High Key Lighting

For this brief, we had to photograph both India and Alex together as a group portrait with high key lighting. Before coming up with any ideas, I wanted to research different high key lighting shoots that other people have done to get an idea of what I wanted the images to look like. To do this, I simply googled 'high key lighting' to see how different people lit their images, and I also looked at tutorials on YouTube. This was just the basis of my research to get more of an understanding of how to light an image, as I've never done studio work before this project.

I then looked at various photographers' work that used high key lighting to see what inspired me the most.

Alan Mahon:

Alan Mahon is a sports photographer who uses both high key and low key lighting. I find all of his images quite inspiring as most of them capture an important moment when the individual/group is doing the sport. Some images are of the individual/group performing their sport, and others are of them simply looking at the camera and posing.

I like the images above because even though they were told to do those positions, there is a natural feel towards them because the individuals look like they are concentrating hard on what they are doing. I think I prefer these action shots to the normal posed 'look at the camera' shots, so when I take my images I want to do something similar, where Alex and India are maybe moving around instead of simply looking at the camera, as I think that's too simple.

George Brooks:

Even though I said that I preferred the action shots to the average posed shots, I think that Brook's work is not just average and it is unique. His studio work is filled with groups or individuals having fun and laughing in front of the camera, which really inspires me.

In these images, you can see that the individuals are having fun in front of the camera and it not just a simple 'look at the camera' shoot. I think that this links everybody in the image together and shows their personality.

In my shoot, I want to do something similar to this in the sense that I want to do something quite lighthearted and almost comical, whilst also showing the individuals' personalities.

Ideas:

After asking Alex and India a few more questions after the initial interview, I found out that neither of them particularly liked being photographed and found it awkward, and so thought it would be interesting to cover their faces with something. Both myself and Will came up with the idea of putting bags on their heads. I had some plain brown bags in my uni room and so we thought it would be good to use these, and maybe draw faces on them. This links to my photographer research because it is lighthearted and fun, but also shows their personality (they don't like being photographed.)

How the shoot went:

I thought that the shoot went extremely well and could not have gone much better. Alex and India did their shoot before ours and I was happy with the light set-up that they did (two lights in front of the individuals and two lighting the background). At first we just got Alex and India to stand still with the bags on their heads while we took photos of them. However the shoot became very laid back as we were playing music at the same time, and they suddenly started dancing around the studio. This was funny but also made some great photographs. I think that because the bags were over their heads and they could not see anything, they were not conscious of anyone watching them and photos being taken and so they did not hold back. I was not anticipating this but was thrilled with the result. I think they both interacted well with each other which made the photos look really effective. I believe that the images are good but funny, which is different to the average High Key photo.

Final Images:

Here are a few of my favourite images from the shoot. They are varied even though they are of exactly the same subject. I like the mixture of poses that they are doing- standing still, dancing, sitting down. This gives me a lot of choice for my final image that I will print out.

Final, printed images:

When editing this image on photoshop, I made it slightly darker and turned up the contrast a little bit, but did not do much else with it. I think that the image is similar to the photographers I researched as the subject is really lighthearted and fun.

Evaluation

I think that this brief was my favourite out of all of the briefs I did in this project because it was the most fun and I think I got some really good photos out of it. We lit the studio a lot differently to how we did in the still life shoot, and it was really interesting to compare how to do different lighting to get more of a knowledge of studio lighting. I am a lot more confident in this area now which will be really useful for the future.

I think that the idea of having bags on their heads is really simple, and initially I didn't know if it would work at all because it might have ended up like the still life shoot. However, it ended up a lot better than I expected and I was really pleased with the result.

I think the reason why it worked so well was because music was playing when we were taking the images, and so Alex and India could relax and almost forget that we were taking photos of them. Also, they had bags over their heads and so could not see each other, or us taking photos of them. This made them relax much more. I think that if they did not have bags on their heads and we asked them to do the same positions, they would have been a lot more awkward and stiff, because they knew exactly when we were taking photos of them and could see us looking at them.