Three-point lighting: What’s that all about?

It’s the most common lighting set-up: three-point lighting. You can see this set-up used in movies, some television shows, and especially in documentaries with interview shots. But what exactly is it and why does everyone use it so often?

Three-point lighting consists of — you guessed it — three points of light: key, fill, and back. Let’s break those down.

Key

A “key” light is your main light source. You don’t want the light pointing straight-on with your subject, because that doesn’t allow for any contrast on your subject’s face — that’s called “flat” lighting. You want to angle your light or your subject so that the key light illuminates one side of their face more than the other. But how drastic of an angle do you want? There’s not necessarily a perfect angle for a key light. But I like to go anywhere between about 10 degrees of axis of the camera all the way to 45 degrees depending on how dramatic the shot should be. (The bigger the angle the higher the contrast will be on the face)

Fill

The “fill” light is the light that hits the opposite side of the face than the “key” light. This light is usually just ambient light, and sometimes the fill light can be the opposite of light, and we call that a “negative fill”. When shooting outdoors, sometimes the ambient light hitting the face is too much light, so we put a “black flag” next to the subject to cut out some of the ambient light and this allows the face to have more contrast. However, when shooting indoors, the ambient light in the room is usually very close to the perfect about of fill light for a natural looking shot.

Back

The backlight is the light source that illuminates the back of the subject and creates separation between the subject and the background. Some people like to get creative with this light by using colored light to add some interest to the subject. For example, a business that has blue as their primary logo color could use a blue backlight to keep the branding present even in their talking-head shots.

Three-point lighting is a universally used lighting set-up that is useful for almost every video and photo project. It does the best job at displaying the subject to the camera in the most flattering, and natural-looking way. While there are countless other lighting styles that are usable, three-point lighting is by far the best one to learn first.

At Pair Productions, one of our favorite parts of photography and videography is lighting, so if you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact us to see how we can help!