There aren’t a lot of things that I dislike hearing, but I have to be honest and share with you all, two;

“These are awesome! what kind of camera do you use?”

“Do you get your whites so white in photoshop?”

Is that where we are in the world of photography today? That the only good that comes out is done in post? or is the camera? My whites are white before post processing and I’ll try and explain my theory in greater detail using math…my least favorite subject.

My high key setups are usually with three lights;

Background is usually 2 photogenic PL1250DR with Larson  10×36 strip banks. The trick to getting good high key shots is all in the numbers. I don’t use a light meter, I do it all by eye and I’m usually always right. At my workshops, I always had one guy test me with his light meter. I was always right, even when he had his meter set to iso800 ;). Either way, the backdrop lights should measure f/9.

The next step adds the person into the photo. When shooting high key images, the rules of people (short, broad and so on) do not come into play. They don’t because with high key, we don’t pay much attention to that. Don’t ask me why, we just don’t 😉 To get PROPER exposure, one needs to make sure that the key light (main light hitting the person) registers one stop higher. If we use f/9 to light the backdrop, we will set our key light to f/11.

When it’s all done and said with, you should get images like those below: