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Jacques, 

 While the pose is nicely planned you seem to have some trouble in your lighting.  Much of the highlight area is burned out, losing all sense of texture and tone.  If you changed the exposure to allow texture to appear in the highlights to allow variety of tonality and texture, you would completely underexpose the shadow areas, losing all of that texture.

 Classically this is called "soot & chalk" lighting, a term that film photographers used to apply to each others work when the lighting ratio exceeded the range of their film.  The ratio of digital sensors is even less than film.

 Ansel Adams, the famous black and white film photographer tried to work with a 10 stop range of exposure on film.  Digital only has a 5 stop range.  Perhaps looking for books or urls with words like "portrait lighting" and "lighting ratios" would give you some help.

My regards,

Jerry

Thank you Jerry - I appreciate your time and advice!