I was recently contacted by a talented young actor about to head over to Sydney to chase her dreams of a career in acting. I have worked on a number of productions that Emma has had a leading role in so had done her portrait a few times previously and it was good to have a chance to work with her again as she has always impressed as being very disciplined and focussed.

For headshots my preference is to work with a fairly flat lighting setup against a clean background to give a clear image of a face without manipulating the features with light. Starting point was 2 umbrella softboxes masked to create a striplight effect with a 1:1 ratio on either side and a large reflector low in front bounce light up. I rely on 3 or 4  Nikon Speedlights (SB600, 800 and 900) and use an SU-800 to control them in up to 3 groups. We began with a white background over-exposed by 2 stops to give a clean white but found a grey worked better and found this easier to achieve with a black background over-exposed by driving the background flash harder. Under-exposing the white would have been better but the white fabric was a bit wrinkled so was not giving a clean background when under-exposed. Camera was a D800 set on manual 1/250s at f4 and ISO 200 with a Sigma 85mm f1.4 lens resulting in huge incredibly detailed files. Emma had done an excellent job of her make-up so retouching was minimal after batching out settings in Lightroom and then a pass through Portrait Professional with a specially saved preset using only minimal skin smoothing and eye retouching.

My favourite shot of the shoot was one with Emma glancing to the side which, while no use as a headshot, made a great starting point to process a portrait by adding in a background texture and converting it to a warm monotone. The gallery shows 4 of the 10 headshots we processed and the monochrome portrait. Thanks to Edin for a great job as assistant.