COP3 Lighting Techniques Research: High-Key

Context of Practice 3 Lighting Techniques Research: High-Key Lighting
To begin with I wanted to start looking at different lighting techniques to first see how to create them so I could identify them more correctly in a scene when looking at photographs and reference images. This was an excellent starting point and reading through lighting books really started to help me in my context of practice study. The first lighting technique I started by looking at was high-key lighting. High-key lighting is a technique that is based around using mid-tone grays to bright whites to help eliminate shadows and reduce the contrast in a picture. In early film production they were not good at shooting film that had bright contrasts and used a range of shadows that went from extreme black all the way through to white so they starting using this technique to be able to get rid of the harsh shadows and help reduce the contrasts in the final outcome but this did limit the expressions on actors faces slightly, but since then this has been improved with the addition to new digital cameras and modern technology.

‘High-key images have a predominance of white or very light tones and tend to look light and airy. High-key lighting is often (often not always) soft, and detail is generally low. In nature high-key lighting is found in fog and snow, where even shadows are light due to the amount of reflected light bouncing around.’

 Light for Visual Artists: Understanding & Using Light in Art & Design

So as the industry tends not to use this technique any more, why do we still have it? Well, it's an artistic choice really and one that does look very nice, especially for portraits and you get such a pure white colour on the faces and it can really make the subject look more youthful.  

'A basic studio lighting set up for high-key photography consists of a key light and a fill light, with your key light two times the brightness of the fill. The background should be lit independently–preferably with two lights positioned three to five feet away at 45-degree angles. These background lights should be at least one stop brighter than your subject lighting. This will result in the blown-out background that you’re looking for in a high-key image.'http://www.digital-photo-secrets.com/tip/3558/using-lighting-style-to-create-mood-high-key-and-low-key-lighting/

'Lighting does not always have to be perfectly balanced with a complete range of tones. Like color, different styles of lighting can produce different moods, and two of the most extreme examples of this can be found in high-key images and low-key images' 
http://www.digital-photo-secrets.com/tip/3558/using-lighting-style-to-create-mood-high-key-and-low-key-lighting/

Hopefully I can portray this into an environment though as it can be ideal for an outdoor lighting situation where the landscape is very under a very flat light, such as on an overcast day where you do not get a lot of shadows coming through as this is the reduced contrast look photographers try to achieve. Most key lighting is really only used in photography now to create some really beautiful shots and again help eliminate shadows and harsh lines on the subjects face, but I believe that I can experiment later on with the technique to see if I can bring it into an environment and hopefully light it in an interesting way, obviously this is not going to produce a look of realism to the scene, but it might be nice to see what kind of effect it would produce on different objects and the environment as a whole.

I found this nice example of how to create key lighting in a scene, which could be very useful in the future when I am looking at how I can potentially use it in a scene. All credit is on the image already. 

Really nice photograph from popphoto.com for a competition based around high-key lighting. This beautiful picture is called Bug on Jar by Eva Bareis, its a really lovely example of high-key lighting.