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.
The Approach
Everything is lit. Nothing is left to the room.
I build every frame with a single shaped source and let the rest of the face fall away into shadow — the same logic Caravaggio worked with in the Contarelli Chapel, and Rembrandt after him. It is a deliberate refusal of the flat, evenly-lit convention this city produces by the thousand.
Flat light describes a face. Directional light argues about it. It withholds half the information and makes the viewer lean in to supply the rest — and that leaning-in is the difference between a picture that gets scrolled past and one that stops the eye.
I have been making portraits this way for twenty-three years. Seven are held in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery. Sixteen are in the Royal Collection. More than a hundred and fifty are held by the National Army Museum. I have photographed five British Prime Ministers, reigning monarchs, and been commissioned for State Portraits by members of the British Royal Family and the Royal Hashemite Court of Jordan. My work is syndicated worldwide through Contour by Getty Images.
I list this to make one point: those pictures will be looked at in a century by people who never met the sitter, and they were made with that in mind from the first frame. That is the standard I bring to every session in Downtown LA — whoever is in the chair.
For Actors
A casting director moves through hundreds of faces in a sitting. The evenly-lit, agreeable, interchangeable headshot is precisely what they are moving through. What stops them is character — a face with something withheld in it, an image that behaves less like a passport photograph and more like a portrait.
That is what I make. Every session is fully studio-lit and directed throughout; you are never left in front of the camera to find your own expression. We work through looks together, and I will tell you honestly when we have the frame.
I photograph actors at every stage of the profession — from drama school graduates building a first portfolio to established names between seasons — and I am recommended by Spotlight and Backstage.
For Corporate & Executive Clients
A portrait now does the work a handshake used to do. It sits above the announcement, the board page, the press profile, the keynote bill — and it is very often the first judgement anyone forms of you.
Most executive photography flattens its subject into pleasantness. I photograph executives the way I photograph generals and statesmen: with gravity, discretion, and a result that reads as authority rather than availability. Sessions are built around your calendar — efficient, directed, and finished properly — and I work with individuals, boards, and leadership teams, at the studio or on site.
Legacy Portraits
This is the heart of the practice.
A legacy sitting is a portrait commissioned to outlive its subject — the picture of a father, a mother, a founder, a family, made with the same intent as the portraits that hang in the National Portrait Gallery. Not an image for this year's holiday card: an heirloom. The photograph your grandchildren will know you by.
These sittings are longer and unhurried. We talk first, at length, before a camera comes out — I want to know what the face has been doing for the last forty years. Then we light, and we work, and somewhere in the second hour the performance drops and the actual person arrives. That is the frame that gets printed, framed, and passed down.
If there is someone in your family who ought to be properly recorded — and there always is — this is the month to do it.
Private Tuition
For photographers, I am offering one-to-one and small-group tuition during the Los Angeles window, including my Recreating Caravaggio masterclass:
Single-source studio lighting — building form the way a painter does, from the shadow side toward the light
Tenebrism in practice — reconstructing the lighting of specific canvases and applying the same logic to a living sitter
Directing the sitter — the part nobody teaches, and the part that decides whether the picture is any good
Post-production restraint — finishing a picture so it reads as a painting, not a retouched photograph