In his video I'll be looking at how you can shoot low-key shots in a small home
studio. AdoramaTV presents Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey
Hello I'm Gavin Howy and you're watching AdoramaTV, brought to you by Adorama the camera
store that has everything for us photographers.
And this video is all about low key lighting. Now low key shots
are those where there is a large proportion of really dark tones in the
image but don't be fooled into thinking that means you're under exposing. You
still want to have some highlights in there as well to show a full range of
tones. It's just the vast majority are going to be at the dark end of the scale.
Now shooting low key in a small studio is a great idea because you can do it
with a single softbox or a single speed light. You can add in more light if
you like but simplicity is the key.
A great low key shot will have a dark black or a grey background and plenty of
contrast in the shots too. Small studios really lend themselves to this style of
photography ok let's get a model in set some lights up and take some pictures. So once
again I'm joined in the studio by Ferne who's going be the model for this
low-key shoot. Now I set myself up in a fairly standard position 45 degrees from
the model and it's metered out at f8 and Ferne is stood against a black background. For low
key shots if you want a black or dark background you can pretty much get away
with anything, material, paper or a pop-up background like this and in a small
studio black is a really good choice. However, if you've got a grey background
check out my previous video on the Adorama Learning Centre where I talk about how
to make grey go black. Ok, let's take a picture like this,
see how it comes out,
Superb, and that works really well we get some fantastic low key shots lots of lovely
dark black backgrounds. But still detail in the highlights, however if I want this
to be even more low key, there is a simple trick I can do. Add more shadows to the
shot and I can do that by either moving the light further back and that's not
really possible, cause I would go through the wall.
The simple answer is to ask Ferne to step a little bit further forward so if you
can take a little step forward. So now the light is in a different angle which
means I need to rotate around of course. Otherwise it would completely miss our
model. But if I take a shot like this, watch watch what happens to the light went on is looking
at the camera.
As you can see it doesn't really work because of course the light is coming
almost from behing and end result is not getting any light on the face. The solution is really simple I
just asked Ferne to look towards the light, ok Ferne do you want to turn and I do a profile shot.
As you can see those pictures look fantastic with lovely contrasty light
There is still highlight detail on the face but also some shadows and in black and white it
still looks amazing.
Now if you're wondering where did the softbox go, because it's really close
to Ferne, and yet it's not in the pictures. Well there's a little Photoshop
trick that I'm going to show you at the end of this video. So once you've worked
out a basic lighting idea why not take it a stage further, and there are many ways you
can do it. One of the simplest is just by including a prop into the scene.
Props come in all sorts of sizes and shapes, for this one it's going to be a
really simple prop, I'm just going to use a bit of material. I'm going to talk about
props in a later video, in this little series, but for now just take my advice
invest in some material. It really is one of the most useful things you can have
around your studio. I'm going to ask you to use it as a head piece really so if I
give you that, I need to take a meter reading for this cause I move my light
to the other side. Let's get the flash meter, pop it underneath Ferne's chin, point it back
at the light, you're always going to meter towards the light you want to know the
strength of f8, that's perfect let's take a shot like that and see what we get
That's a really simple prop, but boy does it make a massive difference to the look and the
feel of the shot and a little bit of red is always a good thing. With low key
lighting you don't necessarily need expensive equipment you can use a single
bare Speedlite. Now normally bare Speedlites are going to give harsh shadows. But in
low key lighting, well, harsh shadows can often work really well. So that's what
I'm going to do. I'm going to finish with a simple Speedlite on its own, and just
take a shot of Ferne sat down against my little textured wall here. So let's get this
over to the side, if I want the lighting to come in at an angle to rake the light
across the background and to hit Ferne in the face with some nice contrasty light.
Now that means I have to figure out where this is going to go so I'll stop
there but I may find a have to move my light around as we take some test shots.
Now, as always if you move the light, you need to meter the light, so let's get the flash
meter underneath Ferns chin again, pointing the little dome back at the
flash you want to meter. Now that I am getting f9, now I want to keep shooting at f8, so I'm
just going to drop the power ever so slightly and I'm back to f8.
Ok so, let's turn
and take some pictures of Ferne looking off to the side.
So those work well, but the direction of light is quite general. Now at the moment this flash is set
on it's 24mm wide angle zoom. Now if I was to zoom the flash in I would get a tighter beam of light with dark top
and bottom. If I really want to exaggerate that to its maximum I'm gonna use a snoot.
Now this is the little MagMod rubber snoot. I'm actually going to use it closed all the
way down, which gives about a 40 degree angle of light and that just pops onto the
front of the Speedlite, like that. Ok, now I need to put my meter in the light
itself. I'm getting f4.5 so it's taking away quite a lot of light
fortunately I can increase the light here and get back to f8.
Ok, let's take some shots like that.
So there you go, by having these Speedlite and very directional angle to the light we got some really great
and dramatic low key shots. Ok let's get one of the pictures into Photoshop and a
little bit of fine-tuning there and we are going to do that right now.
Shooting with a small softbox means that if you want soft lighting. You've got to get it
nice and close that makes it relatively bigger and therefore softer.
That means it's more likely to be in your shot, add to the the fact you're shooting in
RAW means that sometimes your blacks aren't quite as black as you thought
they would be and I've got 2 problems to solve here in Adobe Camera Raw.
Fortunately, they're nice and simple and use a very similar method. So, first of all let's
deal with the blacks, and come to the little arrow in the top left corner of
my histogram, and click on it to turn on my clipping warning for shadows. Now
I'm going to come down to the blacks slider moving across to the left. As I go to the
left you see I'm getting this warning area saying, yep this blue area here is
actually pure black. And I can see that by looking at the RGB here as I move my
cursor across, 00 means black, anything else means, well, not black. And you can
see that's great until I get here where I got a little bit of color coming in
but then I got this large softbox to remove and I'm gonna deal with that bit in
one go. Now I'm going to use one of the local adjustments and you could you see
the adjustment brush. I'm going to use the graduated filter and what I'm going to do
is just drag out a graduated filter over that area. Now once I've dragged that
across I can move my slider's here because I want to reduce the exposure
all the way down to -4. Then I'm going to reduce the highlights all the
way down to whatever they need to be, and as I do, you can see I've lost all the
detail here that means I now have pure black over this whole area I've
completely removed that from my shot. Now if the soft box was still visible, if there
is any other little bits, I can also remove whites and blacks, that'll get me
all the way down and of course I can put multiple, either brushes or
graduated filters until that area is gone. But when I go back to my
usual view there is no soft-box anymore it's completely disappeared simply by
making it really really dark using the local adjustment tools. I love
shooting low-key images in my studio it's so simple but so effective. If you
want more tips on shooting in a small studio space, see the rest of the
amazing videos from the fantastic presenters right here on AdoramaTV you
know either be doing you've got to be clicking on that subscribe button.
I'm Gavin Hoey thanks for watching.