I have always been fascinated by cinematic imagery. When watching movies, you can see headshots all the time, and in cinematography, they call it a close-up shot. Here are incredible close-up shots of different movie scenes that I love.

Cinematic Headshots

Disclaimer: I do not own the copyrights to these videos

Titanic

Main Hoon Na

Duplicate

Batman Begins

The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight Rises

Main Hoon Na

Josh

The Great Gatsby

Baadshah

Shakti

Joker

Baadshah

The Greatest Showman

As you can see from the scenes above, cinematic headshots have certain characteristics. The background is blurred to isolate your subject. The lighting consists of one key light, one rim light at 180 degrees of the key light, and a reflector to lift up the shadows under the chin and add a catchlight to the eyes. The composition mainly consists of the head and shoulder with the top of the head cut off but not the chin. Cutting off the chin creates an image with bad composition and unnaturalness. Cinematic Headshots can create a strong feeling of happiness and confidence or an intense feeling of drama.

I started my fascination with headshots after shooting my cousin Abdulrahman AlMutawa. The blur in the background, combined with the image's confident feel, makes it look cinematic. However, it was a dull image, with unflattering lighting around the nose, mainly because I shot it indoors under tungsten lights. Back then, I was almost exclusively dependent on natural light. I used high ISO, explaining the grain in the image, and I shot it in JPEG and not RAW format. I cut off the chin, which created a bad composition. Here is the image.

The Gear I Used

Then I asked my friend Talal AlDuaij for a cinematic headshot.

The Gear I Used

The image turned out to be excellent and usable. However, I thought a few things were lacking in my photo. The background colours were not as beautiful as I expected, and there were no catchlights in the eyes. Since Talal was taller than me and was standing, I shot him from a low angle, giving him a superior look, which I don't like in cinematic headshots. Furthermore, the rim light from the side of the sun at sunset is much stronger than the key light on his face.

I was happy with the image, but I needed something more attractive and more cinematic for my headshots. I searched around and found an online tutorial titled "The Cinematic Headshot" by Dylan Patrick on www.fstoppers.com.

This tutorial is, by far, one of the best courses I have purchased. I will post a review in my next blog about it.

I hope you learned a lot from this blog. If you are interested in a one-on-one training session, drop me a direct message on my Instagram account.