Backlighting

I recently saw some stunning black and white portraits shot with two flashguns, on in front and to the side and the other behind the subject to provide a nice backlit halo effect. It was wet, so I took my little apprentice and part-time model Sarah to the garage and had a go at creating something similar.
The kit was my D90, 50mm f1.8 Nikon lens with my old Nikon SB-28 speedlight and Trish's raher more splendid Canon 580-EX2. The flashes were triggered remotely by a set of youngnuo wireless triggers.

The setup was the SB-28 in front with beauty dish set at 1/2 power with the 580-EX2 behind my subject's head set at 1/4 power. This allowed a shutter speed of 1/60 with a reasonable depth of field for portrait shots.

This gave a nice effect, although having one light off to one side (right) did cause some problems with shadows on the face.

A reflector might have helped here, but I didn't have one handy so opted to move the front light around until we lost most of the shadows.

In terms of processing, Lightroom struggled a bit with the black and white conversions. With a bit of fiddling, the black and white conversion presets that use red and orange filters seemed to work best with the skin tones. Also tried out the bleach bypass preset as well:

I think if we were to try this again, we'd use a reflector for some fill-in light on the other side of the subject's face and hopefully reduce the strength of the front flash gun a little.