Headshots in South London
Erin Moir
Erin and her family are personal friends. Her parents are colleagues of my wife at the Salvation Army Training College in Denmark Hill, Camberwell. I have known Erin for about half of her life, in fact! Over recent years she has been developing a career as an actor. As I write she is celebrating the end of her exams and the prospect of starting at the Brit School next term. The day of the shoot was just before she closed the show as guest vocalist for the Ark Music Gala at the Barbican. This young woman is going places!
We did the shoot in two sections. First we used natural light in and around Erin’s home on the Denmark Hill campus. Later we used studio lighting in a blacked-out space. People often think that headshots must be very dramatic in terms of lighting, and we wanted to get some of that. But my clients also wanted a sense of naturalness and to just let Erin’s beauty and warmth speak for themselves.
The “outdoor” images here were shot in the front doorway of Erin’s home, with strong back-lighting and flash bouncing off a mirror in the hall to counterbalance it. The soft light on Erin’s cheek in the last of these four came from the sun, reflected off a sheet of foil held in the kitchen by Erin’s mum!
