High Key Lighting - Straight Images

Lighting Glossary

Key Light - The main light used to light the subject

Beauty Dish - A circular dish which is flexible - if it's white it is more diffusive, if it is silver it has more contrasted directional lighting.

Diffusion Sock - The cover placed on the Beauty Dish, it makes the light more diffused (more even)

Honey Comb - Something put over the light to control the direction of the light, this restricts the direction of the light

Fill Light - The lighting placed under the Beauty Dish which fills in the shadows

Back Light - This light separates the subject from the background, it's behind the model and it lights up parts such as the hair.

Lighting Diagram:

High Key lighting

High Key lighting is a lighting style for film, television or photography that aims to reduce lighting ratio present in the scene. This was originally done for technological reasons, since television and film didn't deal well with high contrast ratios, but now is used to suggest an upbeat mood.

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.

Camera Settings: If the light meter is set to F8, and we want to make it +2 exposure then you add two more f stops to it so it would be F10, if the background is overexposed then you can change it to a lower F stop. We need more light on the background than on the foreground.