High Key Photography

The goal in high-key photography is to move the key tones up the scale from middle grey to convey a feeling of white on white. This style of photography can be used to convey a feeling of innocence, happiness, lightness, or clarity.

"Nervous Egg" - Cary
My brother tells me that in one of the first-year photography classes at BYU, one of the assignments is to take a picture of a white egg on a white background - and make it look white! I used a single fluorescent lamp with a white plastic bag for diffusion and a white paper reflector to light the backside. Evidently the egg felt it was under interrogation and began to sweat and that gave me something on which to focus. I took some other shots of kids strongly backlit on a sunny day but I guess I have an aversion to blown highlights on people.
E-3 w/ 12-60mm @ 60mm, 1/2 sec @ f/11, ISO 100, +2EV w/ another +.33 EV in PP, RAW processed in ALR

"Good Morning!" - Mike
The lighting for this really proved to be much more challenging than I had expected. I thought the lighting was fairly uniform, but the long exposure drew out the shadows. Still, it was a fun shot. I had tried getting a larger number of pictures to experiment more, but my models wanted to go on strike after just a couple shots. I'll have to experiment more with this in the future.
55 mm, f/5.6, 1/400 sec, ISO-1600 (forgot to switch back), Spot, Manual Mode

"Dog in the shadows" - Tim
Like with others the lighting was a challenge especially with limited light sources. It would be nice for this week if the background color of the blog was white. It is a cool effect not being able to tell where the picture starts/ends.
f/4.0, 1/350 sec, iso 100, 38mm (35mm eqivalent)

"Ready to Eat" - Matt
The high key technique turned out to be highly dependent on lighting; and lighting is always a challenge. Took me a while to make this subject interesting, to fit the intent of this week's challenge, and to properly light it; but I like the result.
manual lens, 75mm, ~f/3.5, 1/125sec, m-mode

"kissing in the clouds" - Kirk
As I am sure you are now aware, there are multiple definitions of what a "high key" photograph is. Some are very passionate about what they feel is or is not. For this picture I just tried to give a light feel of innocence to the figurine. I learned that lighting is everything and I learned a ton about lighting going through this exercise. During post processing I lightened and desaturated the blue suit to make the image feel lighter.
35mm, 1/40 sec, f/4.8, ISO 200, manual mode