How was this done circa 1900

[jeff__2]

How was this lighting done? circa 1900 photo<div></div>

[dai_hunter]

Couple of possibilities there:

 

Natural light alone

 

Natural light + flash {probably as flash powder}

 

Natural light on the subject + "lime light" on the BG

 

"lime light" x 2

 

All combined with skillfull printing techniques.

 

BTW for those who don't know about "lime light" the term comes from theatre but relates not to the colour (of light) but rather the method of creating it - burning a piece of mineral "lime" in a gas flame produces an intense white light far greater than the gas flame alone. Chemically, it works very much like the mantle in modern camping lanterns. "Lime light" can also be placed behind a lens to give it directionality and focus like a spot light.

[jeff__2]

I mostly can't figure out the background.

How did the photographer get such white/black contrast behind the subject?

[._._z]

Large (north?) window light spilling into bg, with some bounce fill on face.

[john lehman, college alask]

Probably natural light with an angled background. Certainly not fill flash, since that was not used until the 1920's with the development of flash synchronizers (flash powder was problematical indoors anyway - it tended to start fires)

[david_goldfarb]

I'm also guessing this was done in a natural light studio with blinds to control the light. There may also be some retouching involved.

[bill c.]

Jeff-- As someone who studied and copied numerous types of historic lighting techniques for my thesis, I can tell you that one common technique was to have a wall of bottles filled with blue water on the sun side of the studio. This was done because the "film" was sensitive only to blue light and it made the subjects squint less. This looks like it MAY have been the technique used in your sample image. One thing that leads me to think this might NOT have been the case, however, is the clear eyes. In the blue-bottle studios, the exposures were so long that the subject often blinked at least once during the exposure. Exposures got down below a minute or so sometime in the 1870's, but keep in mind that the old techniques held on in some places for years.

 

On the other hand, as one respondent mentioned, it could have been just a simple northlight studio with curtains modifying the light.

 

Getting the counter-shadows (that's when the shadows on the background run counter to the shadows on the foreground, so the dark side of the face stands out against a light part of the background and vice-versa) isn't really that hard, just a gobo (in this case probably another curtain) between the backdrop and the lightsource and angling the backdrop just the right way.

 

Keep in mind that photographers back then used view cameras and rather wide apertures, which gave the resulting image a certain compression and selective focus. Using smaller formats, your mileage may vary quite a lot.

 

Happy shooting. -BC-