BoA

I like the way you shaped the light in this drawing. I mean the overall light/shadow proportion and the way the light streams into the figure. You mentioned something about a transition from manga-style art to real-life art, if I'm not mistaken. I've faced the same problem, or more likely I'm facing it over and over again, because I do both very often. It really is hard, but as you draw more real-life art, you'll find it easier. Me, personally, I often find things in the way I darw real-life people that are traces of my style in manga. I gues you can't really draw a line between the two.
I think what is the greatest diffrence between manga style and real-life drawing(and painting for that matter) is in the number of values. Usually manga has, in the most cases two, or three values-shadow and light or shadow-halftone-light. Technically, you can achieve volume with just line, but it's really hard, so you need to draw the light/shadow in an object. For example, in this drawing, I think it would look nice if you have more values in your dark parts-the hat(?) and jacket. Determining which are the darkest parts within the dark parts themselves would help. maybe you've done that, but I can't see it well on the scan.
Well, this was a rather long comment, sorry if you were bored. -__-'
And one more thing-drawings from a phtograph, from my experience, usually don't turn up well, i'm not sure why.