In this video I'll show you how you can make
high key style images using just a single
light, and working in a very small space.
Hello, I'm Gavin Hoey
and you're watching Adorama TV,
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us photographers.
If you've seen any of my previous videos
you might be aware that I often shoot
here inside my
small home studio. But I'm aware that this
space is luxury for a lot of photographers.
So I'm gonna make it smaller.
My background is about eight feet across,
so I figured a ten feet wide by ten feet
long shooting area is a pretty good
representation of the sort of space you
might have on a temporary studio set up,
for example in your front room.
To make it even more challenging I've decided to
do high key for the look which is really
hard in a small space so I know I'll
need to lean on Photoshop a bit, and
we'll get to that later on, and I know
that the process I'm going to apply will
make my pictures more washed out in
color and brighter.
The good news is it's a really quick and
simple technique, but if you know
something like this is going
to happen in post-production...
you can bear that in mind when you're reviewing
your shots during the shoot.
So let's get a light set, it's actually just
gonna be that one light throughout.
Let's get a model in, let's get shooting.
So to help me out today, I've got
the amazing Gracie.
Gracie is gonna be the model for this
shoot but let's talk about the
background first...
so this is a High Key shoot,
hence I've got this white-ish
background... now the background is
actually hand-painted by Sam.
Her artistic talents came in very handy.
Next we need to think about lighting, so for
lighting in my small space, I'm using a
small flash it's the flash point
evolve 200, and it's in a small softbox, this is
is a 24-inch softbox, which should give us a
couple of things.
It should give us a reasonably hard
shadow but still quite soft.
That's going to come in very handy
later on, and because of the design of
the softbox it's quite a wide spread of
light, which in a small space is a really
good thing if you want to do a shot like this.
But what about the position of the light?
Well if you're really tight on
width, then the obvious place to put the
light is here above the model, but in
line with the camera.
It may not be the best place,
but if your width is restricted,
this will work.
Let's have a look at this shot.
First thing to do of course is to work
out the exposure, so I'm going to shoot
at f/4 today so let's make sure that the
flash matches the camera, and we'll see
what we get, I'm going to pop this
underneath your chin Gracie, and I'm
getting f/2.2, so that needs to be a
little bit brighter f/4... absolutely
perfect, let's take a picture see how it looks.
Here we go that looks absolutely
great, we've got a nice light color
background, good exposure on Gracie, but
there's not really much shadow because
of course, the shadow is falling down
directly behind her, and this setup
really works well with some shadows...
so instead of having the light above
Gracie, I've moved it to the side, this might
need a bit more width.
If you're tight for space then it may not
work but we've got 3m square..
10 feet square to play with,
what it's going to do is push
a shadow over to the side of Gracie, and
the more I move it around the further
this shadow will drift out, and it's the
shadow that I'm looking for... so I might
move the light around what we're
shooting, but I will check the exposure.
Every time you move the light, it's worth
double-checking the exposure, remember
I'm shooting at f/4, I'm going to pop
this under your chin, and I'm still
getting f/4, and that's absolutely
perfect...
let's take a test shot, see how
this looks...
awesome, you can look straight
at me... head straight out,
that's great yeah, and that's great we've
got a fantastic shadow behind Gracie, it's
defined but it is still soft, that's
exactly what I'm looking for, for this
setup okay?
So that's the lighting sorted out.
Now to make this more interesting, we
need to grab some props..
So Gracie are you ready?
All right let's do the shoot...
What should we start with?
Cross your legs over, good.. angles
excellent angles.
It's really close, but I'm still just
inside that ten feet line.
That's really good posing,
right up against the line here.
this is as far back as I can go...
yeah love this.
Well that went really well,
it was great to see some of my circus
props from an older workshop get
recycled in a brand new shoot...
now at the beginning of this video
I said that the post-processing was a
really important part of the look of the
final image, and that it would be really
straightforward and simple.
So it's time to put that to the test.
Let's jump into Photoshop, so here's one
of the images I want to edit,
and although it's correctly
exposed and has loads of color, it's not
really that High Key washed out look that
I'm after..
So to achieve that, I'm gonna
change the layer, and I'm gonna duplicate
the layer...
I'm gonna give this a name, you
don't have to,
I'll call it this Mono, which might give you a
clue as to what we're gonna do,
because I'm going to take away
the color by going to image adjustments,
and desaturate.
That will make this new
layer black and white, so I've got two
layers, one that's black and white, and
one that's color.
I want to blend them
together, so here on the layers panel
I'll change the blending mode from
normal to screen.
Now screen always makes
your images brighter, which gives me that
high key look, and because we're blending
black and white and color, it washes out
the tones, the colors,
so it's a bit strong for my taste,
I'm gonna take the opacity for that mono
layer down to about 70 percent or
thereabouts and that's it.
It's as simple as that,
two layers, one blending mode...
Now of course there's plenty of other ways
you could achieve similar results, and
there's always a bit of room for
fine-tuning, so in this case I think I'd
like to increase the contrast a little
bit, so let's go back to layer,
I'll add a new adjustment layer...
choose brightness and contrast,
and I'm just going to increase the contrast
a touch, so I'd like a little bit more depth,
particularly in these shadows.
Now the shadows I put there on purpose,
I chose a softbox to give me a nice soft
edge, but define shadow, so it makes sense to
highlight that, and of course that helps
with the 3d feel of the picture, and with
a bit of fine-tuning, there it is.
There's my final picture completed, well there's
no getting away from it...
10 ft x 10 ft is not a lot of room to
shoot in, but don't let small space be
the excuse for limiting your imagination.
Now if you've enjoyed this video, don't
forget to leave me a comment below, and
of course click on the subscribe button,
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right here on AdoramaTV.
I'm Gavin Hoey
thanks for watching.