Studio Practice: Recreating a Magazine Cover

Yesterday, I worked on a school photography assignment where we had to recreate a magazine cover photo. I picked one image I liked and planned the shoot with my cousin as the model. Two of my classmates helped me out in the studio, and together we tried to get close to the original photo. It wasn’t a big project, just one of many assignments we have, but it ended up being a really fun experience. Here is the magazine photo we chose to recreate:

We shot in the school studio, but this time we weren’t working with the whole class. That made it feel a bit more relaxed and gave us space to focus. I enjoyed having a chance to do things more independently—even though it was a bit chaotic with people still coming in and out of the studio all the time, grabbing gear or working on their own assignments. The teacher was also helping other groups at the same time, so we mostly figured things out ourselves.

For lighting, we used one big softbox flash. I tried to place the model so that the light would hit her from the side, using just the edge of the softbox. Then we added a reflector in front of the softbox and in front of her face to bring some light back to her skin and make it look softer, like in the magazine photo.

It looked something like this:

We also tried to recreate the hair movement using a fan. In the original image, the model’s hair was beautifully blown back, but we didn’t manage to get the same effect. It wasn’t placed close enough as we were afraid to mess the hair way too much. 😁

The hardest part for me was probably working with others and staying focused while the environment was busy. I’m not the best at group work, especially in school where it gets noisy and distracting. But at the same time, it was really nice to have that bit of freedom—to move around, try different setups, and just test things out without too much pressure.

Here is the final result:

In the end, the photo didn’t come out perfect, but I’m actually happy with how much I learned. I already have a few ideas about what I would do differently next time—how I’d adjust the lighting, the fan, the angle, everything. I think the best lessons come from trying, failing, and figuring it out on your own.

It's sometimes really helpful to try recreating other people's work. You can learn so much from that kind of exercise—not just about lighting or posing, but the whole process. And then you can take what you’ve learned into your own experiments and creations!