

Do your homework – they’ll each have a unique style and it’s important to find one that works for you. Take recommendations from friends, scour the web and find every single acting headshot photographer in your region. Briefs come in looking for brunette actors with hazel eyes, how will they know if everything just looks 50 shades of grey?įinding your Photographer Do your research. Now you can have black and white images on your casting profiles, perhaps for a more editorial or portrait look, but your main image NEEDS to be in colour.
#HEADSHOT PHOTO THEATER BLACK AND WHITE SKIN#
This just means your skin looks like your natural skin colour, there are no deep shadows under your eyes, and we can see everything. Lighting refers to the correct exposure – this is mainly up to your photographer, whom should correctly expose the shot.
#HEADSHOT PHOTO THEATER BLACK AND WHITE FULL#
Experiment with different angles, but it is important for casting directors to see your full face shape, and definitely both of your eye balls… Composition wise, you should be close to centre frame, with your body and face mainly facing towards the lens. A standard headshot in Australia is 6×8 portrait – automatic displays on online casting platforms crop to this, and your agent will most likely display your image in this uniform size on their books. Here I’m referring to image sizing, composition, lighting, editing, and colouring. #3 Meet all the requirements of a standard headshot These headshots stand out, in all the right ways. What doesn’t this mean? Wearing a crazy hat, a bright green t-shirt, a tighter crop, a wider lens, or wearing a bikini (!!!). Nice balance of colours, correct exposure and a relaxed feel about it. What does this mean? An engaging, authentic, natural-looking image. It is paramount that your teeny, tiny thumbnail holds it own in a crowd of millions.

Either now, you are completely wrong for this role, as you’re hair is shorter, lighter, your skin is a different colour etc., and it also means that you could have been perfect for a role they cast last week, but you’ve now missed it because your headshot doesn’t accurately represent you.Īgents, casting directors, producers, directors sift through oceans and oceans of acting headshots every day. If you walk into the room, looking nothing like your headshot, it can mean two things. We just published an interview with Casting Director Stevie Ray from the prestigious McGregor Casting in Sydney, where he talks about exactly this. The other side of the coin here is that your headshot needs to look like you on a good day, yes, but also exactly how you will look when you walk into a meeting or an audition room. It simply needs to suggest something about your personality. If you were a character, what would that look like in a still image? This doesn’t mean forcing facial expressions on yourself, wearing hats, glasses or bright red lipstick. Let’s get esoterical for a second: an actor’s headshot should capture the ‘essence’ of the person in the image.

Ultimately, your acting headshot needs to: #1 Look like you.
