Debbie Omariba is a friend and a great actor and model. She has been on commercials for Starbucks, Luminosity, LinkedIn, Apple and Garmin. I’m her go-to photographer when she needs new images.
To be honest, she was one of the first models I photographed in 2011, when I was avoiding humans on my pictures as much as possible. In 2011, I made a conscious effort to be more confortable with shooting people. Several artists (like David Duchemin, Zack Arias or David Hobby) will tell you to get out of your confort zone to be more creative and a more complete artist.
Actors want their pictures to be relatively close to reality, they don’t want their pictures to be altered in post-production too much. Remember those headshots are their calling cards, if actors do not look like their headshot, they will not be hired to play the part.
I have now photographed Debbie at least 8 or 9 times and while she is now way more experienced, we always have fun when we get together. You can see that Debbie likes to change her hair frequently (which is great for me, because she needs new images each time she does it).
I like to show you the progression of the images from 2011 until a couple days ago. Besides Debbie ever changing hair, we produced images for her portfolio as a model (gym, hipster) and some headshots as an actor. On most of those images, there is very little alterations beside color adjustment and some vignetting.
More info on Debbie: http://www.debtake.com/life/