Thanks for the comments, folks.
I did this with strobes (Norman LH4000 for the main, LH2000 for the background, P2000D pack), not hotlights, but if I've managed to get a hotlight look, that's a good thing.
That negative etching technique has taken some practice, and I'm still not quite 100% confident about it, but now that I'm getting the hang of it, I realize how useful it is. It was an absolutely standard method at one time. In the age of long exposures and natural light, etching might be used to sharpen a line, as well as to control highlights. If you see a sharp 19th-century photograph of a living child under the age of five, it's very likely been sharpened with a knife. Brooks graduates of a certain generation say that they all had an assignment of photographing a bald model with a strong top light and thinning the hotspot on the neg.
I originally posed Melchi with the organ square in the frame and got three shots off that way, but predictably, he turned around to play with the organ. Fortunately, the Sinar P is very quick to work with, so I was able to reorient the camera, refocus, and even adjust the swing a bit and get two more frames in.
There's even more of a story about the lens. I traded it with a friend of mine for a box of 50 sheets of 4x5" Provia 100F. He bought it along with a Darlot Petzval of the same focal length from a camera shop in the midwest that went out of business and had these old lenses as display pieces. Since I got such a good deal on the lens, I splurged and had SK Grimes make me a custom flange and a set of waterhouse stops, which are perfectly round aperture plates that slip into a slot in the lens barrel, because lenses of this vintage don't usually have iris diaphragms. The photographs my friend made with the film went into a book that came out this year, and photographs from the book are currently on exhibit downtown in Manhattan at the South Street Seaport Museum, so we both came out well.
