Farringdon studio

London's Finest Actors' Headshot Photographer — Four Sittings, and a Word About November

London's Finest Actors' Headshot Photographer — Four Sittings, and a Word About November

People sometimes ask me why an actor should sit for a headshot with a portrait photographer rather than a headshot photographer. It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that the distinction shouldn't exist. A headshot is a portrait — it is simply a portrait with a job to do. It has to walk into a casting director's inbox at nine in the morning, sit alongside three hundred others, and make somebody stop scrolling. That is not achieved with a white seamless and a ring light. It is achieved by looking properly at a face, understanding what it does, and lighting it the way the old masters lit theirs: with intent.

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Photographing the cover of Things I Took from the Dark

Photographing the cover of Things I Took from the Dark

Last 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.

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The Returning Sitter: Alex Blake

The Returning Sitter: Alex Blake

Alex Blake came back to the studio recently for an update to his headshots — the kind of return visit that punctuates most working actors' careers every two or three years, when the credits have grown, the face has settled into something a little more itself, and the agent has started asking gently whether the current image is still doing the work it ought to. Alex's was, mostly. But "mostly" is the word that brings actors back.

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Five Years Late: Portraits of Babs Olusanmokun

Five Years Late: Portraits of Babs Olusanmokun

Portraits of Babs Olusanmokun, London | Rory Lewis

Portrait photographer Rory Lewis on capturing actor Babs Olusanmokun (Dune, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds) at his London studio — five years in the making.

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