If you are going to pursue an acting career you need a headshot. What exactly is a headshot? What are they used for? Where do you get them?
Traditionally a headshot is an 8×10 Black & White glossy print showing the actor’s face and hair. Nowadays it can be in color or B&W. Some headshots now use 3/4 poses that show part of the actor’s body. The best thing to do is visit a headshot printer and look at the hundreds of headshots on the wall and see what people are currently doing. If you are near Burbank go to Isgo Lepejian Custom Photo Lab because that is where all the actors go. In Hollywood visit Ray the Retoucher. While you’re there pick up the price sheets and maybe a few business cards of headshot photographers.
Suppose you are a new actor trying to break into Hollywood. You don’t have an agent yet, but you are taking acting classes and feel that you are ready for a role in a no budget independent film or student film.
The purpose of your headshot is to get you an audition for that role. The way it works is you find a casting notice either in a trade newspaper like BackStage West or from an online casting website like TheRightCast.com. The casting notice lists the parts being cast and tells you how to submit your headshot. For smalls movies it is usually the producer and director who do all the casting. The producer gets a pile of about 200 headshots so the first thing they do is to weed out those headshots who definitely don’t fit the character. Each headshot gets about two seconds scrutiny before going to the “NO” pile or the “MAYBE” pile. The “MAYBE” pile gets further scrutiny until eventually it is whittled down to the ones called in for an audition.
So basically you get the audition based on your headshot. It is the first thing the people see who decide if you are going to be in the movie or not. First impressions count.
The most important thing about your headshot is that it looks like you. When you walk into the audition the producer will have a pile of headshots in front of him. He’ll look at you and then shuffle through the pile looking for your picture. You better look like you headshot or they will be disappointed. In other words your headshot should show how you look now in normal street garb with your current hairstyle.
Getting Headshots
There are two steps to getting your headshots made: 1. headshot photo session and 2. printing. Do not get headshots printed through the photographer. Since printing costs a lot of money you want to make your best deal directly with the printer and not have to go back to the photographer every time you need 200 more headshots.
Find a photographer specializing in headshots–not a wedding photographer, not a family portrait photographer, definitely not Glamour Shots at the mall. You want a headshot photographer. There are a hundreds of them in Hollywood and there are a few in every major city in the U.S.A. They advertise in Back Stage West and other trade papers. Call up the photog, ask about prices and make an appointment to look at his “book” or portfolio. If you like his work, book a photo session. The photographer should give you some information about what to bring and how to prepare.
At one time all headshots were shot on B&W film. A headshot session was normally two rolls of 36-exposures. Now some photographers shoot on film but most shoot digital. You should still get about 72 shots. Film is higher quality, but costs more and takes longer to get your results. Since you want a CD with all the pictures on it, digital is preferable for beginning headshots. You should get two or four different “looks”, a look meaning a change of costume or maybe just a different top. One or two looks per roll makes sense so that you have some variety.
There are two sets of expenses for your heashots. One for the photographer and one for printing. While you can spend $500 and up for great headshots, as a beginner find a photographer that will shoot you for $150 or $200 and give you a CD. The CD should have all the high-resolution pictures which are suitable for printing an 8×10 at 300 dots per inch. The hi-res files should be about 3000 x 2000. Then you take the CD to Isgo Lepejian Photo or Ray the Retoucher and pay them for printing.
In addition to glossy prints, you also need to produce JPEGs suitable for e-mailing. Make these yourself on your home computer using Photoshop or a similar program. If you don’t know how to do this, you better learn or have a friend who knows how. The JPEGs can be lower resolution than the files for printing to save bandwidth and disk space. Don’t e-mail a huge 4M file that takes forever to download and uses up all the space in someone’s mailbox. It will just get deleted. 
But don’t make the image too small, though. It should have enough resolution to print on a black and white office printer at 8×10 yet be small enough to download quickly. Something like 800×640 or 1024×820, 1200×960 or even 1500×1200 can be OK as long as the file is no more than a 250K. A 100K file size is even better.
JPEGs are probably more important than the glossies because as a beginner you will be submitting headshots online more often than mailing them through the post office. This is a good because mailing headshots costs a lot of money and online submittal costs little or nothing. The internet has probably saved actors a ton of money. If you have a web page, you can put more pictures on it and then just e-mail the link to your web page.
That is the short story of your actors headshot. Later columns will go into more detail about the photo session, printing, submitting headshots, etc.
