The Method
“This process is a powerful mirror.
But mirrors only work when the subject is already there.”
How Images Actually Work
My portraits are specifically created for honest moments of profound human connection. But that’s tricky because once we make these images they are only 50% complete. They still have to go out into the world where they’re interpreted and processed though the hopes and fears, beliefs and biases of your audience.
My approach is to frame an experience where the viewer recognises something deeper within themselves through you. Creating images that invoke a sense of undeniable familiarity - a presence that anyone looking can truly identify with. By using the cues and signals that bypass the pre-frontal cortex (evaluating/ reasoning) part of the brain… and planting itself straight into the Limbic (the emotional nervous system). With this approach and purpose in mind, we create images that feel effortlessly relevant & meaningful - fully aligned and full of substance and purpose.
Because photography itself is not important to me. It’s simply the medium in which I work.
My Art is Communication - powerful, personal, relevant, meaningful, purposeful and precise. And my Craft is helping people clear away all the mess that inhibits anything real coming through.
Most portraits fail in the same way. The photographer points a camera, the subject ‘performs’, and the result… a high-resolution version of the wrong person.
Precision portraiture isn't an aesthetic choice - it's a methodology. This is mine.
“My favourite part is the moment something shifts...
The mask slips, the performance stops.
And what’s left… is you.”
My 8-part Method
1. Range of Meaning
Every session begins with a deliberate exploration of how your particular face and body communicate. What originally started out years ago as ‘range of motion’ gradually become a range of meaning.
The same one-millimetre lift of the chin reads as elevated and powerful on one person, and condescending on another. A slight head tilt can move from curious to cutesy in the space of a breath. There are no universally good or bad postures - only choices that mean different things on different people.
So before we build anything, we map the visual vocabulary you do naturally. We start to shoot and I watch how you tilt, twist, settle, soften. And we learn what each micro-movement says when you do it.
This is the part most photographers skip. It's also why most portraits feel generic.
2. Active Neutral
Once the vocabulary is mapped, we strip everything back. No expression, no performance, no held tension. Just present, alert & awake. This is what I call ‘Active Neutral’.
It's harder than it sounds. Most adults - especially senior professionals - have been performing versions of themselves for so long that even "neutral" has become its own kind of performance. There's a held smile... Or a subtle bracing of the shoulders. Sometimes a practised softening of the eyes that's been on autopilot since the first time someone said "smile for the camera" thirty years ago.
We dismantle all of it. Surgically. Until what's left is just you, paying attention, with nothing rehearsed in your face.
This is the foundation. Every image we make from here builds on top of it.
3. A.C.E. — The Layering Framework
From Active Neutral, we layer in three things in deliberate order:
Angle — posture, position, the structural geometry of how you sit in the frame. This is purely physical. We don't even look at your face yet.
Connection — the way your attention travels through the lens to the eventual viewer. Not a stare. A reach. Done well, the person looking at the image feels personally met, even though you're alone in a room with me.
Expression — the meaning. By the time we add this layer, you already know your best angle and you're connecting through the camera like a seasoned pro. So we layer expression on top of a body that's already doing the work — which is why it never feels forced or hollow.
Most photographers try to start with expression and hope the rest catches up. It rarely does.
4. Mirror Direction
I give non-stop verbal instructions during a session - so you’re never left wondering what to do. But more importantly, I demonstrate. Everything. So you can see exactly how to do it.
Because words only get you so far. In a space as unnatural as a photoshoot, more words means you’re stuck translating language into body language in real time - which is exhausting and slow. Demonstration, on the other hand, lets your body learn through observation. It’s the same way dancers, actors and athletes train. It uses the mirror neuron system that humans have evolved to learn physical movement and social meaning from each other faster than any other mechanism we have.
If I want a particular angle, I show you. If I want a specific quality of attention, I do it first. Your shoulder… your elbow… your forehead… your feet… everything. Your body mirrors mine, and we adjust from there. It removes the cognitive load entirely. You don't have to think about what to do. You see it and your body does your version of that.
It also means you never have to wonder whether you're doing it right. You're just matching.
