This article is part of the ‘Portrait Lighting For Beginners’ series. This series is meant to help you go from a beginning photographer to making beautiful portraits.

Wow, it’s been a long time since I left off on this series. The last article from the series, Mid Key Lighting, was over a year ago! I’ll try to be better about writing more of these. So here we go, high key lighting.

My son on his 1st birthday

The Concept

So now you’ve learned about low key and mid key lighting. To recap, low key is where the photograph is dominated by darker tones. Mid key is dominated by medium tones. Can you guess what high key is? Yep, totally dominated by bright tones.

A high key image lends itself to a bright and cheery feel. It evokes happy emotions.

This is exactly why I chose to photograph my son in high key for his first birthday portrait. It’s an awesome, happy time, full of cheer and pride for tackling that difficult first year. The first year is full of challenges and triumphs, both for baby and parents. The first birthday also marks the beginning of the “sweet spot” (in my opinion). Year number two is awesome! Then comes year number three, when the terrible twos start, then the honeymoon is over! Ahem, ok back to the program.

Background

Obviously, since high key is bright, you’ll need a bright background. White seamless paper is my choice here. You could use white cloth, but paper seems to work best. You could use a less than white background, and nuke it with lights, but I wouldn’t suggest it, especially if you’re just starting out with this style of lighting.

Lighting

There are a couple of approaches to high key lighting. The first is to use multiple lights, which gives you total control. The second is to use one light, which gives you a little less control, but allows you to light this way if you’re short on lighting.

Multiple Lights
This is actually pretty simple. Position your model a bit from the background and set up your lighting on the model. Ignore the background at this point, just light so the model looks good. Once you like the setup, position a light or two behind the model and out of the frame, pointing at the background. Umbrellas work well here, for they spill light all over the place. Set the power of these lights higher than the lighting on the model. Adjust them until the background looks right. Voila, you have high key lighting.

One light
Again, this is simple. Set up your single light several feet from your model off to the side. Don’t use any light modifiers. Make sure the light hits both the subject and the background. Now place a diffuser panel between the light and the model. This will soften the light and also knock down the power, effectively making the background brighter than the model. Now if you need to, fill in the shadow side of the model with a reflector.

The big problem with one light is lack of control and lack of flexibility. You wouldn’t want to try this as a full body portrait, as you’d see the shadow of the diffuser on the background. This is best for high key head shots. Also, because light falls off so quickly, you’ve got to keep the model and light pretty close to the background, or the background will end up gray.

Tips

• Experiment with the background light power settings. Go for white, but just barely there. If you over power the background, it will “glow” and you’ll see fringing on the model. Go too dark and the background gets muddy and gray.
• Watch your histogram. Camera LCDs will lie to you, so look for the background to be all the way to the right of the histogram. If not, you may end up with a muddy background.
• Often, if the model is close enough to the background, some of the light reflected off it hits the model. This gives you a nice rim light or hair light look. So you can sometimes skip that hair light and use that light somewhere else.

So what do you think? Ready to add your high key shots to the reader photo pool?