Help with lighting and background
 

I need some help ASAP. My sister's boyfriend needs to do a picture for the front of his recital program and is asking me for advice on lighting and such. I am only a lowly nature photographer and haven't gotten into the people aspect yet.
He's doing the picture with another girl and this attachment is their inspiration. They want to recreate it somehow. I live way too far away to have anything to do with the actually taking of the picture, but I could help with the digital darkroom. I'm not sure how they should set up the lighting and background though. Any ideas?

Hello Trinity.

Not too sure what you're asking here. Are you being asked for advice on post-processing, or is your sister looking for advice on how to set up the shot in the first place?

Some information on the facilities your sister has available would help. Is this going to be taken by someone working in a studio, or an "enthusiast" working in their home?

Some basic advice I would give is to look carefully at the backgrounds that are available in the location of the shoot, and really work camera angles that can get distractions out of the picture. Using a wide open aperture will reduce the depth of field and throw the remaining "clutter" out of focus for the stuff that simply cannot be removed.

The picture you have chosen as inspiration shows quite a wide angle of view. To get this much of the people in the shot, indoors, requires quite a big room. Avoid using a wide angle lens at close range if you can't get far enough back, it will give an unflattering distorted view.

The inspiration picture shows a mix of natural light and flash. Given the location of the window, this will be quite tricky to replicate without some work on flash technique; it all depends how practiced the shooter is with this mix of lighting and also factors such as which way the window is facing, time of day, and other such things. It may be a lot easier to not have mixed lighting.

I'm sure someone else will be along soon to give advice.

Duncan

As Duncan has suggested it will require some expertise and daylight/flash balance to replicate this in detail, however...

Assuming the room they intend to use has a large well lit 'picture' window as the sample you've shown then it may be possible to replicate it without too much extra gear.

The first thing they'll need is a sufficiently bright enough day to ensure reasonable shutter speed and aperture to achieve depth of field.

At approx 45 degrees to the window, facing the models a large white sheet can be used to reflect the light back into them, giving a soft light effect to the front.

It won't be an exact match but it will go someway to replicating the image.