This is one of my first attempts at a head shot after watching many hours of instructional videos on the web.
I had only had two speed lights so I placed one the floor behind the model to light the background. The other was placed in a 40" reflective umbrella used as the main light. A reflector was balanced on the models lap since I didn't have a stand to hold it. The light and relector were in the clamshell positions. A large white foam core board was used for the background. The camera was a Canon 70D in manual mode. ISO 200, f/7.1, 1/200sec. The flashes were set to manual too.
The background flash was set to produce a near white background. There was not much distance between the model and the background. So, the light coming off of the background was strong enough to create some subtle edge light on the sides of her face.
Both global and local adjustments were done in Adobe Camera RAW. Light retouching was done in Photoshop and PortraitPro was used for a tiny bit of skin smoothing.