Untitled

Think this is my favorite crop: the most spooky-looking (dodging her

eyes helped that too ;)

It is a spooky effect. I suggest that cropping so that her eyes are almost at the margin of the image is not their most effective placement. There are hundreds of articles on photo composition on the web, which all suggest alternative placement of important features of an image.

Your lighting clearly says two artificial sources of light, which is interesting here for the symmetry but psychologically defeats the composition. Because we live on a planet with one sun as the light source, we deeply expect photographs to have a single one casting shadows. Books have been written on the subject, but a basic idea is to have a single light as the "key" light and any others as supplemental to lighten shadows or highlight edges. Casting shadows in two directions screams artificial to us at a deep level of subconsciousness. Maybe this shock value could be harnessed to useful purpose. Let the model raise one hand with a glistening dagger and it all might work very well.

Regards,

Jerry

Yeah, I know about the Golder Ratio (presume that's what you alluded to) and often do my best to follow it, but in this case I made a conscious decision to break that rule: felt placing model's eyes close to the edge would enhance the creepy mood.

The same goes for the lighting, which was never meant to pretend to be natural, so again, creating certain visual effect had the priority and high-contrast symmetrical side lighting was the means to that end. Besides, while we have one sun only, we had artificial sources of light for millennia, so it's not that the phenomena of multiple sources of light is something completely foreign and thus unacceptable to us: two torches, held one in each hand, would have cast a very similar pattern of shadows.

If I may turn around what you said -- that my lighting [...] psychologically defeats the composition -- I strove for a composition (including lighting) that is psychological rather than classical. If it achieved the desired spooky effect, then it served its purpose, making the departure from classical rules justified.

As for the dagger, she actually has one (she does martial arts), and while I have to admit I didn't consider incorporating it, having thought about it now, reckon it's better for me to create mood 'organically', i.e., without props, which would make the pose look too staged and unnatural. I'm just not there yet...