Reconstruction of a photo

Another assignment was the careful reconstruction of a photo, in order to learn to look at light and shadows to determine how photo's are taken.

My first choice was this photo, a slightly mysterious photo of a youth in St. Petersburg, smoking inside some sort of concrete structure.
I decided against it as after some discussion in class we still couldn't figure out what that bright "beam" was on the right hand side of the photo.

Second option:

Picasso, as photographed by Irving Penn. Rather distinctive use of light and shadow, which would be quite suitable for the excercise, as they defined enough to judge whether I'd get the final picture exactly right.
As model I asked a friend, even though he sadly didn't have the pronounced wrinkles (yet). In my opinion the wrinkles were of less importance than having a model that I could work with easily.
The hat was supplied by him, as he by chance actually had one that looked like it.

I determined that there had been a single light source, of what probably was sunlight, above and behind the object. In order to get the fall correct I put Boy (the model) on a desk chair that could rotate, told him to sit perfectly still, and rotated the chair until I was perfectly happy with the fall of the light and the shadow.
My only misgivings are a double irony: I couldn't find a picture on the internet of sufficient quality and size to show the detail that a photo book told me the original photo had. This did hide though that the original photo actually does show detail in the dark side of the face, and I in retrospect should've used some reflector to get a little, little bit of light on the dark side.
Postprocessing got a bit of criticism as to whether the photo was perfectly sharp (a full second shutter time), which lead to some heavy sharpening performed by Else.