No I haven't taken up a new profession...
I thought I would share a shot taken of me by my classmate, Nicolas St Pierre. There are six of us enrolled in an advanced lighting class and the assignment we are working at is to take two images showing how studio lighting can be used to tell a visual story. The end product (due in 4 weeks) is to create a magazine cover that show the same person, in the same outfit in a good and bad light. We have to use our own lighting equipment to create the image.
There are six of us in the class and every person in the class is a very accomplished photographer.
This is the "good" me. I am standing in front of a scrim with a 24" beauty dish creating the "halo". Two strip boxes on either side are used to create the rim light and a 7 ft umbrella right in front of me is being used as the key light and is providing on-axis light.
We had 45 minutes to set everything up and get at least one decent workable image. This is probably the biggest challenge because it real life, it would take a couple of hours of setup and testing to be ready to do the shot.
Our instructor is a well known commercial photographer who works with a lot of "A-list" companies for their advertising campaigns. http://www.adrienduey.com/about.html