52 Week Challenge: Week 13

This week was another portrait week, and it should have been a breeze because portraiture is my main photography style and the one I'm most comfortable with. However, the theme was "high key" and while I thought I knew what that meant, turns out I was wrong. Kind of.

When you Google "high key portrait" or "high key still life," the first thing you'll notice is that there's a lot of white and a lot of brightness. "Okay," I thought, "high key is just a nice, bright image." I wound up shooting three different models for this one, because despite the simplicity of my understanding of the theme, I wasn't quite satisfied with how the photos looked.

I learned photography with natural light, and when I shoot indoors I'm typically working with babies and toddlers so I tend to flood the area with light. That was my initial approach for this week's challenge, but after my second shoot I decided I wanted stronger shadows. Which is how I got this:



I think it's a great shot. It achieved exactly what I wanted it to, thanks in part to the model following direction extremely well. However. It turns out my instinct to bump up the shadows was incorrect; a true high key photo has relatively low contract in terms of the ratio between light and shadows. In that respect, my second shoot was more of a technical sucess:



So there you have it! Have you ever shot high key photography? What challenges and successes did you experience?