The lighting in this scene is dramatically different from the other pictures we could choose from, which is part of what drew me to it. I'm not great with understanding lighting, particularly in a black and white film (it all sort of looks the same to me, I'm afraid), but this looks like fairly natural lighting. It doesn't look "soft," like some of the later scenes, but maybe that's because I was so tense, thinking about what was possibly going to happen to the wife.
But what really caught my attention was the angle. This is a high-angle shot, meant to emphasize how innocent and harmless the wife is, I believe. And it does just that. She looks so pathetic and alone, with the audience knowing what her husband is planning, yet she sits there patiently, with us looking down on her, and she passively awaits her fate.
It's also, I believe, a long shot, and we can see how alone she is from it. It's creepy; she's surrounded by what very well could become her own watery grave, she doesn't realize it, and there is absolutely no one around who can help her. She looks so small and insignificant.
Really well done, Jen. While it's true, this is likely natural lighting (hard to tell what may have been done to even it out), you might think of lighting in terms of key (high, low, high contrast) and the potential meanings of this.
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