H.M King Abdullah II of Jordan Portrait Sitting
New York, 9–13 August: Actor Headshots and Corporate Portraits in Midtown Manhattan
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.
Read MoreFedly Daniel — Actor Headshots at My New York Studio
There 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 MoreAndy Burnham: The King of the North Enters Downing Street — The Fifth Prime Minister of My Career
Yesterday, 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 MoreVirtual Portrait Masterclass Cinematic Portraiture With Rory Lewis Saturday, 8 August 2026
Join award-winning photographer Rory Lewis for an immersive photography workshop on lighting and direction techniques.
What you'll learn:
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 MoreAlex Wyndham Headshots | Rory Lewis Photographer, Los Angeles
There'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 MoreCongratulations Rosanny Zayas — Cast in HBO Max's The Pitt, Season Three
Rory 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 MoreA Week at Bleeding Heart Yard: London, 21st–27th July
I 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 MoreFrancis Price at the Downtown LA Studio
The 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 MoreLos Angeles Actors Headshots Brian Kolb
There'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 MoreElvis Winterbottom Actor headshots at the Los Angeles studio
Spent 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 MoreI photographed Britain's next Prime Minister Andy Burnham
Andy Burnham, sworn in only today as the new Member of Parliament for Makerfield, confirmed he would stand. Wes Streeting, the one figure thought capable of mounting a challenge, set aside his own ambitions and offered his backing instead. The party has rallied. If no rival emerges when nominations open on 9 July, Burnham could enter Downing Street within weeks. For now he is not Prime Minister, but he has been practically crowned as one.
Read MoreA Privilege — Babs Olusanmokun in London
I had the privilege this week of photographing Babs Olusanmokun in my London studio, and as I worked I found myself thinking, not for the first time, about how often I get to say that word — privilege — about the Black actors who find their way to my chair.
Read MoreThe Singer's Silence — Nick Pritchard at the Los Angeles Studio
There is a particular quiet that settles over a portrait sitting when the subject is, by trade, a maker of sound. The performer who fills a room — who has stood in front of seventeen thousand people at the Coca-Cola Arena and held them — arrives in my studio and discovers that the only instrument I am asking him to play is his own stillness. Nick Pritchard understood this faster than most.
Read MoreInside the Portrait: A Four-Hour Lighting & Direction Masterclass at B&H New York 13th August 2026
There's a moment, going back through the frames from a sitting, where you can feel the difference between a photograph that merely records a face and one that holds the room. It is rarely a question of the camera. Almost always it comes down to two things: how the light falls, and how the person in front of you was directed in the seconds before the shutter.
Read MoreNew Work, and a Few Doors Open in Los Angeles
There is a particular satisfaction in taking down a body of work you have looked at for too long and replacing it with something better. I have just done exactly that. The headshot portfolio has been rebuilt from the ground up — newer sittings, harder edits, a great deal that didn't make the cut. What's left is, I think, the strongest the studio has put out.
Read MoreKiko Macan: New Headshots at the Los Angeles Studio
Kiko Macan came to the Downtown Los Angeles studio this week for new headshots, and I was rather pleased he did. Kiko is one of those sitters who arrives with two careers in his pocket — actor and director — which makes the session a more interesting puzzle than usual. A headshot for an actor sells presence; a portrait for a director sells authority. We set out to do both.
Read MoreJacobo Fe Gismera at the Downtown Studio
Some sitters arrive at the studio with a CV; Jacobo Fe Gismera arrived with a biography that reads like one of his own screenplays. A Spaniard in Los Angeles by way of UCLA, he was the youngest novelist in Spain to publish in the historical genre, putting out his peplum novel Perfectus Imperator at nineteen, the same age he began a modelling career that has since run to hundreds of publications across a dozen or more countries.
Read MoreCapturing Bao Song
There is a particular awkwardness, and a particular pleasure, in photographing another photographer. They know exactly what you are doing. They have stood where you are standing, made the same small adjustments to a collar, watched the same flicker of self-consciousness cross a face and waited it out. You cannot hide the mechanics from them, and so you stop trying.
Read MoreAn Olive-Wood Cross and the Studio Skull
Most of the best things that happen in this trade arrive sideways, by way of a handshake you weren't expecting. This was one of those.
I had been asked to speak at Samy's, here in Los Angeles, on the subject of Godox lighting — a perfectly cheerful evening of light shaping and the usual debates about modifiers, where two photographers can disagree for an hour and both be right. When it was over a gentleman came up, introduced himself, and put a card in my hand. Edward Goldstein. He mentioned, almost in passing, that he did some modelling.
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