Your Best Portraits

This image I call "The diamond earring".
This is Arnold who is a professional dancer and occasional model. I took this image in his kitchen using a single flash gun, off camera and placed in a small Lastolite soft box.
The lighting was all under my control. The biggest challenge was to position the light and subject in a way to achieve a dark background and a moody feel to the image. Arnold posed as I directed him.
I cropped the image slightly to remove the soft box from the top right corner, cloned out a hot spot on Arnold's nose and added a soft glow effect using Nik software to improve the contrast. I enjoy the way his hat compliments his skin tones.