As a member of Finnish Professional Photographers’ Association I was privileged to do a workshop for other FPPA’s members. Theme of the day was high key lighting, white light and white background. To celebrate “White Day” I wore white shirt 😀 (nothing to do with that fact that I haven’t have time to laundry…)
At first demo I created high key lighting with classic Rembrandt lighting.
In high key lighting main idea is to create white reflective surrounding area around model. Light reflects from white surfaces and that lightens shadow parts of model’s face. I used multiple white reflectors and one zebra reflector. I wanted to warm up a bit shadows parts.
I don’t think Lastolite TriGrip is useful in studio conditions, but that was all I had this time. In studio I would prefer Lastolite Triflector. It has has tree reflectors attached to each other and you can modify their angle one by one (kuva: Jarkko Viljanen).
Then I just changed background to black one and didn’t light it at all.
In high key lighting your target is create lighting where you use mostly light tone values, basically all the tone values are between white and 0,5 stop from it.
Again I was missing my white board… have to buy portable one 😀 (kuva: Jarkko Viljanen)
Even though high key lighting was the main theme I demonstrated few diffrenet lighting styles to portrait photographers.
In first demos I used soft light and large light sources. In this one I changed some lights sources smaller and made all of them to produce harder light (took out diffusers from soft boxes). In main light I used Elinchrom 44×44 cm with grid as light modifier.
In this one I used honeycomb 8° and large barn doors in main light as light modifiers. I also changed Rembrandt lighting to Butterfly lighting (kuva: Jarkko Viljanen).
Something between – some soft light and some hard light. If you use diffuser between model and studio strobe you can create harder light than just with large light source. If you move light souce closer to diffuser light turns out harder and if studio strobe is farther away from diffuser light is softer.
I find this kind of lighting style gives some boost to normal soft light created by large soft box. And still your model can move freely and it’s easier for you to catch expressions and feelings (kuva: Jarkko Viljanen).
It’s all about light…. and especially the nature of it 🙂 (kuva: Jarkko Viljanen)
Me in my white shirt 😀 (kuva: Jarkko Viljanen)
Thanks for all FPPA’s members who participate my high key photography workshop. I really anjoyed our day together. I hope you did too 🙂