What is high key photography? There is a lot of discussion about the subject. Some say that photographs with a white background are high key, while others are calling that … a photograph with a white background.
Well technically speaking, in a studio high key photos are on a white background, but there’s more to it than just the background. In high key lighting the quality of light is usually quite homogeneous and shouldn’t produce dark shadows. They should have an overall “light” feel to them, lots of whites and not much contrast. But be aware, a lot of light does not mean over exposed. If you blow out all your whites in the subject, you’ll have an over-exposed image and not a high key photo.
A little more about over exposing your pictures. If you are taking your photograph against a white wall and you want it to be white as it can be, it can be blown out. This is not a problem, because you don’t need the details from the background. Just make sure your subject is exposed in a right way without having blown out parts. Making your background totally white can be achieved by giving it about 1 f-stop extra light in comparison with your subject. So, let’s say your subject is exposed at f11, you should expose your wall at f16. If you expose your wall more, you can have the danger that light from the background spills too much on your subject and then you get a weird halo effect. Which sometimes can be nice as an effect, but often you do not want that to happen. If you are in a large room and your subject can be placed further away from the background, you can even expose your background 2-3 f-stops more than the subject. You can always use gobo’s to place between the background lights and your subject to prevent light spilling unto your subject. The 1 f-stop gap is a good starting point. If you think it can go higher, you can add more stops to the background.
What is an ideal lighting setup to achieve high key photography? In an ideal situation you should have about for lights. Two for the background and two for lighting the subject. You should place two lights in an 45° angle to the background. In front of the subject you can also place two lights in an 45° angle. This is a standard setup. You can play with this or use different kinds of light. The only thing you have to keep in mind is that the light on the subject should be evenly spread and that there are no hard shadows or contrasts. To prevent the light falling on the subject you could use some panels to block light spilling unto the subject from the lights facing the background wall.
High key lighting can be achieved with three lights if you place two lights on the background and use one big light source to light up your subject. If your light source isn’t huge, you could use a reflector screen to light up some shadows. Or do something completely different, like I have tried on a recent shoot.
Sometimes you need to be creative with the options you have. I had a shoot where we wanted to do high key lighting, but there wasn’t a lot of material at hand. I had three speedlights and two white walls. It was a small room and the facing walls had about 5 meters between them. I didn’t have much room to play with.
I put one speedlight behind the subject facing the wall, I put the zoom on the speedlight to wide. The two other speedlights I faced against the opposing wall so it became a giant softbox for equal light on the subject. This setup worked for 75%. The background wall wasn’t evenly lit, so there was a bit of fall off in the corners. In post-production I fixed this. I could have chosen to put two speedlights facing the wall behind the subject in a 45° angle and use the shoot-through umbrella and a reflector I had with me to light my subject. But I really liked the front light coming from the opposing wall so I chose to do some post-production on the end result.
Here’s the lighting setup I used and which required some post-production afterwards:
I hope this post was useful and you enjoyed the read. Feel free to tell me about your own experiences.
