We did a mic test for this one. She makes YouTube videos so for this photo session we used her microphone and went with a dramatic 2 light setup. Make no mistake, I’d still consider this a complex setup because it uses a boom stand which allows me to hang a light overhead. Boom stands are not cheap.
For this look I told her to rant about something and she went all in. Doing so got her to give some expressions with attitude. This just gets back to the same things I’ve been drumming on about for a while. Give your subject something to hold and something to do. This will get them to relax and get their body and facial features more in line with what you are trying to do.
Finally, her little sister popped in, so we did some big sister - litter sister shots. Two good tricks for siblings is “looking at each other” and “putting heads together.” Both of these tricks work well in getting a look you might be going for or at least getting into a general ballpark of what you want for these kinds of shots. Once you get to the right ballpark then it’s just a matter of tweaking the setup, but this will all come down to the personalities involved and the time you must dedicate to a session. In this case, a four-year-old isn’t very patient for long so we moved quick.