that would be gone in a couple of days can be removed. Same applies to small distractions, such as accidental shadows or flyaway hairs. I spend quite a bit of time retouching but only to produce a natural and most realistic looking photograph.
