Tag Archives: lighting

Origins of the term “High Key” in video lighting.

You’ve probably heard the term High Key as well as Low Key a million times in the world of photography, video and film. But where exactly does the term come from and what exactly does it mean?

I had to ask myself this today when during a discussion about a future shoot it was stated that we would shoot some low key scenes. But I wasn’t really 100% certain in my own mind what that meant. Does it mean dark? Does it mean a low key light level (relative to the background), or is it the positioning of the key light?

Look, this isn’t a term that’s new to me, I’ve come across it many times, but I’ve never particularly liked the term because it always seems to mean slightly different things to different people, so you can never be sure what they really mean.

First of all what is a “key light”? Generally the key light is the main source or most important source of light in a scene. I don’t know the origins of the term or how long it’s been in common use, but it seems to be a relatively new term specific to photography and video.

When I googled “High Key Lighting” I got an equally confusing description of what it is. On Wikipedia for example, high key is described as “High-key lighting is usually quite homogeneous and free from dark shadows”. OK, so that would mean low Key to have dark shadows and not be homogeneous – ie. high contrast. And this doesn’t really seem to match what a lot of people consider low key to be. Elsewhere I came across all sorts of frankly bizarre definitions of high key such as….
High-key lighting creates a clean focus on the center of attention and then in another article it stated that it means that when you use a high-key setup, the key light is stronger than the fill lights. but then went on to say So usually, the shot has very little to no shadows present. Hmmm… how can you have a key light stronger than the fill and then also not have shadows?

Well, at least I know I am not the only one not entirely sure what these terms that get thrown around all over the place truly mean. Let’s face it if I said I was going to make my shots “contrasty” or with “deep shadows” or perhaps “flat” I am sure everyone would be on the same page.  But “Low Key” what does it mean? Is it just dark? Is it contrasty? Is it flat? 

Salome_with_the_Head_of_John_the_Baptist-Caravaggio_1610-588x500 Origins of the term "High Key" in video lighting.The above image is of the painting Salome with the Head of John the Baptist by Caravaggio(1610).

Clearly the main light, what we would normally call the key light is the brightest source of light and it must be relatively bright.  Let’s imagine for a moment that the ratio between the Key light and rest of the scene is 8:1. This ratio is often quoted as the minimum for low key and suggests a bright key relative to the background. As light and contrast is relative you could actually achieve a similar look in a bright room – provided the key is 8 times brighter than everything else and then you stop down or add ND to the camera to bring your exposure down to a reasonable level. The high contrast ratio will ensure the background would be very dark compared to the foreground. But one thing remains, the key light is bright, not dim. It is high, not low compared to the rest of the scene. So where does the term low key come from?

The term Low key has been used in music for a very long time to mean a quiet or deep tone, but I don’t think the image above could be called “quiet” and low key lighting doesn’t always mean very dark, it normally means high contrast and often includes very bright highlights.

I’d like to offer up an idea of where the term actually comes from when applied to photography and video: TV soap and episodic multi-camera lighting. Perhaps when we use the term high key today it is a discombobulation of different concepts and terms and that is why there is often confusion. 

Traditionally daytime episodic TV has always been shot quickly using multiple cameras. To make this possible the lights are normally up above the set suspended from the ceiling on some form of grid or truss system. This ensures that the lights are not seen by any camera whichever angle they are shooting from. In addition the lighting will generally not cast deep shadows so that you can shoot from multiple angles without issue.

High Key isn’t about how bright the scene is, you could be shooting a night scene. But the lights are up high, above the set and the lighting will be free of strong shadows. So High key isn’t about brightness, it’s about contrast and also the key light position, up High so you don’t end up with cameras shooting directly towards the light.

The the opposite of high key will be low key where perhaps the key light is creating a lot more contrast, where the key is brighter than the fill and not only brighter, but perhaps more commonly at a lower height so that the low key light casts shadows across the scene to create a sense of depth rather than just on the floor. Arguably this doesn’t mean the scene will be dark, just that there will be contrast between the key light and the rest of the shot.

