Low Key Beauty - Definition Post

Low key lighting is a style of photography whereby the images are dark and highlight the contours of an image, this technique throws various tones of light and dark, this style is typically known to be a more masculine lighting due to darker tones. 

 Beauty photography usually focuses on portraiture, and fashion, these images are usually of females; however they can sometimes be of men also.

The different types of equipment will be using on this shoot include the following:

Key light- the main light used to light up the subject.

Beauty dish- a flexible circular dish. If this dish is silver then the lighting will be more directional; whereas, if this dish is more white then the light will be more diffusive. 

Diffusion Shock- this is a cover placed over the key light, it helps soften the light and make it more diffused. 

Honeycomb- this helps control the direction of the light 

Fill light- this is the light which is placed under the beauty dish, this helps reduce the amount of shadows on the subject.

Back light/clip light- this light helps when separating the subject from the background, specifically their hair. 

We will also be using: a tripod, a camera, a light meter, and a subject to photograph. 

The above image is a screen shot from our powerpoint this lesson, whereby it shows how our light diagram that we will create after our shoot should look, my version will be in my work diary. We use light diagrams so that if we want to reshoot, then we can easily know how to set up our lights and where our subject was positioned. 

The above images demonstrates a lighting diagram, and how this creates the final image, we do not know the camera settings, but this would allow us to set up our studio to gain a similar effect. A light meter would be used to help us determine our camera settings.

Last year in our AS studies, we touched upon low key lighting, therefore I already have an idea of what the effect is like, however I have never used gels to cover the lights previously. Gels are coloured sheets which cover the studio lights in order to reflect colours onto the individual.