How To Do Low Key Photos

What is Low Key Lighting?

Low key refers to a style of photography that utilizes predominantly dark tones to create a dramatic looking image. Where high key lighting seeks to over light the subject to the point of reduced contrast, low key lighting intensifies the contrast in an image through intensely reduced lighting.

The key here is not just to produce a dark image but to use lighting very selectively so that only specific portions of the image are illuminated. Normally as a photographer, you spend your time trying to avoid harsh shadows, especially on faces and around the subject’s eyes. For this reason, shooting low key can actually be a fun change of pace.
Instead of avoiding intense shadows, you’ll have to consider them as the primary element of the composition; one that defines the mood of the entire photograph. The trick then becomes manipulating your lighting and the positioning of your subject so that the shadows fall in just the right spots to create the look you want.

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Low Key Lighting In Art

Artists recognized the power of low key lighting long before photographers came around. Painters during the Renaissance and Baroque periods often used a technique known as “chiaroscuro” to achieve a similar dramatic tone for their images. Chiaroscuro comes from the Italian “chiaro” meaning clear/light and “oscuro” meaning obscure/dark.
Chiaroscuro was used not only for drama but also to bring realism to a painting. The varied lighting creates a sense of three dimensional depth that can be quite stunning.

One of my favorite artists that utilized this technique was Caravaggio. He created several works, such as The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (seen above), that really capture the essence of what chiaroscuro was all about. Other great examples of artists who used this technique include Gerrit Van Honthorst, Tintoretto, El Greco and even Rembrandt to a lesser degree.

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Low Key in the Studio

If you have your own photo studio, there are lots of ways to setup low key shots that will give you fantastic results. First, make sure you have a large black backdrop. As a general rule, try to avoid hitting with any lights in such a way that it shows texture, wrinkles, etc.
You can definitely have a low key portrait with other types of backdrops, but this will help you achieve that classy solid black look that comes to mind when you think of low key photography.

For an easy and affordable setup, position your subject a bit away from the backdrop and use a single flash off to one side. Also, make sure you turn the power way down on the flash so it doesn’t blow out your subject too much.

This should give you fairly dramatic results with all the lighting biased towards one side of the image as in the example below. Notice how a little bit of the backdrop is illuminated in this image. Depending on your specific preferences, this could be either desirable or something to watch out for and try to prevent.

If you want to provide a little backlighting, consider dropping in a reflector and/or placing another flash well behind the subject and off to the side. This will give you some nice hair light and can often create a sort of halo effect.

As always, don’t expect to nail it on your first shot. Play around with different locations for both your light and your subject as well as different intensities for your flash. Resist the urge to think too much about what you can pull back out of the image in Photoshop and try to create the results you want up front. Getting into this habit will force you to learn the ins and outs of your equipment better and reduce the time spent in post-production.

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Low Budget Low Key

If you’re not lucky enough to have your own home studio, fret not. There are still plenty of ways to get a decent low key shot on a shoestring budget using only your camera and common household resources.
One trick that I’ve seen quite often is to use a two room setup with a door. The main room should be one that you can get completely dark, preferably with no windows or other natural sources of light. With the room as dark as you can make it, position your subject somewhere in front of the door.

Now setup a bright light in the other room, also in front of the doorway. The door serves as a way to block and control the light coming from the other room. To get the shot, just stand in front of the wall out of the way of the light coming in.
You might also want to setup some sort of reflector card behind the light as in the image above. You can use posterboard , paper or something else cheap that you have around that will bounce the light effectively.
Another take on this same setup is to use a window instead of a door. This is a little trickier as a window tends to light up the entire room but can be accomplished with great results under just the right conditions and by using a thick window shade to soften the light.

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Outside Low Key

Another great way to get some nice low key shots without spending a fortune on lighting is to venture outside at night. Here nature takes care of the darkness element and you need only find a good light source.
Moonlight and streetlights are obviously great places to start. Parking lots are also perfect places to find drastically variable lighting conditions ideal for creating really dramatic shots.

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Camera Settings

For low key shots, the camera settings can actually vary quite widely. The trick is to minimize the light entering the camera while not making everything too dark. To illustrate, let’s take a look at some actual shots along with their respective settings.

Here we see a nice solid black background and one primary light source. From the Flickr properties we can see that the exposure is at 1/80 sec, the aperture is f/6.3 and the ISO is at 100. Normally an ISO that low would produce an image that’s too dark under anything but decently bright conditions but here dark is exactly what the photographer wanted and the flash in conjunction with the reduced shutter speed served to fill out the areas that he wanted to expose.
The bonus of shooting at ISO 100 is that the image quality stays high and void of color noise, which has a tendency to really stand out against a black background. Let’s take a look at one more image and see if we spot any similarities.

As you can see, even though this image is brighter, it was actually shot at 1/200 sec, significantly faster than the previous image. Although the aperture is letting in less light at f/13, the ISO is the same and it looks like there’s more available light in the scene. The extra light enables the photographer to shoot at a faster shutter speed while still pulling in plenty of detail.
The primary takeaway from these two images is to try your best to keep your ISO around 100-200 to keep the image both dark and noise-free. You’ll have to then play with your exposure and aperture to achieve the desired effect for your particular lighting setup.

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Low Key Explored

The example images above are primarily portraiture, but you should definitely not stop there in your experimentation with low key lighting. Low key is excellent for product shots and anything else you really want to make look cool and stylish. Here are a few more images to get you thinking outside the box.