So, in summary:
High Key = Uniform lighting of both foreground and background with minimal shadows. But could be either overall bright or overall dark, often with the key light(s), of which there may be many, placed high above the scene/set so you can shoot the scene from any angle.

Low Key: A relatively bright key light so that there is contrast between the key lighting and the rest of the scene/shot. Overall the scene may be bright or dark, but it will have high contrast and shadow areas. Possibly the key light will be at a lower level so the low level key light  will cast shadows across faces and objects to provide depth and modelling.

So many descriptions of High Key and Low Key simply refer to the overall brightness of the scene, this is not correct. A High Key scene can be dim and a low key scene MUST contain areas of great brightness in order to have the contrast associated with low key. All too often stating that the term High Key comes from the use of a bright key light over simplifies the situation to the point where it is no longer clear what is meant because to create nice looking Low Key you will will often need a bright key light.

Please discuss in the comments.

 

Nanlite Forza 300 LED Spotlight

 The Nanlite Forza 300 is a LED COB spotlight normally used with a reflector to provide a 55 degree light cone.

Forza-2_2.3.1-600x338 Nanlite Forza 300 LED Spotlight
Nanlite Forza 300 spotlight with included reflector.

 

The lamp is 300 watts and can be powered from the mains with the included power adapter or vai a pair of V-lock batteries. It is daylight balanced at 5500K and has a CRI of 95 (measured by myself). It has always resulted in very pleasing skin tone whenever I have used it.

Forza-skin_1.12.1-600x338 Nanlite Forza 300 LED Spotlight
Skin tones look good when using the Forza 300 from Nanlite.

 

The 300 watt LED COB emitter produces a similar amount of light to a 3000 watt tungsten lamp. This  makes the Forza 300 suitable for illuminating very large areas or as a source light for a large soft box or for use with large silk diffusers. Nanlite make a very nice parabolic reflectors/soft boxes for the Forza lamps that are very quick to erect due to the use of clever quick locking support arms.

Parabolic-reflector_5.1.1-600x338 Nanlite Forza 300 LED Spotlight
Parabolic reflector/soft box for the Nanlite Forza 300

 

The lamphead has a standard Bowens mount so there are many light modifiers that can be used, but one that I particularly like is the Nanlite zoomable Fresnel adapter. This large fresnel lens can be adjusted to provide a very tightly controlled light beam from just 5 degrees wide to 45 degrees wide. It comes with barn doors and turns the Forza 300 into something comparable to the old Arri 2K fresnel, just without the heat and power draw.

Fresnelbarn-doors_3.1.1-600x338 Nanlite Forza 300 LED Spotlight
Nanlite zoomable fresnel lens with barn doors for the Forza 300 and Forza 500.

 

I’m a big fan of fresnels as they give you good control of where your light is going. Make it dimmable as well and you have a very versatile lamp.

The light can be controlled via DMX as well as a couple of very cheap wireless remote control units (around £20/$30) and an app is due to be released soon. 

Like many modern lights it also has a number of effects modes including strobe, storm, TV and bad bulb and these can be quickly and easily selected from the lamps control unit and power supply. The build quality is very good. The lamp head is mostly metal while the control unit is a mix of good quality plastics and metal.  The whole thing weighs 4.8kg so you don’t need a particularly large light stand to support it.

with a street price of around £650/$850 this is a very affordable yet also very capable lamp. I would suggest that anyone trying to build their own versatile light kit should include at least one spot light and not just rely on LED panel lights. Having a good, bright spot light allows you to a lot more creative lighting as a spot light, especially if you add the Fresnel lens can be used with gobo’s or objects in the foreground to create interesting shadow effects.

