Two days of sittings in Midtown on 17 and 18 September, at Young Studio on 8th Avenue, followed by the New York masterclass on the Saturday. Actors, executives and commissioned portraits — one light, dark ground, as always.
Read More
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.
Read MoreLast week The Wall Street Journal published Marc Myers' House Call interview with Jared Harris, and the portrait that opens the piece is one of mine.
The sitting took place at my London studio. Harris was filming at the time, and he set the production aside for a day so that he could sit. That is not a small thing. A filming day is an expensive, jealously guarded commodity, and an actor who gives one up for a portrait is telling you something about the seriousness with which he regards the record of his own face.
Read MoreMy 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.
Read MoreLast October — a full year before the book would reach the shelves — he came to my Farringdon studio to sit for the cover of Things I Took from the Dark: The Museum of Me, his illustrated memoir, published by Quercus on 8 October. For thirty years — from The League of Gentlemen through Psychoville to Inside No. 9, which brought him and Steve Pemberton a BAFTA for its final series — Shearsmith has been British television's most reliable custodian of the uncanny. The book explains why.
Read MoreThere 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.
Read More
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.
Read MoreThere are faces the camera simply agrees with, and Fedly Daniel has one of them. He came to my Midtown Manhattan studio (580 8th Avenue, 20th Floor) for a new set of actor headshots, and from the first frame the session had that quality I'm always chasing — stillness with something moving underneath.
Read MoreYesterday, Andy Burnham accepted the invitation of King Charles III to form a government, and became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Speaking outside Number 10 — no lectern, standing freely in the street in that unmistakably direct Northern manner — he promised a "circuit breaker for Britain." My warmest congratulations to him. It is a remarkable moment for the country, and, I confess, a quietly extraordinary one for me.
Read MoreJoin award-winning photographer Rory Lewis for an immersive photography workshop on lighting and direction techniques.
Lighting techniques for headshots and portraiture
How to direct your subjects for natural, compelling shots
Tips to enhance your photography portfolio
This workshop is perfect for photographers of all levels, from beginners to seasoned professionals. Rory's engaging teaching style ensures you'll gain practical skills and knowledge that will elevate your portrait photography to the next level.
Read MoreThere's a particular pleasure in a sitter you clock the moment they come through the door, and Alex Wyndham was one of them — Maecenas himself, Octavian's silken fixer from the second season of Rome, standing in my Downtown LA studio some seventeen years on and none the worse for it. I confess I said as much straight away, which is not always the done thing with actors, but there it was. One doesn't forget a face that spent a whole season murmuring political poison into a young Caesar's ear.
Read MoreRory Lewis Photographer here, with some splendid news from the casting desks of Hollywood. My warmest congratulations to the wonderful Rosanny Zayas, who has officially joined the recurring cast of HBO Max's acclaimed medical drama The Pitt for its third season. Rosanny will play Physician Assistant Vera Delgado, scrubbing in alongside Noah Wyle and company at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center when the new season arrives in January 2027.
Read MoreI am back in London for one week this July, the 21st through the 27th, and the studio at Bleeding Heart Yard will be open for the duration.
There is a particular pleasure in photographing in London that I never quite shake. The light here behaves differently — softer, more conspiratorial, forever threatening rain. It suits the way I work. I have spent the better part of my career chasing the kind of light the Old Masters understood instinctively: a single source, a deep and forgiving shadow, a face emerging from near-darkness as though it had decided, of its own accord, to be seen. Caravaggio knew the trick of it. So did Rembrandt. The shadow is not the absence of the subject; it is the thing that gives the subject weight.
Read MoreThe stage actor's face, and what a camera asks of it
There is a particular ease to photographing an actor who has spent real time on a stage. The instrument is already tuned. Francis Price came to the Main Street studio with exactly that — a classically trained presence that knows how to hold stillness without going dead behind the eyes, which is the whole quiet art of a good headshot.
Read MoreThere's a particular kind of session that arrives when an actor steps back into the room after time away. The face is the same. The man behind it isn't — and the work, if it's any good, has to hold both.
Brian Kolb came to the Main Street studio to mark exactly that: a return to acting after a break, and the new narrative that comes with it. The brief was not one look, but range — the proof a casting director needs that a man can be cast in more than a single drawer. So we built six, and we built them to argue with each other.
Read MoreSpent an afternoon at the Downtown studio with actor Elvis Winterbottom, in for a set of headshots built to carry across casting briefs. We talked a great deal between setups, and he turned out to be genuinely interesting company, the kind of sitter who makes the hours run away from you. We worked through a deliberate range of looks: a plain dark tee and mock neck for the stripped-back theatrical frames, a navy waffle knit, a tailored blazer over a soft blue shirt for the producer and executive read, and a weathered leather jacket for something with more grit. One man, several characters, which is exactly what a working actor needs the camera to hold.
Read More
![CF051113sm].jpg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c4d7e227e3c3a6ec70a5ac7/7104a89a-fd65-47b6-8820-531daf8fd4bf/CF051113sm%5D.jpg)
