She’d kill me if she knew I posted this
My wife I mean. This is actually a lighting test shot from my blog post earlier this week, but has now become my latest in my 52 week project (that just so happened to be on hold for about a month!). So Melissa was holding our second son, Damien, while I got everything set up as I needed. So she wasn’t really paying much attention to me, though Damien was very fascinated with everything I did. So, I liked how this looked at the beginning, but then somehow, I think it was the background, it reminded me of a renaissance chiaroscuro painting. So I cropped to a square orientation, did some color adjustments and other stuff to further create this look. For some reason or other I also gave a slight burnt edge appearance. I think this turned out quite well for what I was going for. What are your thoughts?
Renaissance Portrait
on amazon. It was probably the cheapest I could find in the size I wanted with as many modifiers in one piece as possible. It has a diffuser as the innermost circle, with different types of covers for different modifiers. The cover that zips over the diffuser is gold on one side and white on the other side. Then if the cover is flipped it has black on one side and silver on the other. At full size it is 43″ in diameter, but handily it folds down to be 1/3rd that size. Here I have a photo showing all the different modifiers in one. Most of them are self-explanatory as to what they are, but I will say that the diffuser is the one on the floor and the white cover reflector is the one behind my head. 
on camera pointed to the side with the catchlight panel pulled out, just to add some sparkle in the reflection of the eyes. And yes, that’s me making faces for the camera. I removed the color just to put more emphasis on how the light itself is working. Below I will go into a little more detail.