Grab3_3.16.1-600x338 Nanlite Forza 300 LED Spotlight

For a recent short film shoot I used the Forza 300 to throw light through a forest of trees. The trees creating interesting shadows adding a lot of extra contrast to the shots.  For another scene I used the Forza 300 as a backlight through some smoke for an interesting mystic effect. A flat panel light cannot reproduce these effects in the same way.

grab1_3.3.1-600x338 Nanlite Forza 300 LED Spotlight

For this shoot I needed to power the lamp off batteries. It is worth noting that if running the lamp at is maximum output of 300 watts you will be drawing over 10 amps from each of the 2 V-Lock batteries need to run it. This is right at the limit of what many V-Locks can deliver.  As a result you may find your batteries cutting off before they are fully discharged. To run a high power LED lamp like this you should consider Lithium Manganese batteries or other batteries capable of at least a 12 amp output. My own preference is to use Pag Paglink batteries as by linking two batteries together you can double the amount of power they can deliver. Using 4 Paglink batteries (2 pairs of 2) I was able to run the lamp for 90  minutes at full power.

4xpags_3.13.1-600x338 Nanlite Forza 300 LED Spotlight
4 Paglink batteries will power the Forza 300 for around 90 minutes.



The lamp I used for the review was supplied by Prolight Direct UK. They are very knowledgable with many years of experience with all kinds of film and television lighting, so do contact them with your lighting needs.

I highly recommend the Forza 300. It is, in my opinion, one of the best of this type of lamp on the market today and very competitively priced. Please see the video above for more information.

Nanlite.com

Anatomy of a shot. Night Scene in Arctic Norway – Fujinon lenses, Stella Lights.

I have just return from one of the most challenging shoots I have been involved in. The shoot took place over 5 days in and around Tromso in Norway. The aim was to gather footage to show off the capabilities of a new type of 4K TV from Phillips.

We shot the Northern Lights, we shot dog sledding , snow mobiles, shots of the city and sailing on the fjords. Each part of the shoot had many challenges and a lot of the shoot took place at night and at night the crew slept in cabins, tents and on the yachts. Shooting from the ice and snow covered deck of a yacht in temperatures well below zero is not something I enjoyed. And to top it all off the weather was pretty grim fro most of the shoot. Heavy snow showers, freezing temperatures and towards the end strong winds.

Because image quality is paramount for this project I choses to use the best lenses I could, but at the same time space and time constraints dictated that zoom lenses would be desirable. We were shooting 16 bit raw as well as XAVC class 480 on my PMW-F5 and some pick-up shots in UHD XAVC-L on a PXW-FS5. For the PMW-F5 the primary lens was the Fujinon Cabrio XK6x20, 20-120mm PL zoom and to ensure we had similar looking images from the FS5 I used the new Fujinon XF 18-55mm. I have to say that I’m quite in love with both of these lenses.

fujinon-xk6x20-20-120mm-t3-5-pl-mount-lens-cc1-e1490981959479 Anatomy of a shot. Night Scene in Arctic Norway - Fujinon lenses, Stella Lights.
Fujinon Cabrio XK6x20 PL mount cinema zoom. A beautiful lens!

The Cabrio 20-120 is a beautiful lens and it’s really nice to have a servo zoom that is truly parfocal. The 20-120 produces really nice images even in the most challenging of conditions and at T3.5 it’s reasonably fast throughout the entire zoom range. This was the lens that I used for the majority of the shoot, in particular for the many night scenes we shot. The E-Mount 18-55 on the FS5 produces images that matched really well with the bigger lens and camera. This is a combination I would love to use on more shoots where the budget will allow.

One particular scene that we had to shoot was particularly challenging. It was a set up shot of a night time arrival of a couple of snowmobiles at a Sami camp site. The Sami people are the indigenous people of Northern Norway and they have a particular style of tent know as a Laavu which is similar to a teepee or wigwam. The idea behind the shot was to have the snow scooters arriving with headlights blazing and for the drivers to then enter the tent lit only by the light of a campfire inside the tent. At the time of the shoot it was snowing heavily and was totally dark. Turn off the lights of the snowmobiles and you could not see a thing.

A007C001_170317I9snwscter-wide-1.-e1490980652498 Anatomy of a shot. Night Scene in Arctic Norway - Fujinon lenses, Stella Lights.
Wide shot of the snowmobiles arriving at the camp in the dark.

While modern cameras like the F5 are very sensitive, the light of a campfire inside a tent will not adequately light a scene like this on it’s own. I didn’t want a totally dark background, so I decided that I would subtly light the trees of the forest that we were in to add some drama and give some depth to the background and a sense of being in a forest.

