Studio Lighting for Portraits (Part Three)

Hi Key Lighting:

Hi Key lighting usually persists of a lot of lights, with the background being fairly bright. So for this task we used 4 lights.

Instead of playing around with lights infront of the subject or using one light behind, this time we added 2 lights that lit up the background to make it appear white in the photos, we used umbrellas to spread out the light so that it wouldn't look 'blocky' and the small poles slide through the reflectors that attach on the lighting heads.

(ISO - 100) f11 1/100

This is what the lights do, they make the background not appear grey, but white and very very bright. They usually have to be set quite high on the brightness number too, but not too much more than the front lighting, perhaps 2 stops.

(ISO - 100) f11 1/100

And this is with the main and fill light added. You can see the normal tones coming through just like in the previous lighting images blogged earlier. 

(ISO - 100) f11 1/100

(ISO - 100) f11 1/100

 We tried to do some silhouettes, the first attempt was ok but the lights around the subject could have been darker and the background lights may had have to be more brighter. The second attempted didn't work because the set up next to us had their lights turned on at that moment unlike in the last take, in which the light leaked over to our side too!

(ISO - 100) f8 1/100

(ISO - 100) f5.6 1/100

Then the next thing we did was create a typical high fashion style hi key lighting photo, so we opened up the apertures to get over exposed images. Then doing the same again, I changed the white balance too, to tungsten which gave a blue cast to the image which you can see in the second image. It's a good technique if you want a blue toned image!