Creating different looks in your acting headshots
and how easy (and how hard) it is
Because humans are good at gathering information quickly about each other, it doesn’t take much to create the impression of a different character.
• The most important difference that hair, clothes, and lighting can make is the change they make in the inner life of the actor. This is the real difference between looks.
Studio lighting is, in my opinion, much better at making this change happen than natural lighting is.
This is why I only use studio lighting in your headshots, constructing the design from scratch for each look.
There’s often some disagreement about what constitutes a “look” for the sake of acting headshots in Los Angeles.
To me, the definition is pretty simple. A look doesn’t have to do with the shirt you’re wearing, or whether you have glasses on or off. It has to do with with whether the photograph is of a different person.
Some LA headshot photographers will have their actors put on fairly elaborate outfits to get those characters across. And given this, it might seem that cropping as tightly as I do around the actor’s head might actually make it harder to communicate the differences between looks.
However, by the bottom of this page I hope to have convinced you of two things.
(1) Humans are smart, and one of the things we’re smartest at (for better or worse) is coming to fast conclusions about other people. In California (and a few other places), this is called someone’s “vibe,” and people are usually right about the “vibes” they get from others. Trustworthy folks feel trustworthy, and untrustworthy folks feel untrustworthy. But there’s something that goes along with this: we really don’t need to see much of someone’s outfit to know what the rest of that person’s garb will be like. By extension, we can gather a lot of information about what type of person someone is from just their collar and shoulders. Which is why I personally think that showing more than this is redundant and counterproductive. No actor has ever been cast because of their upper torso, but the clothes that you can see on the neck and shoulders can give a lot of information (if they’re well chosen).
(2) The most important contribution that clothes, apparel and hair make to headshots is not to help win some dress-up contest, but that they actually change the inner life of the person that is being photographed. Different clothes and different hair make you feel like a different person. “The apparel oft proclaims the man,” as one pretty good writer once said.
But enough talk. Let me show you.
If I didn’t tell you, you might not notice that all four of the above headshots are of the same actor. The framing is the same as I usually use, so the changes can be pinned down to a few things. The hair in each shot is different. The make-up is the same. In one of them, he’s wearing glasses. The shirt is different in each shot, and each color does bring with it its own psychology. In terms of the things that usually constitute a different “look,” that’s pretty much it. Three things: hair, glasses, shirt.
The external factor that probably has the most impact on the difference in feeling between these headshots is the lighting. Studio Los Feliz uses studio lighting exclusively, which differentiates these headshots from almost all of the other best headshots in LA. The lighting for each look is built from scratch, and this means that many actors feel that their headshots from Studio Los Feliz come out looking a little bit more contoured and cinematic than they would at other headshot photographers. This is because a lot of the strength and beauty of cinema comes from the way that the lighting creates a key part of a character and her/his current place in the emotional arc of the story.
It has always surprised me how few headshot photographers in LA choose to shoot with studio lighting, given that it can be somewhat flat to see everyone in front of the same soft natural light coming in through big, north-facing windows. Galleries of naturally-lit headshots always feel a little bit same-y to me.
However, the big difference that studio lighting makes is not even mostly in the way it changes the actor’s face. It’s in the way it changes the actor’s inner life. The difference between the above shots is not the clothes, the hair, or the lights. It’s that each headshot seems to show someone who lives in an entirely different world.
I do a number of exercises with the actors who shoot with me, which are the same as they will have used in acting classes and rehearsals. In other words, when someone comes in for headshots at Studio Los Feliz, they actually get to act! This is lots of fun for everyone, and I savor every second of it. The result, I hope, is a set of acting headshots that don’t just show the same person wearing different clothes, but a set of very different people. The clothes, the hair, the lighting are all incidental — what we’re after is a deeper change.
To sign off, here’s another set:
If I recall correctly, the man wearing a tie loves bringing home a pay raise to his wife and kids. The second one, who I lit to make it look like he was in a back alley somewhere, had a best friend who was killed because he wasn’t good enough at his job. The one with glasses tells jokes in the office that not enough people get. And the last one played Caliban, and made him lovable.
To learn a little more about the differences that are possible between headshots, be sure to read about “open” and “closed” headshots on my page about the differences between LA headshots, NYC headshots, and London headshots. And no matter where you get your headshots from, make sure you back them up!