High Key - Cracked Egg
High Key is a style of lighting for film, television, or photography that aims to reduce the contrast ratio present in the scene. This was originally done partly for technological reasons, since early film and television did not deal well with high contrast ratios, but now is used to create an upbeat mood.
I was first introduced to the concept of High Key as part of an assignment on the Flickr Group Take a Class with Dave and Dave.
My submission to the assignment was a black and white high key of a cornflower.
My camera at that time was my 5 year old Sony S85, which Medha now thinks is her camera and is doing a rather great job with.
My favorite submissions from other participants in that group were this, this and this. You can see all the submissions here.
I haven't been very successful with high key in color, therefore I am rather pleased with this attempt. What do you think?
In fact, so happy am I that I am sending it as an entry for Jai and Bee's first themed photo event, Click, where surprise! surprise! the theme is Eggs!
I knew what I wanted to do but I didn't quite know how to stand up the egg without the prop showing through. Any guesses on what I used? My husband - oh! is he out of the doghouse again or what?! ;-) - came up with the solution. What would I do without him?! Cos I was close to giving up.
I used a plain sheet of discarded drawing paper as the background and curved it up a bit to eliminate all the mess that lay on my dining table. I also tried to do as much in-camera editing by setting the exposure and shutter speed so that post-processing using Adobe Photoshop was limited to cropping, minor adjusting of levels and removal of some inadvertent drops of water that dampened the background paper as they were added to the cracked egg to make it flow over.
Camera: Sony DSLR A100
Lens: Kit lens 3.5-5.6/18-70 (birthday's coming up! Need to drop hints starting now! But I have to admit that for a kit lens, this lens rocks!)
Focal length: 70mm
Aperture: f6.3
Exposure time: 1/30
ISO: 400
White Balance: Sunny
Metering Mode: Spot
Post processing: Adobe CS