High Key Lighting

High Key Lighting

High key photography is a modern lighting technique that is based on using mid-tone greys through to bright whites. The use of bright lights and lighting to eliminate shadow reduced the contrasts in the picture.

 

The light diagram above shows the set up in a studio when photographing high key lighting. The model has to be in front of the main light rather than the rear flash lights because it will be too light. As the rear lights are brighter they will be too bright for the model whereas standing in front of the main light will be better as the f stop is lower. The lighting ratios between the main light and the rear flash lights is 1:2 because the rear lights are twice as bright as the main light. The reflector is used to reflect the light onto the subject to make it a bright as possible

High Key Lighting Experiments

Rear lights at f5.6

Rear lights at f8

Rear lights at f11

From the experiments that I have carried we can see the difference that the rear lights make. The soft box f stop stayed the same throughout all of these image, f8. The camera settings stayed the same also, f8, shutter speed at 1/125 and ISO 200. From the three pictures above we can see that when increasing the f stop of the rear lights the image gets brighter. F11 was the best outcome because the background is completely white whereas the other images the background is not completely white. To improve the image at f11 we could have changed the f stop of the soft box as this would've made her face slightly darker. I think I have experimented with this technique well and I am able to set the studio equipment out to enable me to perform this technique again.