Yesterday’s picture was an example of a high-key photo.  Notice how there’s so much white in the image?  That’s the “high” part of the key.

Now, how to pull this off.  First of all, you need a layout for the photo.  In my case, I started with a white peice of paper as a background (yeah, it was pretty big).  I also added the tea, cup, plate and chocolate, deliberately picking white dishes.

So that’s the first part, making sure everything is light.

Next, setup the lighting.  I did this in steps:

1. Previsualize the image impact intended
   I knew that I wanted to blow out the background.  This means I need a strobe to cover the background (white piece of paper), and it needs to be brighter than the other light.  For detail in the image, I need light coming from the front (more or less), but also from the side.  Possibly above.
2. Setup the background light
   First flash/strobe is setup.  In this case, I put it to camera left, and just to the left of the cup.  It’s aiming at the background.  This does two things: it lightens the background (allowing me to blow it out), and it creates a backlight,  which will illuminate anything translucent.  This is set to 1/64th, since light in my house/studio is somewhat subdued.
3. Setup primary light
   This is the  light that illuminates the main item (the cup).  It must be brighter than ambient, but not as bright as the background flash.  I set it at 1/32nd, and slapped on a soft box.  Due to light loss with the softbox, the effect is 1/128th (a little under that, actually)
4. Setup kicker light
   A “kicker” would normally be a very soft light (1/128th or more for this with diffusion added) that would rim the object.  In this case, we’re dealing with extremely low power, though.  I opted for a reflector (ahem, a white piece of paper), aimed to send the primary light back in to the shadows
5. Test shots
   A few test shots to flush out details.  In this case, the light settings were fine.  There was some tweaking of the camera settings, but they were minor.  Effectively ended at: 1/125th, f/11, ISO 100.

An example:

Drop of Honey

Note how the drop is lit up by the backlight?  That’s part of the benefit of the high-key imagery…