Headshots are an investment, so make sure you get a return on that investment with a high rate of auditions that can lead to paid work and you making a living as an actor. As such, let’s talk about what your headshot needs so that it pops specifically for online casting sites. What follows are tangible aesthetics that need to be discussed with your photographer before your shoot to make sure you’re both on the same page.
The headshot is becoming extinct. What I mean by this is that a printed 8x10 is no longer the industry standard for actors to showcase their image. That piece of real estate has now shrunken to roughly 1.5 x 2.5 inches and in some cases even smaller, like the size of a postage stamp, and it’s all the result of technology.
Online casting sites are dictating the size of actor headshots because the casting process has, for the most part, moved online to a screen. It’s also important to realize that the image you display in your profile is not necessarily the size that the casting director is going to view it. (Please read that last sentence again.)
Casting directors routinely pull up hundreds of actor images at a time and in many cases, have the option to view anywhere from three to a dozen images per row. The higher that number gets, the smaller your image gets. It’s only when they click on your thumbnail that it expands to the size you see in your profile.
If your headshot doesn’t grab their attention and stand out in this sea of thumbnails, you’re basically invisible—you don’t exist to them—and all that money you spent on headshots that may look great in 8x10 might look like an indistinct blur with two eyeballs when reduced to the size of a postage stamp. But this is reality; this is the process now.
Okay, so now we know what we’re dealing with and what we’re up against. Knowledge is power. To make sure your headshot pops on casting sites, here are five key ingredients you should make sure your headshot includes.
1. High Contrast
There needs to be a high degree of contrast between the background, your hair and skin tone, and your wardrobe. All three of these elements should contrast well with one another. I group hair and skin together because sometimes one’s skin tone is relatively close to one’s hair color. For example, someone with dark skin can have dark hair, and someone with light skin can have blond hair. You want to start with your hair and skin tone and work backward because that’s unchangeable whereas background and wardrobe are changeable.
READ: Make Your Headshot Rejection-Proof
If you have dark hair and dark skin, make sure you’re being shot against a light background so there’s high contrast between your skin and hair tones and the background. That’s going to separate you from the background and make you stand out because of the high degree of contrast. If you have dark hair and skin and are shot against a dark background, there’s no contrast with the background The situation you want to avoid is if you have dark hair and dark skin and you’re shot against a dark background when your image is reduced to a thumbnail and it will all blend together.
Now let’s talk about your wardrobe. Again, think in terms of what’s going to provide the highest degree of contrast with both your hair and skin tone and the background. If your hair and skin tones are dark, your background is white or light gray, then a deep blue will provide high contrast with both of those color tones.
2. Portrait Orientation
All of the casting sites I researched use portrait orientation for their gallery and individual actor profile pages except for one. This tells us that in order to make the cropping process more harmonious with the portrait thumbnail template, the pictures you have taken specifically for your thumbnail image should be in portrait.
Granted, there are certain landscape images that will crop and fit nicely into a portrait orientated framework, but why swim upstream? Make it easy on yourself so that when you’re cropping your headshot or reducing its size, a portrait-orientated image is going to work better for this particular format.
3. No Busy Backgrounds
When your headshot is reduced to a tiny thumbnail image, you don’t want anything competing with your face and shafts of light or highlights bouncing off surfaces in the background can do just that. Plus, they will dilute that high contrast look we want with the background. So keep your backgrounds simple and solid.
4. Proper Framing + Sharpness
When shooting in portrait orientation, you want your head to take up one-third to one-half of the frame. This will ensure that when the image is reduced or cropped, your face and hair will still retain sharpness and detail.
If your portrait shot is mostly body with your head taking up just one-quarter or less of the frame, your head is going to be really small in a thumbnail. You will then have to crop that original image down and it's going to look cropped, and that doesn't serve you well. It could even look a little blurry and that would not be good.
5. High f-stop
Here’s a bonus tip that you may want to jot down and share with your photographer. It’s technical, but something they will certainly understand. If you want to retain sharpness from the tip of your nose to the back of your head your photographer needs to shoot at a higher “f-stop”. Trust me, they’ll know what this means. If they don’t, run away and find another photographer.
Lower f-stops will give you a shallow depth of field meaning that your eyes may be in focus but your ears and hair may not be and if you’re cropping or reducing the image to a small thumbnail, you need to retain as much sharpness throughout the image as you can. A higher f-stop will give you that sharpness and detail throughout.
If you can get all these elements into your headshot along with a killer expression, you’ are sitting pretty when it comes to standing out amongst a sea of less optimized headshots on a casting director’s computer screen. Your image is going to catch their attention regardless of whether you’re right for the part or not, and that’s what you want.
Charles Mitri is a Los Angeles-based headshot and portrait photographer who specializes in creating dramatic, moody images for actors and models. His work elicits emotions that are rarely felt from standard industry photography. He is also involved in creating his brand of stylized portraits that combine backgrounds shot separately with subjects shot in-studio, then composited together to create one of a kind artistic images. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, writing, yoga, swing dancing, tennis, and eating chocolate chip cookies.
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