In-tent-wide-e1490980747645 Anatomy of a shot. Night Scene in Arctic Norway - Fujinon lenses, Stella Lights.
A slightly closer shot of the tent with backlit trees behind it.

As we were travelling continuously on this shoot there was no space for a large or complex lighting kit and the remote location meant we needed battery powered lights. In addition I knew before we left that there was a chance of bad weather so I needed lights that would work whatever mother nature decided to throw at us.

snw-scter-start-e1490980892561 Anatomy of a shot. Night Scene in Arctic Norway - Fujinon lenses, Stella Lights.
A snow scooter comes into the shot. You can see just how heavily it was snowing in this shot.

I decided to take a set of 3 Light & Motion Stella battery powered LED lights. It’s just as well I had the Stella lamps as on top of all the other difficulties of the shoot the weather decided it was not going to play ball. We had to shoot the scene (and much of the shoot) in the middle of a snow storm. Fortunately the Stella lights are completely waterproof, so I didn’t need to worry about rain or snow protection. Just set them up turn them on and use the built in dimmer to set the light output.

To light the scene I set up a Stella Pro 5000 in the woods behind the Sami tent, aimed through the trees and pointed directly towards the camera. I chose to backlight the trees to provide a sense of there being trees rather than lighting them. I felt this would look less lit than throwing a ton of light into the forest from the front and I’m pleased with the result.

20170317_201335-e1490980965481 Anatomy of a shot. Night Scene in Arctic Norway - Fujinon lenses, Stella Lights.
A Light & Motion Stella Pro 5000 was used to back light the trees and tent. The heavy snow was no problem as the light is totally waterproof.

The Stella Pro 5000 is very bright for a compact battery operated light, it’s 5000 lumen 120 degree output that is pretty close to what you would get from a 200W HMI, it’s very bright. It has a very high CRI and gives out great quality daylight balanced light.  It was positioned so that the light itself was behind the tent on a small bank, about 20m back in the woods. You couldn’t see it in the shot, but the light coming through the trees created shafts of light in the snow and the trees appeared as silhouettes. It added depth and interest to what would have otherwise been a near totally black background.

20170317_203855-e1490981224538 Anatomy of a shot. Night Scene in Arctic Norway - Fujinon lenses, Stella Lights.
Light & Motion Stella 2000 used to light the forground, again the lamp is waterproof so bad weather is no problem.

Then to provide a small amount of light so that we could see the riders of the snow scooters as they walked to the tent I used a Stella 2000. I didn’t really want the light from this lamp to be too obvious as this would really make the scene look “lit”. I didn’t need the full 2000 lumen output so I used the built in dimmer to reduce the output to around 70%.

The third light was a small Stella 1000 and this was placed inside the tent with a scrunched up orange gel. The Stella 1000 would typically be used as a camera top light, but it’s full dimmable and produces a very high light quality, making it suitable for many applications. The creases and folds in the orange gel helped break up the light a little creating a less lit look sympathetic to the fire inside the tent.

in-tent-mid-e1490981340247 Anatomy of a shot. Night Scene in Arctic Norway - Fujinon lenses, Stella Lights.
A Stella 1000 with orange gel was used inside the tent to give the light from the fire a small boost.

It allowed me to increase the illumination in the tent, adding to the light from the fire without it being obvious that the tent interior was lit. For some of the shots I had an assistant sit in the tent, out of shot and slowly move the gel in front of the light to add a little movement to the light to mimic the firelight even better.

sihuette-e1490981444887 Anatomy of a shot. Night Scene in Arctic Norway - Fujinon lenses, Stella Lights.
One particular shot on the storyboard was the silhouette of the drivers entering the tent. The Stella 1000 really helped punch trough the canvas sides of the tent.