5. Transitional Expressions
I often ask for an overly exaggerated version of an expression — a bigger smile than you'd ever wear, a more serious look than you'd actually use. Not because I want those images. Because they're a doorway.
As you release the exaggeration, and your face settles back toward active neutral, you pass through dozens of micro-expressions you'd never produce on command. They're not constructed. They're not performed. They're just what happens between two intentional states.
That's where the truth lives. In the transitions.
It's why my work feels less posed than other photography. Most of what you'll love wasn't a moment we constructed. It was a moment we caught.
6. Warmth and Competence
Research consistently shows that over 80% of the impression we form about another person comes from two cues: warmth and competence. Are they trustworthy? Are they capable? Almost everything else is downstream of these two judgments.
I work with both as deliberate levers throughout a session. A portrait can be too warm - saccharine, performative, the kind of smile that reads as pleasing rather than present. Or too competent - the defensive arms-crossed ‘power pose’ that kind of signals capability but quietly pushes the viewer away.
The portraits that do the most work are the ones that calibrate both in the right combination for you. Warmth that signals trustworthiness without softening into pleasing. Competence that signals capability without hardening into defensive. Most of our dialogue during a session - verbal and otherwise - is fine-tuning where you sit on those two axes.
7. The Third Person Reframe
When we review images together on the screen, we do a lot of scrutinising… calling a spade a spade. But we never say "you look pissy here" or "you're closed off in this one." We say "she looks pissy" or "he's closed off."
It started as an accident. I noticed people would take it too personally and in actual fact it had nothing to do with them. But we are brutally honest in these sessions.
I found that putting it all in 3rd person - and assessing them as a separate entity rather than a verdict on themselves - made it infinitely easier to call out the rubbish. There's no fault. It's not you. It's her. And she's not quite it yet.
It's small, but it changes everything. The conversation becomes collaborative rather than defensive. We can both look at an image; agree it's not landing; and move on without anyone needing to feel anything personal about it.
Reverse-engineered into the method on purpose. Now I do it every time.
Once the foundation is laid - the vocabulary mapped, active neutral established, the layers in place, the trust built - something happens that I can only describe as a shift. The session stops being directed and starts being received.
What's actually happening, scientifically, is 15+ years of trained pattern-recognition operating faster than my conscious mind can track. What it feels like, in the room, is a kind of effortless reading - knowing exactly when to call for a particular adjustment, when to pause, when to capture, when to wait. Artists have been calling this state Flow for decades. Athletes call it the zone. Same mechanism. Same trained intuition. Different application.
This is the most valuable part of any session, and it's also why the longer formats are worth what they cost.
Flow takes time to enter. It takes more time to sustain. The deeper sessions exist because the deepest images live in this phase - and getting there is earned.
8. Flow
The whole point.
This is why my portraits feel different.
I don’t have a special camera, or a magical light, or some gift no one else has. The methodology is just that. Methodical. It’s exactly why I always say ‘Process over Outcome’. The second we start chasing an outcome, it eludes us at every turn. But if we just stay with the process we get there every time. Each step does specific work. Each one builds on the one before. None of it is mystical, even when it feels that way in the room.
This is so much more than a photoshoot. It's a record of who you are when you stop ‘performing’ or proving.
Behind the Scenes with Leigh S.
Signature Session
“The shoot was loose and loud and fun - like a piece of art that looks chaotic up close but starts to make sense as you step back from it.
It could have gone on for longer which is not something I thought I would ever say about a photoshoot!”
Why it Matters
Seeing yourself on camera, changes your life.
When you see yourself on camera, your brain activates your ‘self-referential processing network’. It’s a part of the ‘default mode network’ which is active during internal thought; and responsible for how you understand and narrate yourself.
Every time you see yourself reflected back, your brain is literally updating its model of who you are. You’re rewriting your self concept in real time.
Most of us are walking around with a self image created by other people… by years of editing ourselves to make other people comfortable. And that self image shows up on camera as hesitation, shrinking, rushing or apologising for taking up space.
But when you see yourself reflected back - especially by such a high frequency mirror - your nervous system builds itself a new reference point.
