Portrait Photography

Last week, my wife wanted to renew her passport so she went to the nearby studio to take some passport-sized photos. The results came out quite unflattering. Over-exposed face, distorted perspective, wrong pose etc. etc. I would have posted the sample photo taken by the studio but I fear for my life :)
Anyway, I suggested that I take the studio shot as I have the basic equipment required to take portrait photos, plus a photo printer to do the printing and a photo cutter to make it look like a professional job.
This is the first time I have attempted an actual portrait photo so I wanted to make a good job of it. I setup my blue backdrop and arranged the 2 wireless flash units on each side pointing upwards so that they will bounce off the white ceiling giving an even distribution of light. The Nikon D70 was setup with it's master flash covered with a flash diffuser pointing straight at the subject (that's my wife), but with the power reduced to eliminate over-exposure.
I fitted the camera with the superb 50mm 1.8 lens opened to it's optimum optical performance of F8. The shutter speed was manually set to 125th of a second, and the 3 flashes took care of providing the sufficient light to make this work.
The resulting photo was slightly photoshopped with some healing brush and some minor adjustments. I think I will stick to home-made portraits for the family in future.