At the moment I can’t show you the footage. That will have to wait until after the launch of the TV. But I’m really pleased with the way this scene came out. It’s challenging trying to shoot in the dark, in a blizzard, in temperatures well below freezing. Every aspect of getting this scene was hard. Opening a flight case to get out some kit meant getting snow on everything inside it. Just positioning the light up the woods was tough, the snow was up above my knees as I waded through it. Operating the camera is so much harder when it has a rain cover on it. The viewfinder was constantly misting up as snow fell on it non stop. Seeing the witness marks on the lens is difficult (although thankfully the marks on the Fujinon 20-120 are huge and easy to see).

20170317_205922-e1490981701785 Anatomy of a shot. Night Scene in Arctic Norway - Fujinon lenses, Stella Lights.
The Fujinon Cabrio XK6X20 lens all iced up at the end of the day. After shooting out in sub zero temperatures don’t take the camera inside until you are sure you have wrapped for the day!

But sometimes it’s challenges like these that make the job interesting. I know I was cursing and swearing at times trying to make these shots work, but seeing the scene come to life in the grade is all the more rewarding.

I’ll be writing more about the Fujinon 20-120 very soon, so why not subscribe to my blog using the subscribe bottom on the left.

Why Do We Need To Light?

Lets face it cameras are becoming more and more sensitive. We no longer need the kinds of light levels that we once used to need. So why is lighting still so incredibly important. Why do we light?

Starting at a most basic level, there are two reason for lighting a scene. The first and perhaps most obvious is to add enough light for the camera to be able to “see” the scene, to get an adequate exposure. The other reason we need to light, the creative reason why we need to light is to create shadows.

It is not the light in a scene that makes it look interesting, it is the shadows. It is the contrast between light and dark that makes an image intriguing to our eyes and brain. Shadows add depth, they can be used to add a sense of mystery or draw the viewers gaze to the brighter parts of the scene. Without shadows, without contrast most scenes will be visually uninteresting.

Take a typical daytime TV show. Perhaps a game show. Look at how it has been lit. In almost every case it will have been lit to provide a uniform and even light level across the entire set. It will be bright so that the cameras can use a reasonable aperture for a deep depth of field. This helps the camera operators keep everything focus. The flat, uniform light means that the stars or contestants can go anywhere in the set and still look OK. This is lighting for exposure, where the prime driver is a well exposed image.  The majority of the light will be coming from the camera side of the set or from above the set with all the light flooding inwards into the set.

eggheadsteam-e1479407949570 Why Do We Need To Light?
Typical TV lighting, flat, very few shadows, light coming from the camera side of the set or above the set.

Then look at a well made movie. The lighting will be very different. Often the main source of light will be coming from the side or possibly even the rear of the scene. This creates dark shadows on the opposite side of the set/scene. It will cast deep shadows across faces and it’s often the shadow side of a face that is more interesting than the bright side.

blade-runner1 Why Do We Need To Light?
Striking example of light coming from opposite the camera to create deep shadows – Bladerunner.

A lot of movie lighting is done from diagonally opposite the cameras to create very deep shadows on faces and to keep the background of the shot dark. If, as is typical in TV production your lights are placed where the cameras are and pointed into the set, then all the light will go into set and illuminate the set from front to back. If your lights are towards the side or rear of the set and are facing towards the cameras the light will be falling out of and away from the set rather than into the set. This means you can then keep the rear of the set dark much more easily. Having the main light source opposite the camera is also why you see far more lens flare effects in movies compared to TV as the light is often shining into the camera lens.

960_1 Why Do We Need To Light?
Another example of the main light sources coming towards the camera. The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford.

If you are shooting a night scene and you want to get nice clean pictures from your camera then contrast becomes key. When we think of what things look like at night we automatically think “dark”. But cameras don’t like darkness, they like light, even the modern super sensitive cameras still work better when there is a a decent amount of light. So one of the keys to a great looking night scene is to light the foreground faces of your cast well but keep the background very dark. You expose the camera for the bright foreground (which means you should not have any noise problems) and then rely on the fact that the background is dark to make the scene look like a night scene.  Again the reason to light is for better shadows, to make the darker parts of the scene appear very dark relative to the foreground and a high level of contrast will make it look like night. Consider a bright moonlit night, faces will be bright compared to everything else.

sam-shepard-jesse-james-e1479407719922 Why Do We Need To Light?
A well lit face against a very dark background means low noise night shot. Another example from The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford.

