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.

One of the (many) things that differentiates pro shooters from hobbiests is that the pro shooter is always ready to capture that great shot. They don’t turn off their camera whenever they’re not actively shooting. They leave that lens cap off. They keep their finger near that shutter. And they keep looking for a photo op. After all, you never know when life will happen. If you’re not ready, you’ll miss the shot.

But this is an easy one for the amateurs to remedy.

A few weeks back we were commissioned to do a family portrait session for some friends of friends. We decided to make an afternoon of it and did some BBQing. We brought along our son (since we were also hanging out).

During the afternoon we spent half an hour or so in the backyard taking family photos. The little guy didn’t want any part of the family posed shots. So when we were done, we let mom and dad go inside and have a beer.

We stayed in the backyard and let the little guy play and have fun. As usual, he quickly forgot that I was chasing him around with a camera. We ran around and played guns (light stands make fantastic bazookas), and all was right in his world. I was happy because we went home with a big handful of photos that we were happy with. Mom and dad were too.

Up until this point everything went as planned. We were done shooting, got some great photos, and were just hanging out letting the little guys play. As soon as my wife let our son go to play, he made a bee line for our photo subject and laid a big hug on him. This moment literally lasted two seconds, because my son was off again and moving toward something else, probably a bug or a leaf or a blade of grass. Who knows.

Lucky for me I was ready for anything. Though we were done shooting, I left the camera turned on, the lens cap was in my pocket, and my finger was at the shutter. All I had to do was raise the camera to my eye, grab a quick focus, and snap the photo. I thought, “Hey, that’ll be cute” and moved on without a second thought.

We went back home and looked at the photos from the day. This one turned out to be our favorite. It was a favorite of the family we were there to shoot too. We even got a big print made up and displayed it at our booth at a local children’s festival. Countless people commented on this photo above all others in our portfolio.

These photos were taken with my Canon 20D fitted with a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens (I love this cheapo lens). Color and contrast adjustments were made in Lightroom.

So if you want to increase the number of keepers you shoot, a good place to start is being ready more. You’ll be amazed at how your photography will improve.

Allow me to share an experience I had from a recent portrait session. My wife and I shot a family in Austin back in early November. The little boy was 15 months old and walking just fine. Typically, when we photograph children that are older than newborns, we like to at least incorporate some outdoor settings into the shoot. Since we have a photojournalist style of photography, we decided to make the focal point of the session a playground where the family could play and we could capture the fun.

Let me start by saying that shooting people on swings is really difficult. Sure if they’re not moving then everything is great. But focusing on a target that is moving back to front is an acquired skill. Autofocus is out. Manual focus is the only way. I like to find a focus point, stand still, and wait for the person to swing through that depth-of-field and try to hit the shutter at precisely that moment. It works pretty well, but I still toss out about 30 percent of the shots because the focus is off. The wider the aperture, the harder this gets. Too bad I like wide apertures…

Then there was this shot. I don’t remember what I said, but it made all three bust out laughing. I’ve learned that to get that one great shot, sometimes you just have to go for it and the technical stuff be damned. There was no time to refocus; the moment would have passed. So I shut up and took the picture. The focus is off and the whole shot is soft.

When we were going through the shots from the session, we almost tossed this photo because of the focus. Instead, we recognized it as a capture of a family’s fun moment with a technical flaw. We decided to keep the photo and present it to the clients. Turns out they loved it. It ended up being one of the featured images in a custom designed 8×10 inch press printed book we made for them. Once they saw it, they ordered five copies as Christmas gifts. This made me especially happy I just took the picture.

So the moral of the story? You can pick apart your images from a technical standpoint all day long. You can put them on forums and let others shoot them down. But don’t forget to look beyond focus, white balance, and other details at what the photo really says. Sure, you should strive for technical perfection, but don’t let it hinder you. If I put this photo on a forum, it would probably be shredded as a horrible failure. But in the end it doesn’t really matter, because the clients loved it, and bought lots of them.

The post-processing on this image was done in Lightroom and Matt Kloskowski’s “Vintage New York” preset was applied to get the unique color scheme. You can get the preset over at Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips.

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.

Photo by cloudnine

You now know how to create low key portraits using dark tones. Now you’re ready to move on to mid key portraits. Mid key lighting is simply lighting so that the overall tones in the photograph are somewhere in the middle. Not too dark and not too bright. That’s it. To make your portrait model stand out, you’ll want her to be the brighter part of the image.

Like low key lighting, this style of lighting lends itself nicely to one light portraits. Sure you can use more lights and reflectors if you want to, but you don’t have to. You can position your subject and key light in such a way that the light hits both the subject and spills on to the background. Because your subject will be closer to the light, she will automatically be brighter than the background, attaining the look you want.

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.

Image by Chakoo

Low key lighting is perhaps my favorite style of studio lighting. There’s just something about the mood and drama that is created when you have a dark background with the subject standing out against it. Combine this lighting with some creative and dramatic posing and you have the power to create images that will be cherished for generations.

The Setup

The idea behind low key lighting is simple: dark tones, minimal lighting, and emphasis on certain areas of the subject. This is the perfect lighting setup for those of you with just one light, because single light portraits look great in this lighting scheme. While I have several lights with me on any given portrait session, when I get going on the low key setup, usually all get turned off but one. If I do use more than one light, it’s usually just to fill in a little bit of shadow detail so that the image isn’t too contrasty.