How to achieve this effect? .. and possibly improve on it?

[alihms]

I saw this picture of Jerry Yang, founder of Yahoo, and I like the lighting. The strong shadow coupled with his pensive mood really complements the article about him resigning from Yahoo.

How do you think this was achieved? What's certain is at least there are two lights here. The main one from front (creating that strong shadow) and a smaller one lighting his face. But I suspect, there are more lights involved. His whole body is well illuminated. You can still see the suit's wrinkles even on the left side. Was a reflector used?

Can we improve the setup even more? Can we somehow make the shadow totally uniform? Especially around the head.

[William-Lee]

I believe that this picture is taken using flash from right side because we can see that the shadow is on the left side of the picture.
Since the face is well lighted, there should be another flash on the right as well which is further away from the left most flash.

For example:

---- Jerry Yang

----------- x -------- x

------- Cameraman

The above marked "x" is the flash. That is my opinion about this picture.

[M.Khuzairi]

use few flash with different strength. the right one the stronger one, the middle one to compesate the flash so there is no shadow on the face. @ use defuser to soften the flash in front of the face