Beauty Lighting and Head Shots

Saturday, I watched a video of Peter Hurley doing head shots of various people. He took some amazing shots, but the video was really about his “process.” Debbie was doing a bunch of things and heard it more than watched it. She hated Hurley. He was loud and abrasive and even somewhat abusive with these people. He would say things like “You’re eyes aren’t the same size. Turn your head so the beady one is closer to the camera.” but, he did do something quite interesting.
He had a chart called “How Does Your Inner Child Feel Today?”. It is a bunch of faces that correspond to emotions. He would look at it and randomly choose one of the emotions. He would say, “Show me innocent.” He explained that the expression he got might or might not be something interesting that he could photograph, but he said that the person would always realize they made a silly face and break out with a huge smile.
OK so, today I decided to try some beauty lighting. I powered my beauty dish with the Polaroid PL135 as the key light with a reflector underneath in a clam shell orientation. I added a Qflash T4d as a hair light. I had to power both down as low as they would go to shoot at iso 100 and 1/100, f/2.8 with my 85mm lens.

So, I told Helen to give me Joy.

Then I told her to show me pain.