A great start. Let's thank the model!
Now you have her and we are looking at one pose. Start with one low power light. Try just moving it clockwise around the face from a circle 3 ft circle centered on the face that is 10" in front of the face from 12 o'clock (i.e. 0 degrees) to 6 o'clock (90 degrees). That’s 4 pictures.
You will see that as the angle of the shading changes so will the mood and drama.
Now move the circle 3 ft in front off her and repeat.
What feelings/mood do these various pictures give?
The single oblique light gives the 3D depth and sculpturing needed to make things "real" in the 2D photograph.
These are the variables:
- Distance of the light from the face
- Size of the light source: the larger softer shading.
- Brightness (Watt seconds or watts for continuous lighting (almost all flashes you use close to the face will be far to bright and annoying so use a small light, say 10 watts instead in a frosted bulb.)
- The angle of the light, as it is changed, illuminates and shadows the chin, brows, eye sockets, lips and so forth differently. This gives the varied impressions of mood and thought. Light that is directly in front of the face can abolish a lot of the micro detail as the tiny shadows vanish. This can be an advantage. One would then add another light from the side to put back the dimension you need, but here we are using one light only!
- Diffused versus specular light.
- Color: forget about that for now!
Set the camera to manual and use the histogram to check that your brights are all the way to the right. Ideally, take a picture of a grey, white and black striped card to fill your framing and you should get 3 peaks spread across the width of the histogram with two troughs hitting the x axis between the black area and the grey peak and between the grey peak and the white.
Of course you could simply take a large light box in close front of her and another light to the side and do wonders. However, this exercise is limited in scope. It's not to get a perfect portrait. It's just to see how the angle and distance from the face of a small light source can alter the mood from threatening to frightened and really positive without altering the model's expression much at all.
Let's just do that for now.
(After that you will need some 2'x2' white and black cards and clamps to hold them to one side or other or below the subjects face. Not yet, mind you as we dont want to shape, modify or reflect the light much until you have a basic lighting
you like. Since we don't know what you will choose, we have to wait and see. You might like the angle and distance from the face but want to change the size of the light source, all this we can do later!)
I don't know what flash you have but you need just the very lowest setting and you may have to put something over the light to decrease it's output or else use a the smallest bare electric light bulb, a candle or a lantern.
Pick the best set of 4 shots, 2 sets, one close and the other 3 ft away. That would mean 2 post with 4 pics in each. Describe how each picture makes you feel.
Asher