Agency-style headshots between auditions.
No booking, no day rate.

An agency headshot is a narrow format on purpose. Plain, unpatterned background. Head and shoulders. A direct gaze down the lens with the eyes in sharp focus. Natural expression, current look, minimal retouching — the brief is that a casting director should be able to tell exactly who walks into the room. Anything decorative works against it.

That's what the Actor style is built to: neutral mid-tone background, soft light from above, direct gaze, no heavy smoothing. Editorial B&W is the traditional second look — strong side light and deep shadow, the register used for theatre and long-form profiles. Each casting platform also has its own upload spec for dimensions and file size, so check theirs before you submit rather than after.

This is the part we'd rather tell you up front than have you discover after paying. Agencies, casting platforms, and unions have taken varying positions on digitally-created images, and some are explicit that a submission headshot must come from a real session with a photographer. If yours says that, this is not the right tool for your submission photo, and no amount of quality changes that.

Ask your agent directly, and check the terms of the platforms you upload to. It's a two-minute question with a clear answer, and it's the same question you'd want settled before spending a day rate on a shoot.

Even where a submission photo has to come from a shoot, the rest of your presence doesn't. Your own site, your social profiles, an electronic press kit, a programme bio, a director's introduction email — all of those need a current photo, and all of them go stale the moment you change your look for a role.

The other use is cheap and slightly unglamorous: deciding what to shoot. Seeing yourself in a colour agency-style frame and a black-and-white editorial one, from selfies, before you book a photographer, is a genuinely useful way to settle which direction you want to pay for. The free preview does that for nothing.