52 Week Anamorphic Cinematography Challenge Week 13: Portrait - High Key

This week was something that was truly new to me, to shoot a high key portrait. Most of what I have shot over the years has been either an even exposure or leaning towards darker. Not this week though! 

The prompt for this week was "Expose to the right and create a light, airy high key portrait." I think that I can safely say that I accomplished that this week, emphasis on the light airy aspect. 

Finding a subject for this week was the easiest part of the shoot by far. I simply had to turn to my beautiful fiance and ask nicely (and maybe agree to take the trash out for a while). Now let's go ahead and watch the video.

This week was shot on the BMPCC in 1080 30P compressed cinemaDNG RAW, at f5.6, 360 degree shutter, 1600asa with the B&L Anamorphic Projector lens attached to a Sigma 18-50mm lens. 

I made a slight change in my camera settings this week with a lower f-stop. Normally I have avoided this because the image tends to be softer, but that was a perfect look for this week's shot. 

By shooting slightly softer, the bright light had a very nice smooth look on both skin and fabric to give an overall airy look to the image that I really like. 

This week was a really nice change compared to a few of the past weeks. The whole "hmm what should I shoot this week..." contemplation never really happened at all. I decided to set up the shot in front of the sliding glass doors in my apartment.

This allowed for a nice bright backdrop with interesting light patterns as the camera moved due to the blinds. The light changes are very subtle but are most certainly there. This back lighting also meant that I would get a generally nice smooth rolloff of the light across skin. 

This was because the direction my apartment faces means that it was not direct sunlight. Despite this somewhat softer version of sunlight, I still ran into a difficulty associate with the lens system I am shooting on. 

This was the most difficult part of the shoot. The adapted lens set up tends to run into slight issues with bright lighting. You may have noticed in the video the slight blue aberrations around some of the brighter portions of the image.

This is unfortunately not visible while shooting and only really shows up with a combination of any color grading and the stretching of the image. To reduce this effect I simply de-sharpened the entire image slightly. 

This was also another week where I found myself using a vintage film emulating look. This time it was simply one of the included Fuji looks that come with Premiere Pro CC.

I also found that to really help exaggerate the high key look of the image that the best LUT to start with was the preset in Premiere for the Phantom. This took the log image and pulled the shadows up and pushed the highlights even further. 

So another week down just to move on to the next one. If you are participating in a photography or cinematography challenge of your own please share your image for this week in the comments below! If you enjoyed reading this or watching the video, please feel free to share it!