Reply To: 12-09-09 – Low Key

[orionid]

I’m a little confused about this theme. When I looked up Low Key it showed photos that were deep in shadow. Like a face where one half was visable and the other half almost black. Or do we want to show the light sorce?

Traditionally, photography has three types of lighting: Key, fill, and back. Key lighting is generally at an angle, and provides depth to the image. Fill lighting evens out the exposure across the image, and back lighting exposes the background. When all three are used extensively for even exposure (think I love lucy reruns where lucy, ricky and the kitchen in the background are all exposed evenly), that’s called high-key (because the key light is typically above the subject).

Low-key, by defintion, eliminates the back lighting and uses minimal or no fill to allow a maximum of contrast between areas in the exposure (lit and not lit). To get any amount of exposure at all, the key light is typically level with or slightly below the subject, hence low-key.

Rather than trying to get all of fark to wrap their collective minds around this, I went with the one-light requirement, which would effectively force low-key lighting and high contrast photos without having to teach the definition. Whether or not the light itself is in the photo has no bearing on the definition. It typically isn’t, but if you can still pull off a shot where it is, that’s bonus. The one I linked to earlier flirts with not quite being contrast-y enough, which is why I was considering not using it.