Model?! Me? Hahaha. No.

At my office, we have an apprentice that we have to teach photography to. Her name is Camilla and when I met her for the first time two months ago, I fell in love. Deeply. She's one of the sweetest girl I have ever met and Luigi also loves her, which is a huge plus! I never hold back my knowledge when it comes to anything, and since I'm the retoucher and beautyphotographer of the studio, I decided to teach her to exactly that. I told her to find a picture she wanted to try and replicate, which is the best way to learn photography. You learn so much in the process of trying to copy someone elses work! It was also important that she found a model that looked like me (since I was going to be the model in this test) with the same brown hair and close to same skintone. She found the picture below by Jill Greenberg.

Before doing anything, we had to break down the image into pieces so we could try and understand it. I have marked in different colors the things we looked at and tried to duplicate so you can understand the thought process.

Red: You can see from the two areas I have circles that the light is coming from the back. So, hairlight from the back = check.
Purple: The light on the nose and shoulder shows that the light is straight from the front. This is supported by the shadow under the nose which doesn't lean to either side. So, light straight from the front = check.
Green: The shape of the reflection in the eyeshadow and lips, as well as the reflection in the eye shows that the light source is square and long. So, long square softbox = check.
Pink: Shadows! You can see that there actually are shadows in the picture on her sides, which means there are black walls close to her on each side. So, black walls to create shadows = check!
Light blue: Very light shadow under the nose. So, reflector under face for lighting up shadows = check!

Knowing these things, we went ahead and set up the light as you see below. Two shoot-through umbrellas on each side behind my head for the hair light, which was blocked by the black walls on each side so the light wouldn't hit anything else. It's a little hard to see in the diagram, but the white board in front of the model is just a piece of white cardboard that was right below my chest like a tray so it would reflect light back up to my face to lighten up the shadows. We then had a strobe softbox (a long thin softbox) above my face horizontally. The light was spot on right away. So we snappet a few and I tried to mimic her pose with looking to the side. I did my own makeup and my hair was curled quickly the day before so it was just an experiment and learning process for Camilla. Below you can see how the image turned out straight from the camera, and the picture on top is after I retouched it to get the same golden look.

What do you think? Did we do good?

PS. Read what I wrote about retouching here.