The Mirror shot " Blood: 'sweat and tears' "

I've been playing around with ideas to add to a well known image .
Since I never had anyone to model for me initially I had to set everything up and try to look down the lens with the mirror and hope for the best .
First you set the camera to manual mode , iso 200 , 1/200th [ max flash synch mode for the D90] and then dial in aperture until it shows "-2" on the meter .
The light kept changing so I was at F18 for a while , then the sun went behind the clouds and I was down to F9 , then things got bright again and I had to move to f22 ... with clouds you have to keep checking where the ambient is sitting according to the meter and make adjustments .

Of course I kept the image of my face small until I could find a better looking model ;)

Jessica is from Canada , on a working holiday in New Zealand . She also has a Nikon D90 and helped out with my last wedding . She wants to be a traveling photographer one day .

She agreed to help me after work on Sunday afternoon and I think we got some good shots .
None of these images have had any photoshop work done on them , I prefer to be able to say they are straight out of the camera . [ one or two were cropped ] .

Occasionally you get a lucky accident in the background .

Jessica suggested most of the variations [ luckily]

Then there's my twist on the image . I wanted something different and while I was thinking about the prospect of someone getting their hand cut on the sharp edges [ I had put glue on the edges for safety ] , I realized that the blood could possibly look like 'sweat' and if it dripped in the right place 'tears' so after shopping around for the right colour paint I came up with 
"Blood: ' Sweat' and 'Tears' " .
[Update: Nobody on the forums really liked these images with 'blood' in them so it was a bit of a learning experience - I got a little carried away with the concept without actually thinking about what other people might think of the final images ]

Then there were one or two others that were interesting like "Turtle-neck" [ Update : This was the unanimous favourite on 7 different forums ]

And Jessica also suggested we do a 'photographer' shot as well ....

It's not easy , having the paint in the right place , and the lighting , getting the model to line it all up properly , hold it there and get the right facial expression all at the same time - something to work on next time I suppose ! 
We actually ended up with better contrast with the ambient at -2.3 .[ update , even though ''-2.3'' looked good on the camera screen and the computer it printed out way too dark - next time I won't go below -1.7 for the background ]