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”.

When I moved to Colorado on New Years Day of this year, I realized that a whole new world of photographs opened up to me. Every day I get to experience something new, something beautiful, something that just begs for a photograph. I started carrying my trusty old backup camera, my Canon D30, with me everywhere I go.

As I go through my day, I keep my camera handy and take pictures of things I find interesting. I’ve started a new blog called Photowalking Colorado where I can post these photos. This is a no frills blog where I can regularly post a photo and a quick and dirty description. That’s it, nothing more. If you like Thomas Hawk’s web site, you’ll recognize the format straight away.

It didn’t make sense to start publishing these photos here, as this blog is mainly dedicated to the art of people photography, and I don’t want to pollute your feed reader with something you don’t necessarily want.

If you’d like to subscribe to the feed for Photowalking Colorado, you can snag it here.

If you visit the blog, let me know what you think! I’m always curious what people think of my photos. Drop me a comment in this post or leave one on Photowalking Colorado.

Cheers!
Tim

It’s been a really long time since I highlighted some of the reader submissions to the Sublime Light Flickr Pool. I think some refreshing is in order.

But first, let me hand out a few updates about the blog. First off, long time readers have undoubtedly noticed a significant drop in the posts over the last six months. As you know I moved from Texas to Colorado during this time, and right about the time I was ready to pick things up again, we decided to start a new business. We’re opening up a retail store in our new home town. In addition to that, we’ll be opening up a studio location for our portrait photography business.

Needless to say, I’ve got my hands full.

Despite my neglect of this blog however, the traffic keeps picking up. More and more people find this blog every day, and of particular interest is the Portrait Lighting For Beginners series (which I will someday finish).

To date Sublime Light has around 600 feed subscribers and gets around 500 extra visitors a day that don’t subscribe. These visitors come from more than 110 countries! Some of these are a little surprising to me (I honestly don’t know why, but they are). For example, 30th on the list is Qatar. Or how about Vatican City. How cool is that?

You guys are coming from all over the world and are coming together based on your love of photography. Awesome!

Reader Photos
OK, enough of that. Let’s see some of my favorite photos submitted to the pool recently.

I’ll start off with Rex Lisman, the pool’s most prolific photo adder guy. Rex’s specialty seems to be senior portraits, something I haven’t dabbled in much but would like to.

I really like Rex’s style of putting these teens in a nice relaxed natural setting in Arkansas. There’s some really beautiful landscape there, and that certainly can’t hurt things. One thing I like about Rex’s work is that even with the strong settings, he still manages to get your attention on to the subject.

Next on to our next biggest contributor, Anthony HB2007. Warning, don’t click to his photostream if you’re at work. Whoops. IT guys, it was an accident, I swear.

Anthony’s photostream is full of beautiful models, which certainly can’t hurt your images. Some are fully clothed. Some are…well…shall we say less than fully clothed. But there’s one thing he does well, he puts the right light on the right model.

Take this image for example. Soldis, his Icelandic model has some of the most arresting eyes I’ve seen in a long time. Anthony put the light directly on her face to really accentuate those eyes. Beautiful!

TimpWeb created this next very unique image. There was clearly some post production going on here, but I really like the departure from typical portraiture. One commenter says it looks like a movie poster. I’d have to agree!

From time to time fabsenstylsen posts a unique photo to the pool. There’s something about this next one. I dig the lighting. I’d tell you more about fabsenstylsen, but I never took German.

There are lots more fantastic photos in the pool. I’d encourage you to check it out. I’d show you more, but I’m out of time. You’ll just have to go have a look for yourself. Better yet, join the 263 members and post some of your own!

UPDATE: Now how did I know that Anthony’s photostream would receive a bunch of traffic after this post went out?

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I really love the Rocky Mountains in spring. All day long I listen to the sounds of hummingbirds whizzing around, sounding just like those flying cars from the Jetsons cartoons. The breeze kicks up and the smell of earth and pine needles fills my lungs with every breath. From my front deck I look down to the Cache la Poudre river below and watch the kayakers and rafters braving the rapids below. When I’m not careful and leave a bag of trash out, a neighborhood bear comes and flings it everywhere in the middle of the night. OK that part isn’t so cool, but how cool is it having bears around?

It’s really quite beautiful, and photogenic. It makes me want to grab my camera, take a hike, and take a photo. It also makes me want to play with high dynamic range (HDR) images more. The colors that are everywhere just beg to be shown off in photos! Simply taking a photo and bumping up the saturation won’t do.

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I’ve been a subscriber to Trey Ratcliff’s Stuck in Customs photoblog for quite some time now. If you like HDR, you simply must check out his site. He’s been all over the world, so much so that he could possibly say he has no home. His site is full of HDR images of exotic far away places, and some of his hometown of Austin, Texas (where I moved here from five months ago). Knowing that he has a HDR tutorial, I read up on it and decided to make some images of my own.

Hewlett Gulch
This past weekend I took the family on a little late morning hike to Hewlett Gulch, just a few miles from our house. Not the most beautiful part of the Rockies, but enough to get my HDR juices flowing.

With a 30 pound toddler on my back saying “hi” and “bye bye” to every flower, rock, and blade of grass, I huffed and puffed my way up the canyon. With a potential killer photo around every bend, I couldn’t let a little out-of-shapedness stop me from moving forward. Boy I’m looking forward to the day when my son can hike on his own.

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If you look through my Flickr stream, you’ll see all the HDR photos from the day. You may notice that I found myself naturally preferring to keep the HDR “surrealness” down to a modest level. With HDR you can really go over the top and make your images look quite, well, freaky. Cool, but freaky. There was only one photo that made me get my freak on (at left). We came upon his fireplace out in the middle of the woods. There were still ashes and everything. It was quite odd, and the scene had a strange feel to it. So I really punched up the HDR look.

If you haven’t tried HDR yet, I’d encourage you to give it a try. It’s a lot of fun, and you can get a free trial version of Photomatix. Just be careful, it’s a little addictive. I’ll be posting some more HDR photos as I take them.

And as I figure it out, I’ll post some results of my next experiment: HDR panoramic images.