Studio lighting - recreation

I decided to use techniques from the simple lighting work work shop and do an actor head shot.

 Here is the image I wanted to recreate:

and here is my image:

I first had to analyse the lighting as we had done in the workshop. Simply look at the image, and use what information I can gather to decide where the light were positioned. In this image, the whiteness of the face must mean that the light used was close to the face.As this shot was of a real person, you can see the catch lights in the eyes which can help betray a lighting set up. You can see that the catch lights appear in the top of the pupils, but the way the light is lighting to forehead and leaving a shadow under the neck and nose you can assume that the light is placed above the subject pointing diagonally downwards. The shadows fall downwards so the light must be directly above the subject. There are shadows under the neck, nose and slightly under the brow. The hair appears shiny and glossy, with a slight halo effect (I had to figure this out by trial and error when shooting).
I guessed that only one light had been used, and possible reflectors had been placed either side for fill.

When I did my lighting I placed a medium softbox above my model pointing diagonally down directly in front. I then had two white boards either side to provide fill on the lower jaw and beneath the cheekbones.

I had a black background approx 1.5m away and had the model wear dark clothing.

When taking the photograph I used a long lens at 80mm to avoid wide angle distortion, this combined with a wide (ish) aperture (f/9) provided shallow enough depth of field to blur the background, but allow enough depth of focus throughout the face.


Here is my basic lighting diagram:

My model has red hair and the girl in the original photograph has dark brown hair, so it was impossible to get exactly the same darkness on my image in the hair tones.

In Photoshop I then used the 'burn' tool to darken the clothing and blend it with the background completely. I took this photo in colour so I could have more control over the tones when converting to black and white.  This helped me get the bright white skin tones, and a glossy look in the hair.

I then used the eye dropper tool to select a black tone from the background, and then used the crop tool to create a similar crop to the original photograph.

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