Tuesday Tips & Pics - Headshot Preview

In a lot of ways I think shooting headshot's are a lot easier than shooting regular portrait sessions.  Engagement sessions and maternity sessions and family sessions are largely about capturing the emotions between your subjects, and this can be really tricky when they are so aware of the camera pointing at them.  But headshot's are more about capturing the essence of what a person really looks like.  They should be nice clean edits that clearly focus on the subject.  It's awesome to capture some personality as well, but most casting directors aren't going to look at pictures that are overly edited with haze or vintage actions or that have unique and artistic compositions or back grounds.  Headshot's, are about clearly capturing the faces of your subject.  After all they are called Head Shots for a reason!

I shot a headshot session for these adorable brothers, Brendan and Patrick, who have a casting agent here in LA.  They first went to studio for headshot's and got, what was frankly some pretty cheesy studio shots with some awful 80's backgrounds.  They came to me for some more natural looking headshots. Here's just a couple so far of these cuties.

Oh another tip--long lenses work great for headshots so you can blur the background and make the subject pop and capture some great detail.  I shot these with my Nikon 85mm f/3.5 Macro. I love that this lens is great for macro and for portraits!

Here's Brendan...

And here's Patrick...


They are definitely a bit different from my typical portrait session shots, but I think they still look like my work! Link up what you've been shooting below!