Common lighting styles

Lighting design has become a rather important part of entire stage design. There are different lighting styles used and each of them requires appropriate attention and description. It`s necessary to admit that lighting styles are known as specific styles used in cinema or scene production to express particular emotions or certain kind of mood in the audience.
As it has already been mentioned there are two basic lighting styles used in modern lighting design. Both of them are pretty popular. It`s impossible to speak about lighting styles and not to tell you some words about high- and low-key lighting designs. So, high-key lighting is considered to be one of the lighting styles used in television or film which aims to reduce the contrast ratio in the scene. As a matter of fact, this is usually done for technological reasons because the early films and television programs didn`t deal with modern high-contrast ratios. And nowadays it`s used to create a special mood. By the way, this lighting style is often used in comedies and sitcoms for having little contrast and being rather mild. High-key lighting is one of the lighting styles, which were achieved through multiple sources lighting the stage in the 1950s and 1960s. Usually, 3 fixtures were used for the person: right, left and central ones. It resulted in a uniform lighting pattern with very little modeling of the human face. Today, the multiple light sources are considered to have been substituted with more efficient and fluorescent soft lights providing the similar effect. One of the primary advantages of high-key lighting is that it doesn`t require the adjustment for every scene and therefore allows the production to complete the necessary shooting in a couple of hours instead of days. I can`t but say that this is one of the lighting styles which has the obvious drawback of adding the meaning or even drama by lighting the definite parts of the scene more prominently than other ones. Recently, the shows with larger budgets have moved away from the mentioned high-key lighting design by using special lighting setups different from the well-known traditional four-point lighting setup. Another considerable reason is significant growing sophistication of the audience for various television programs and necessity to differentiate. Low-key lighting differs from other common lighting styles. But it is also used for television or film. This style makes an attempt to create the so-called chiaroscuro effect. When it`s used in the traditional lighting design of black-and-white photography; it is considered to be the three-point lighting: key, fill and back lights. It is worthy admitting that key light usually shows the contours of the object by throwing its areas into the shadow or light, while the fill light is known to provide only partial illumination in the shadow areas to prevent possible distracting contrast between dark and bright. For achieving dramatic effects one can emphasize the sun brightness or make human face look seamed or rugged, in some cases it is possible to uinderline and foil the details in the shadow environment. A great variety of methods can be applied to create the mentioned effects. In conclusion it is necessary to admit that ambient lighting is a special term used to describe the use of light for deliberate illumination of the object or its background to evoke a certain emotion or mood.
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