Rory Lewis Photographer Headshots & Portraiture

On Friday 11 September 2026 I am opening the Downtown Los Angeles studio for a single day of thirty-minute headshot update sessions. Each one gives you two looks and one retouched image, and it is the only date this year I will offer them.

My portraits are held in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and in the Royal Collection. I have photographed Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Patrick Stewart and Dame Judi Dench, along with five British Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Theresa May among them, and I am a four-time winner of Portrait of Britain. What I teach at Samy's is exactly what I practise in those sittings. Nothing is simplified and nothing is held back.

There is a particular pleasure in photographing an actor who has spent time in the eighteenth century. Tom Connolly leads the feature film Love, Courage and the Battle of Bushy Run as Colonel Henry Bouquet, the Swiss-born British Army officer whose victory at Bushy Run opened the road to the relief of Fort Pitt. The battle was fought, as it happens, in the first week of August, two hundred and sixty-three years ago this month.

On Saturday 19 September I am teaching a one-day portrait masterclass in New York, at Young Studio on 8th Avenue. It runs from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, models and lighting are provided, and you need bring nothing but a camera and a short lens.

14 August – 17 September 2026 · 411 S Main Street, Unit 222, Downtown Los Angeles

My Los Angeles diary is open from 14 August to 17 September, and I am now taking bookings for headshot sessions, commissioned portrait sittings, and private tuition. After 17 September I return to London and New York, and these are the last extended Los Angeles dates before the autumn.

There is a particular kind of face the camera waits for. Not the arranged one, not the face that performs readiness the moment a lens appears, but the one that carries a thought behind the eyes and lets you watch it move. Michael DelaFlor brought exactly that into my New York studio, and it made the work a pleasure.

I return to New York this August. From Saturday 9 to Wednesday 13 August, my studio at 580 8th Avenue — twenty floors above the Garment District, a few minutes' walk from Times Square and the theatre houses — will be open for actor headshots, portrait sittings, and corporate headshots.