With today’s post we are starting our cinematography 101 mini series with our favourite topic of them all – lighting. In cinematography there are 3 main light roles that you are going to use to light your subject face in a basic three-point lighting setup. These three main lights  are the Key light, the fill light and the back light which is also sometimes known as a rim light or a hair light. Before we proceed we would like to make a note that the backlight and the rim light are not the same, but for the purpose of our today’s post we can treat the rim light and the backlight as lights coming from the same family.

So the key light is the main source of light hitting your subject. It's usually the light that lights up the face so that the actors are visible to the camera. Usually we like to place the key light at a 3/4 angle to my face just above the eye line in order to get this so called Rembrandt look. Obviously this is not the only way to...