Introduction to Lighting

Introduction to Lighting:

Low Key & High Key Lighting

Low key lighting leaves large, prominent areas of dark. This kind of lighting tends to be somber—serious, formal, and dignified in mood. Low-key lighting requires more side and back lighting.

High key lighting has an abundance of bright, diffused light, resulting in slow-falloff of flat lighting.

3 Point Lighting

The technique uses three lights called the key light, fill light and back light. Naturally you will need three lights to utilise the technique fully, but the principles are still important even if you only use one or two lights. As a rule:

• If you only have one light, it becomes the key.
• If you have 2 lights, one is the key and the other is either the fill or the backlight.

Hard & Soft Lighting:

Hard light leaves hard-edged shadows – they are well defined with a clear border. The best example is the shadow from sunlight in a clear sky.

Soft light leaves blurry-edged shadows. When they’re slightly soft you can still make out the shape of the object casting the shadow. A super soft light almost makes believe there’s no shadow, the best example being an overcast day.

Specular light is light that is brighter at the center and then tapers off at the edges. The entire beam doesn’t have an even concentration of light. The light from a torchlight is the best example of this.

Diffused light is light that has an even concentration of light across the beam. It’s as if someone threw a light blanket on the object. Whatever is illuminated is illuminated evenly.