30 Actor Headshots

Hot on the heels of my shoot with Emma, I was assigned to shoot headshots for the Santa Monica Players local theatre group who were putting on a production of the wedding singer. The complicated part of it was, that I needed to do 30 head shots in just under 2 hours.

For those people that are thinking don't school photographers do that all the time? Well yes they do, but a school mugshot photograph is much different to and actor head shot. The actor head shot needs to show the subject in good light (somewhat glamourous) at the same time as being true to how they really look. Looking at a lot of actor head shots beforehand I was thinking as they are part of a theatre group and they were going to be showing these photos in the programmes along with on the boards outside of the auditorium (for potential talent scouts), I decided that we needed to have something consistent, and that meant the lighting had to work for every type of face.

I was told that I'd be able to shoot at a rehearsal session so I was hoping there was going to be enough space to set up a makeshift studio. Basically I have a couple of lightstands with Manfrotto Superclamps attached to the top and my boom arm running across the top with a king sized white bedsheet clipped to it, sounds a bit ghetto right? well to be honest a lot of the time I'll use a blank wall or a projector screen, whatever I can find to get the same sort of look.

Luckily when I get there, they've got a separate room that I can set up in and take the shots whilst the rehearsal was going on in another place. There was plenty of space as well so I could go for a big set up. I recently picked up an absolutely huge light stand which I wanted to use with my boom... wait didn't I just say I was going to use that for the background? yes I did... bugger! Well I solved this by using another light stand as the cross bar for the background, all hail the superclamp!

There are two other main pieces of equipment that I used for this shoot, the Lastolite Triflector 2 (which is an expensive bit of kit but it's awesome) and my photek softlighter 2 (which is like a giant brolly octabox type thing but gives really amazing light). I boomed the softlighter overhead and used the triflector as a fill in front of the models and this set up gives a very nice light for portraits.

You can see the set up I was using below for the group shots at the end. The only difference for the head shots was that there were two flashes on the background on each side and just the photek was used not the umbrella as well.

Basically once the light was set up I didn't have to worry about changing it a lot, a slight tweak here and there for a couple of people but all in all the settings remained the same. This allowed me to concentrate on the actors and getting the right expression from them for the shot. You'd actually be surprised how uncomfortable actors are in front of a camera that takes stills as they're used to moving around, sometimes it's better to just let them do that and shoot.

I've created a contact sheet of all the headshots which you can see larger on my flickr page by clicking on the image.

I'll be down at their production of the wedding singer (June 15-18th) and from what I saw at the rehearsal it would be well worth getting tickets from their website www.smptheatre.co.uk