Thanks Asher, this model was bitten in the face by a dog as a child completely severing the left side of her upper lip and the resulting scar tissue create an odd duck lip curl. Add to that the fact that she has very full and voluptuous lips and you get the full and somewhat erotic shape of her mouth. Parting her lips is intentional in that it lessens the effects of the scar tissue in the shaping of her lips. The overall intent of the first image is to be somewhat erotic as it is very much in contact with the viewer and looking to evoke a stimulated response where as the second image is disconnected and more a study of the body than a sexually charged portrait.
The lighting in #1 is a 36" octabox on a boom arm above and just out of frame
In the second image she is lit with the same setup but I have added a 4x8 sheet of white foam core just out of frame camera left to help open the shadow side of the image a little and have also opened up the exposure by a stop and adjusted my physical perspective to the light to present a different look. I rarely shoot from a single perspective and have a tendency to move my feet a lot while shooting, particularly when working with directional lighting.
As far as cropping these to provide anonymity and make them straight figure studies, I frequently do exactly that because makes them less threatening and more saleable as wall art though with the these 2 image I would not do so as it would orphan the models arm and hand which would have little to no context if the head was cropped away. When looking to create the anonymous figure study I will typically pose the model and compose the crop in camera rather than cropping in post. The other images I have posted in here show various forms of anonymizing the model either by virtue of cropping or posing.
