1920's style shoot

[Derrel]

I'm not so sure about the 1920's always being high lighting ratio...here's a short video that has multiple studio publicity images of famous American silent film actress Louise Brooks. A good number of these have fairly moderate lighting ratios, with a soft, delicate, almost ethereal quality to the final images. Louise Brooks was the subject of the fairly well-known song and video "Pandora's Box", performed by by OMD, or Orchestral Manoeuvers in The Dark.

Louise Brooks Rediscovered Silent Film Star - YouTube

Here's the OMD video link, which is one of my favorite videos of all time: Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - Pandora s Box - YouTube

 

[bribrius]

She's styled quite nicely and had a nice look herself. Lighting should be much higher ratio if you want the image itself to look retro.

like 4-1? thoughts?

I'm gonna be brave enough to admit to being a dunce here ... What exactly do you mean by the ratio? Shadow area to highlight, as in highlight should be 4x brighter (2 stops?) than shadow region?

just the ratio of light camera right vs. camera left. In this case you are about 2-1. Standard portraiture. 2 on the right (window side) 1 on the left (reflector side). the higher the ratio the more shadow the more dramatic the effect. Up to you how dramatic you want it.

edit: looking again, you are probably 3-1 on her neck between 2-1 and 1-1 on her face. Reflector is working great, window light could use some direction and diffusing (see how bright her neck is compared to her face). I dont think i would want her neck brighter than her face on the right side. just me. I am not a portrait pro just learning myself

 

[Tittan]

Also, to the OP ... Where was your focus point? Tip of nose? Or the right eye? Reason I ask is ... It seems to me like maybe the nose is sharper than the eyes?

My focus point was at least supposed to be on the right eye, but I might have derped.

 

[Tittan]

When it comes to the ratio, I spent some time looking at portraits from the 1920's before this shoot, and decided to try for a soft 2:1 ratio, as I think it looks good. The photographers back then seem to either go for 2:1 or an extreme ratio. Examples of this are found here: Marion Davies Circa Late 1920s-early by Everett for the style I went for, or here: http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/images/1920i.1-600w.jpg for the more extreme ratio.

It seems to me that most women were photographed with 2:1, while men had a larger ratio, but that might of course be bad research on my part.