What Is A Motivated Key Light And How To Use It

On this video, photographer Jay P. Morgan (from the Slanted Lens) looks at introducing what is known as motivated lighting into a shoot and talks about how it was lit and edited.

Motivated lighting is just a technical expression which refers to a situation in an image or a video where there is a light source whiting the frame (lanterns, windows, street lamps etc.) which you use as tools to create the actual lighting that you would like for the scene. On this video Morgan uses a lantern as a motivated lighting to create a fairy tale kind of look to his model.

The lantern used in this picture was wrapped with diffusion and a full Rosco CTO. The cord used for the light was removed in post production. This part of the video looks at adding adding a lighthouse background to add to the general image.

You can find all of Jay P. Morgan’s videos here on LensVid on the following link. As always you can find more helpful photography tips on our Photography tips section here on LensVid.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.