Headshots with Actor Brendan Hutt

December 4, 2023
2 mins read

Last August I had the good fortunate to do headshots for Brendan Hutt of Promethean Theatre Ensemble and Idle Muse Theatre Company. Brendan’s current headshots still work well for him, but he’s had a few updates to his look lately and wanted to do a few new ones to expand his range. For example, he’s clean shaven in the headshot he’s using, but now he has a beard. He also wanted to do a headshot wearing something a little dressier. Options.

Brendan and I have known one another for countless years, by which I mean to say that I’ve lost count, but I’m guessing it’s about sixteen years. I’ve photographed Brendan in many shows, and we’ve gathered, gamed, and feasted together for time out of mind. Thus, doing a headshot session together was natural and easy, and we made hundreds of portraits.

Michael Dahlberg and Brendan Hutt in Idle Muse Theatre Company’s Equivocation.

Culling the Choices

“How much do you prefer me to narrow them down?” I asked Brendan. “Are you the type of person who wants lots of options, minimal options, or would you like me to pick?”

“Just leave out the blurry ones,” Brendan said.

So I got rid of the blurries and anything I wouldn’t have been happy to edit.Brendan is an excellent actor and subject, which meant that he nailed hundreds of great, nuanced expressions and an overabundance of choices to go through with his agent.

Bastards and Schlubs

I always say my two types are bastards and schlubs. Those are the modes I think of myself in. It’s a good spectrum to be operating in. There’s a lot there.

Brendan Hutt on type

In making Brendan’s portraits, we tried several different looks. In the end, we settled on a commercial look, a casual look, and one in between, where Brendan wore his glasses. We swapped out backgrounds as much as we changed wardrobe pieces, taking our time as we shot. Brendan is a master of nuanced expressions, so we had a seemingly infinite variety of options for each look. Some were warm and friendly, some were intense. We made the looks to supplement what Brendan already had, and when we were happy with what we’d made, we moved on to some fun experimental shots.

As a side note, during the editing/retouching phase, fixing the folds on Brendan’s textured shirt made me feel like a space wizard with sorcerous powers.

Fixing the folds.

It Must Not Be Denied but I Am a Plain-Dealing Villain

I think I have a particular affinity for underplayed menace. That would be so cool. Cold and collected and more than capable of doing real harm in that way that doesn’t need to be showy.

Brendan Hutt on playing the villain

Since this was a session about expanding Brendan’s range, I wanted to make sure we played against type as well. When I asked Brendan what sort of role he’d most love to play, he told me he’d love to delve into some more villainous roles. I thought there was some space to play there, outside the normal parameters of the commercial headshot, so we made some images to show off Brendan’s dark side. For this we used, well, a whole lot of darkness.

We had a ton of fun in the last part of our session, and the way we lit Brendan created a very different look from the headshots we captured at the start of the session.

It was excellent working with Brendan, as it always is, and I’m grateful to him for spending the afternoon with me in service of his amazing talent!

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.

The All Worlds Traveller

Welcome to The All Worlds Traveller, an eclectic collection of thoughts, pictures, and stories from a Distant Era. Illustrated with Distant Era art and photographs, these pages explore the stories and worlds of people beyond the here and now, and the people and creative processes behind such stories. This is a blog about photography and narrative; history and myth; fantasy, science-fiction, and the weird; creation and experience. This is a blog about stories.

Steven Townshend

I’m Steven Townshend—your guide, scribe, editor, and humble narrator. The All Worlds Traveller is my personal publication, an exploratory conversation about stories and how we interact with them, from photographs to narratives to games—a kind of variety show in print. It is a conversation with other artists who explore the past, the future, and the fantastical in their work. Not one world—but all worlds. Where Distant Era shows stories in images, The All Worlds Traveller is all about the words.

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About a Distant Era

Distant Era creates fine art and portrait photographs of people and places from imagined pasts, possible futures, and magical realities. In collaboration with other artists, we evoke these distant eras with theatrical costume and makeup, evocative scenery, and deliberate lighting, and we enhance them with contemporary tools to cast these captured moments in the light of long ago or far away. We long to walk the lion-decorated streets of Babylon, to visit alien worlds aboard an interstellar vessel, and to observe the native dances of elves. Our images are windows to speculative realities and postcards from the past. They are consolation for fellow time travelers who long to look beyond the familiar scenery of the present and gaze upon the people and places of a distant era.

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