So in cinematography, very often the reason to add light is to create shadows and contrast rather than to simply raise the overall light level. To make this easier we need to think about reflections and how the light that we are adding will bounce around the set and reduce the high contrast that we may be seeking. For this reason most film studios have black walls and floors. It’s amazing how much light bounces of the floor. Black drapes can be hung against walls or placed on the floor as “negative fill” to suck up any stray light. Black flags can be used to cut and control any undesired light output from your lamps and a black drape or flag placed on the shadow side of a face will often help increase the contrast across that face by reducing stray reflections. Flags are as important as lights if you want to control contrast. Barn doors on a lamp help, but if you really want to precisely cut a beam of light the flag will need to be closer to the subject.

I think most people that are new to lighting focus too much on the lights themselves and don’t spend enough time learning how to modify light with diffusers, reflectors and flags. Good video lights are expensive, but if you can’t control and modify that light you may as well just by a DIY floodlight from your local hardware store.

Also consider using fewer lights. More is not necessarily better. The more lights you add the more light sources you need to control and flag. The more light you will have bouncing around your set reducing your contrast and spilling into your otherwise nice shadows. More lights means multiple shadows going in different directions that you will have to deal with.  Instead of using lots of lights be more careful about where you place the lights you do have, make better use of diffusion perhaps by bringing it closer to your subject to get more light wrap around rather than using separate key and fill lights.

 

Setting Exposure with Standard Gammas – Use your judgement!

grey-boxes Setting Exposure with Standard Gammas - Use your judgement!First take a long look at the image to the left. look at the 3 small grey boxes. What do you see?
Is the middle of the three grey boxes brighter than the others? Does the bottom small grey box look about the same brightness as the top one?

This post comes as the result of a discussion going on elsewhere about how to correctly expose when using standard gammas. Basically discussing how to expose when your not going to do anything to your footage in post,  for what I would call “direct to air”.
There are many ways of setting exposure. You could use a light meter, you could use zebras,  you could use a waveform monitor or histogram.

Lets imagine that grey box is a face. If you were using zebras you would normally set them to between 65% and 70% and then expose the shot so the face exhibited the zebra pattern over any parts of the face not overly highlighted or in shadow. This is the textbook way to expose using zebras. Another way to expose might be to use a mid grey card (also known as an 18% grey card). With standard and cinegammas you would normally expose this at 50% using the cameras histogram, waveform monitor or spot meter. Again this is a textbook, technically correct exposure. But this is the real world and the real world is very different to the theoretical world because light plays tricks with our eyes and the overall brightness of a scene can change the mood of the shot.

Lets say you have a room with dark coloured walls.  At one end is a window and you have an actor standing at each end of the room, one against the dark wall, one against the window. We have two shots in our scene, one looking at the actor against the dark wall, one looking at the actor against the window. What happens if we expose both faces using zebras to exactly the same textbook 65% level? Well the face against the window will look darker than the face against the black wall. Look back at the grey boxes on the left. The top and middle grey boxes are exactly the same brightness but because the middle box is against black, to our eye’s it appears brighter than the top one. Now if we were to use a histogram or waveform monitor to expose these two shots, all the extra white in the window shot might tempt you to reduce the exposure, this would make the problem even worse. In fact to expose these two shots so that the faces match as you cut between them you need to reduce the exposure on the darker shot. Looking at the grey boxes again the lowest box is actually at 45% while the other two are at 65%, yet the lower box appears to be about as bright as the top box.
So what am I trying to say? Well exposure isn’t all about setting object “X” at exposure “Y”. You must use your judgement and a known monitor or viewfinder to asses your pictures. Learn to interpret what your monitor is telling you, learn to recognise scenes that may need to be exposed away from the text book values and methods. Above all else don’t be afraid to expose for what looks right, as opposed to object “X” at value “Y”.
I suppose to follow up on this I should tell you how to calibrate your viewfinder or monitor… I’ll do that soon in a later article. Did you find this useful? let me know, I’m planning on writing more about dealing with light and lighting.