You can see an adjustable reflector on the left edge of the picture. The darker fabric was lowered or raised in front of the white reflector to control whether light was reflected full length or just on the upper body of the subject.
Most studio photographers today use electronic strobes, all sorts of light modifiers and accessories, and a flash meter or exposure meter. But back in the 1800s to early 1900s, photographers did very nice portraits without any of those things. Just window light and a knowledge of how to expose their photographic plates.
A round scrim, seen at the top-right, was used to control top-light coming from nearby windows.
There’s no excuse for bad studio lighting today because we have total control of the lighting and a digital camera displays instant reviews. But I wonder how many of us could work under the same conditions as 125 years ago.
Not sure which person is Dan but I will guess that the other person might be his brother James Carroll only because Topley photographed the two brothers individually a few months before this portrait.
A round scrim can be seen at the top-left and the adjustable reflector is on the right.
New photographers today could learn a lot by beginning their portrait photography career as if it were 125 years ago. Start with just window light and a reflector. But not at night. :-)
Once you learn window light, and there’s more to it than people might think, it becomes easy to emulate it with electronic strobes, big or small. Electronic flash has many advantages over window light: flash is more controllable, repeatable, has huge output and it works at night. But window light is free and easy to carry.
The skylight has a number of curtains that were used to control the overhead light depending on the time of day and the weather. Also notice the two round scrims in the right-background.
Photo studios in the 1800s through the 1920s were usually purpose-built to include large windows and even larger skylights. Window light was the only option back then.
Many of today’s photo studios are windowless because they’re located in commercial or industrial settings that were never designed for photography. Some studios may have windows but they’re not often used for lighting. Thanks to electronic flash, window light is not required.
Harper photographed Perkins many, many times.
Like most photo studios of the day, Harper’s studio had large windows, a skylight with adjustable curtains and large reflectors.
You can see the large window/skylight with adjustable curtains and a white reflector, on the right, which was probably also used as a background. Johnston also had a large scrim on a wheeled wooden frame.
There are many publicly accessible photo archives which have studio portraits from the mid-1800s and early 1900s. The sharpness, resolution and dynamic range of these old portraits don’t compare to today’s photography. But the use of light and the control of that light are still something you can learn from today.
[A short rant about Library and Archives Canada: The archives are very valuable but the photos available through its website are low resolution, highly compressed image files. Higher resolution and better quality versions do exist but, for some unknown reason, they’re not online. The site’s search function isn’t very good and images aren’t properly or consistently tagged or captioned. Plus, the search results limit how many pages of images you can view. By contrast, the US Library of Congress usually makes high resolution images easily downloadable and there are no viewing limitations.]
Here are a few more window-lit portraits by Canadian photographer William Topley, all from Library and Archives Canada:
Loved it, many thanks for sharing!