love this photo , how could i do it?

Hi

i love this photo

http://www.artlimited.​net/image/en/252196


i tried to take some shots
i used the a 5d mark 2 and a 85 1.8 spot on the face +2/3

but i can not get such esposure
or i save the safe , and the rest is blow away
o i can seve the background ,but i can't obrain such exposure

may someone help me?

thanks
cheers

ps all the shots i took are deleted , i was so angry

The subjects face is actually underexposed to me. Just looks like they shot it into the setting sun and allowed the light to flood into the lens with out a lens hood. That is the glow you'll get if you aren't standing in the shade or have a lens hood on. Does this make sense?

A lot is going to depend on getting the right angle shooting into the sun, as that is what creates the effect around the head and the flare into the lens. I suspect that a reflector was used to bounce some light back to the face. The image is also colorised, which is giving it that yellow tint, and there is likely to be other things done to it in PP as well. It will almost certainly have involved some exposure correction to specific parts of the image, the difference between the sunlight streaming into the lens, with the face and body in shadow (even with a reflector) will have seen to that.

I have done similar types of shot, with the subject backlit by the sun and even using a reflector on the parts of the subject out of the light, they needed serious work in post to bring them up. You seem to have hit the same issue as you say you could save the subject or the background.

The key to the whole thing though, isn't so much getting your exposure right (you can easily bracket a few shots to ensure that) but getting the lighting right. As with all shots of this nature, the lighting is everything. Get the angle right with the sun, reflect more back on the subject to stop them being too underexposed and bracket your exposures to make sure you get that right. Then work on it in photoshop, you may find that you end up combining elements from differently exposed images.

That shot though, is definitely not just a matter of 'getting the exposure right', there is far more to it than that.