High Key Light­ing Setup

With a white back­drop and a few pieces of white foam board, it’s easy to cre­ate a high key light­ing setup. The shot above shows the basics. Four pieces of foam board held together with gaffer’s tape help cre­ate the high key box on the set. In this case, we had a stu­dio with a white cyc wall, but the same setup could work just as eas­ily with white seam­less paper.

We taped two pieces of 4×8 foam board together to cre­ate a V-​flat. Then we put a stu­dio light behind each one aimed at the back­ground. Just using those two lights gives us the high key back­ground as you see above, but it’s not the entire setup yet. You can tell by look­ing at the light on my friend Steve and our model. Also, take a look at the gra­da­tion of light on the V-​flat walls. You can use that fall-​off to your advan­tage, but also to reflect very soft light back on your sub­ject. It’s best to bring your sub­ject away from the wall into an area inside the box, or else you can really cre­ate a nuclear appearance.

You could just put two lights off-​camera aimed at the back­ground to cre­ate a high key light­ing setup, but there are some advan­tages of using the V-​flats. Per­haps the best rea­son is to avoid any flare from those lights com­ing back into cam­era. You’re flag­ging off the light so it goes where you want. The other rea­son is to cre­ate that soft area of light between the pan­els. Although the back­ground is too bright and harsh, it reflects light onto those V-​flats and cre­ates another light source that can wrap around your sub­ject. If you’d like to min­i­mize the light from one side, use foam board that’s black on one side and white on the other. Just flip the V-​flat around to make the side­light seem more directional.

Cre­at­ing a Sil­hou­ette Light­ing Setup

With­out adding another light, you can use the setup we’ve described so far for sil­hou­ettes. Just bring your sub­ject in front of the V-​flats to to elim­i­nate some of the light. You’ll end up with a soft wrap­around back­light, such as on this photo.

Adding a Key Light

All we’ve really done so far is cre­ate a high key back­ground. You can do some nice things with the back­ground in this setup using gels to add color or a cucol­oris to cast a pat­tern on your back­ground. How­ever, you still need to put a key light on your sub­ject. The idea is to make a dis­tinc­tion between your back­ground lights and your key light. Here’s an exam­ple with­out a key light to show what I mean.

This is Steve being his charm­ing self. He’s inside the box and it’s reflect­ing soft light back on him. How­ever, it’s not really bring­ing out his fea­tures. You can iden­tify him, but this back­light and wrap­around from the V-​flats isn’t mak­ing him pop. Once I add a key light — in this case, an Elinchrom 53″ Midi Octabox — you can see that he pops quite a bit more in the next photo.

That’s all there is to cre­at­ing a high key light­ing setup. The lights behind the V-​flats in this sce­nario were using 8″ reflec­tors aimed at the back­ground. You can use what­ever mod­i­fier you like for your key light, since it’s not really inter­act­ing with the back­ground lights. Go ahead and throw in a beauty dish or a soft box. Use the wrap from the box inside the V-​flats or move your sub­ject for­ward to elim­i­nate any spill. Used in this high key man­ner, you could put down a piece of take and start shoot­ing a prod­uct cat­a­log if you needed.

One More Thing

If you want to use your sub­ject for com­posit­ing onto another image in post, just turn off the lights behind the V-​flats and let the back­ground fall to grey. You just use your key light and, if you wish, use the V-​flats for some frontal wrap­ping light on your sub­ject. It’s a great way to sep­a­rate your sub­ject from the back­ground and make things eas­ier to cutout later in Photoshop.