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.

A few weeks ago, I took the photos of about 30 employees for a government contractor in Fort Collins, CO. These were to be simple head shots for the company’s use on the web and in an employee directory. Nothing special.

Here’s a diagram to show how the lighting was set up for the employee photos:

The camera was about 15 feet from the subject, set to 70mm with a shutter speed of 1/250th to kill the ambient light. Aperture was set to 6.3 to throw that background a little out of focus (helped by the longer focal length). This also let me choose a low power on the flashes to use less juice and recycle quickly.

The key light was a Canon 430EX set to 1/4 power, and shooting through a translucent umbrella. I feathered the light forward to soften it and direct a good portion of the light across the subject and onto the reflector.

The gold reflector bounced the light back into the shadow areas and warmed them up, giving the subjects a nice glow.

The background light was a Vivitar 285HV, set to 1/16th power and zoomed out all the way to give a tight light pattern. It was up about 8 feet off the ground, and placed about 6 inches from the wall. The light was pointing down at about 45 degrees. This made the light sort of “skip” or “scrape” down that wall, adding lots of shadow to the rugged stone. Had I pointed the light straight at the wall from a distance, it would have come out looking flat and lack interest and shadow.

This was a very quick throw together shot. I got to the hotel about ten minutes before the employees, picked the spot in about a minute, and threw everything up in a hurry. Two test shots to get the lighting nailed and I was off and running. Bang bang bang, 30 people in about ten minutes. Each person was literally less than 20 seconds. They sit down, a couple posing instructions, *click*, “Next”.

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.

My brother doin’ it up right

This weekend my brother came to visit me from Colorado. He also has a friend who lives here who has a boat. Living in a city with several lakes I often hear the phrase, “You don’t want a boat, you want a friend with a boat.” I couldn’t agree more. Well they invited me out for a little wake boarding, which I had never done. Being the photophile that I am, I naturally brought my camera.

But I very quickly realized that shooting this type of photography presented a handful of challenges that could really hamper a photographer that doesn’t know this stuff up and down. So I thought I would give a walk through on what decisions I made before and during shooting to come away with the best photographs possible.

The Challenges

• Things are moving fast, as in most sports photography. This means a fast shutter speed is needed to freeze the action.
• The ride was bumpy. Thanks to choppy water, the boat did a lot of bouncing around which made it hard to keep the camera steady and to keep the shot well composed. It also meant an even faster shutter speed was necessary to combat extreme camera shake. The bumpy ride also made focusing extremely difficult because I just couldn’t see well through the viewfinder.

Sublime Light is a web site dedicated to teaching you to photograph people like a pro. For the latest articles, check out the home page.

I got an email from a reader a couple days ago asking what to do with the files that are obtained when shooting in RAW mode. This seemed like a good time to give a quick primer on shooting RAW and getting your hands on some finished photos.

Why Shoot RAW?

I’ll start with a few reasons why shooting RAW can be a good thing. This list is by no means exhaustive.

• You get a higher dynamic range. Your camera can capture a slightly broader range of light from the shadows to the highlights than if you were shooting JPEGs. Given the narrow range on digital cameras, a little extra can’t hurt.
• You capture the highest quality image. JPEGs are compressed images, and you lose some of the image quality. A RAW file gives you exactly what the sensor captured so that you can make your own decisions later on how to process the image. The trade-off here is that RAW files are much larger than their JPEG siblings thanks to the lack of compression.
• You gain ultimate control. Processing RAW files means you can tweak the image after the fact just like you were making the changes to the camera before you snapped the picture. For example, you can change the white balance on a photo after the fact. You can’t do that with a JPEG.

Software Choices

Viewing and processing RAW files requires a little bit of extra time, knowledge, and software. Here are just a few applications that I’m familiar with for viewing and processing RAW files: