Working on finding the light...

[The_Traveler]

Not to argue, but I'm calibrated as well. You're supposed to expose to the right. The thing in the top corner is at 255 which is the absolute max, but his face/hair are perfectly exposed. I've used Color Munki and spyder3(I think it was 3)

Exposing to the right doesn't mean you have to leave it there.

True, but it doesn't mean its overexposed either.

Actually that's exactly what it means.
Exposing to the right means that you increase the proper exposure to ensure you get as much detail in the shadows as you can without blowing the highlights.
The original looks overexposed; there's little or no color in his cheeks.
What you don't see is the ruddiness one gets when you compress the flesh under the chin and force the blood into the cheeks.
You also can't see the blanching of the hands that occurs when they prop the chin this way.
What you can see is the silhouette of the shooter against the window in the catch light in the pupil.

So, if you upright the picture, bring the center down in levels, edit the catchlight and darken the hands so they aren't so bright, you get this.
It looks more natural to me, but the OP gets to choose what he likes to see, of course.

 

[The_Traveler]

And, BTW, this is beautifully sharp.
If you repeat this pose, you can do two things to make it a bit different.
Get him to lie slightly at an angle to the light so you get more surface texture and get him to raise his face off his hands just a bit to unpooch his cheeks.

Oh, and watch the vertical line.

Nicely done, I think.

Lew

 

[Bossy]

Thanks Lew. I do see how that looks better with values than the first. It must be personal taste on style then, for the lightness. My opinion of overexposed is blown whites, which I don't see on his face or skin. I see tonal values as well in the areas you said there isn't color, peach and reds etc. There isn't anywhere that is hot on my screen except the corner white blob, but it is flatter than your edit for sure.

I calibrated a couple weeks ago. I'm on a mac at mid-brightness. I'm here to learn!

 

[SCraig]

... My opinion of overexposed is blown whites, which I don't see on his face or skin....

Blown highlights are extreme overexposure unless they are in an unimportant area of the shot. For example shooting a portrait into the sun can easily cause the sky visible behind the portrait to be overexposed, yet the portrait itself would be perfectly exposed.

Same with underexposure. Completely blocked up shadows are extreme underexposure but that is frequently the case when using a flash. In cases like that it's meaningless because the subject itself is normally properly exposed.

You can't always judge exposure on one small area of a photograph. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Bright, overexposed highlights will frequently draw the eye away from the subject yet used properly they can draw the eye TO the subject. As with everything else in photography there are no cut-and-dried rules, only guidelines.

In the case of this photograph I looked at the histogram and saw that the bulk of the tones were shifted to the right. What I felt should have been close to neutral gray, the iris of his eyes and the gray tone in the upper left corner, were light gray. These led me to call it slightly overexposed, and when I shifted everything to the left the saturation became bolder and the skin tones darkened slightly. To me it looked better but that wasn't my call to make since I didn't shoot the photograph.