For reference photos take it with a camera with a decent zoom. Zoom all the way and stand back far enough to completely frame the head. That will get rid of some of the prespective problems. I still have a hard time believing you put the image as a backdrop template so I will explain how.

take the photo into photoshop. crop the image till you have just the head. In photoshop you have layers and color channels. Go into the channels option box. there is a little triangel around the top right of that option box. click on that and choose create a new channel. It will say something like alpha1. click create or apply. Now click back on the layers and it will give you back your drawing. Select the face carfully with the Lasso or color picker. have the whole face selected. Now go back into you channels with the face selected. pick the alpha channel you created. Use the fill tool and fill that selection in with white. Done with that. Go into the edit from the menu across the top and pick image size. Write down the hight and wide. example would be 650 pixels wide, 780 pixels high. Save the image as a TGA and close. Repeat this with the second reference.

Open Maya. Create a Lambert material. Under color assign the image you created.


create a plane with measurments the same as you reference image. If the reference image was 650 pixels wide then make the width of the plane around 6.5. it the hight was 780 make the hieght 7.5. Assign the lambert material to it. Press 6 to turn on the texture and there you go.