Welcome to another ‘Photography Terms Explained‘ post. This week I’ll be explaining just what is meant by the phrase ‘High Key’.
High Key means, basically, a photo that is predominantly bright/light – generally with hardly any shadows, and not very contrasty at all (although that’s subjective: a photo can still have quite a bit of contrast and still be classed as high key). Think of a white flower petal lying on a white sheet – that’s high key. But what’s a much better way of explaining just what High Key means? With some photo examples, of course!
'High Key' by GonchoA
'High key for #ds' by Rosmary
'#000000 & #FFFFFF' by Moogs
'Zebra - high key' by PedjaP
Have you experimented with taking any high key shots? Let us know in a comment below, or – even better – why not ‘like’ our page on Facebook, and post one of you shots on our wall? We’d love to see your stuff!
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Is High-key achieved with only over-exposure?
You can over-expose to get the high key look, yes, but say you were photographing a white dove against snow – you wouldn’t actually be over-exposing to get the high-key look, it would actually be the correct exposure that would result in the bright, white-dominant – and thus ‘high key’ image. So it kind of depends on how you look at it!
Strictly speaking, I believe High Key photography by definition involves an especially bright light coming from in front of the primary subject. It is a term borrowed from film and TV production.
So not just ‘white’, but brightly lit, usually from the front to minimize contrast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-key_lighting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_light
Hi Paul. Thanks for you feedback, but I really think the term is open to people’s own definition of it, really. Lots of photographers class ‘high key’ differently, I don’t think there can be a definite ‘this is high key’, ‘this isn’t high key’ argument – part of the beauty of photography is the subjectiveness of it all, afterall. You definitely don’t need a bright light coming from in front of the primary subject for an image to be high key, either.