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Tumbler Batmobile

Serve Chilled

Cherry Tomatos

White flower in black background

On black_3535

budding

eat me

curl

Pink Daisy

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Conclusion

To sum up, low key lighting is a highly dramatic way of enhancing the contrast in an image that has roots tracing way back to the Baroque period and beyond. You can achieve this effect indoors with studio equipment or some ingenuity and outside at night in a dark area with a well-placed light source.
As always, we want to give you an opportunity to show off your work. Leave a comment below with a link to your low key shots along with a quick explanation of your lighting setup and camera settings.

10 Top Photography Composition Rules

There are no fixed rules in photography, but there are guidelines which can often help you to enhance the impact of your photos.
It may sound clichéd, but the only rule in photography is that there are no rules. However, there are are number of established composition guidelines which can be applied in almost any situation, to enhance the impact of a scene.
These guidelines will help you take more compelling photographs, lending them a natural balance, drawing attention to the important parts of the scene, or leading the viewer's eye through the image.
Once you are familiar with these composition tips, you'll be surprised at just how universal most of them are. You'll spot them everywhere, and you'll find it easy to see why some photos "work" while others feel like simple snapshots.

Rule of Thirds

Imagine that your image is divided into 9 equal segments by 2 vertical and 2 horizontal lines. The rule of thirds says that you should position the most important elements in your scene along these lines, or at the points where they intersect.
Doing so will add balance and interest to your photo. Some cameras even offer an option to superimpose a rule of thirds grid over the LCD screen, making it even easier to use.

Notice how the building and horizon are aligned along rule-of-thirds lines. Image by Trey Ratcliff.

Balancing Elements

Placing your main subject off-centre, as with the rule of thirds, creates a more interesting photo, but it can leave a void in the scene which can make it feel empty. You should balance the "weight" of your subject by including another object of lesser importance to fill the space.

Here, the visual "weight" of the road sign is balanced by the building on the other side of the shot. Image by Shannon Kokoska.

Leading Lines

When we look at a photo our eye is naturally drawn along lines. By thinking about how you place lines in your composition, you can affect the way we view the image, pulling us into the picture, towards the subject, or on a journey "through" the scene. There are many different types of line - straight, diagonal, curvy, zigzag, radial etc - and each can be used to enhance our photo's composition.

The road in this photo draws your eye through the scene. Image by Pierre Metivier.

Symmetry and Patterns

We are surrounded by symmetry and patterns, both natural and man-made., They can make for very eye-catching compositions, particularly in situations where they are not expected. Another great way to use them is to break the symmetry or pattern in some way, introducing tension and a focal point to the scene.

The symmetry of this chapel is broken by the bucket in the bottom right corner. Image by Fabio Montalto.

Viewpoint

Before photographing your subject, take time to think about where you will shoot it from. Our viewpoint has a massive impact on the composition of our photo, and as a result it can greatly affect the message that the shot conveys. Rather than just shooting from eye level, consider photographing from high above, down at ground level, from the side, from the back, from a long way away, from very close up, and so on.

The unusual viewpoint chosen here creates an intriguing and slightly abstract photo. Image by ronsho.

Background

How many times have you taken what you thought would be a great shot, only to find that the final image lacks impact because the subject blends into a busy background? The human eye is excellent at distinguishing between different elements in a scene, whereas a camera has a tendency to flatten the foreground and background, and this can often ruin an otherwise great photo. Thankfully this problem is usually easy to overcome at the time of shooting - look around for a plain and unobtrusive background and compose your shot so that it doesn't distract or detract from the subject.

The plain background in this composition ensures nothing distracts from the subject. Image by Philipp Naderer.

Depth

Because photography is a two-dimensional medium, we have to choose our composition carefully to conveys the sense of depth that was present in the actual scene. You can create depth in a photo by including objects in the foreground, middle ground and background. Another useful composition technique is overlapping, where you deliberately partially obscure one object with another. The human eye naturally recognises these layers and mentally separates them out, creating an image with more depth.

Emphasise your scene's depth by including interesting subjects at varying distances from the camera. Image by Jule Berlin.

Framing

The world is full of objects which make perfect natural frames, such as trees, archways and holes. By placing these around the edge of the composition you help to isolate the main subject from the outside world. The result is a more focused image which draws your eye naturally to the main point of interest.

Here, the surrounding hills form a natural frame, and the piece of wood provides a focal point. Image by Sally Crossthwaite.

Cropping

Often a photo will lack impact because the main subject is so small it becomes lost among the clutter of its surroundings. By cropping tight around the subject you eliminate the background "noise", ensuring the subject gets the viewer's undivided attention.

Cut out all unnecessary details to keep keep the viewer's attention focused on the subject. Image by Hien Nguyen.

Experimentation

With the dawn of the digital age in photography we no longer have to worry about film processing costs or running out of shots. As a result, experimenting with our photos' composition has become a real possibility; we can fire off tons of shots and delete the unwanted ones later at absolutely no extra cost. Take advantage of this fact and experiment with your composition - you never know whether an idea will work until you try it.

Digital photography allows us to experiment with different compositions until we find the perfect one. Image by Jule Berlin.

Composition in photography is far from a science, and as a result all of the "rules" above should be taken with a pinch of salt. If they don't work in your scene, ignore them; if you find a great composition that contradicts them, then go ahead and shoot it anyway. But they can often prove to be spot on, and are worth at least considering whenever you are out and about with your camera.

5 Tips for Successful Panning

What is Panning?

Panning is the horizontal movement of a camera as it scans a moving subject.
And since someone out there who’s mind is permanently blocked to technical jargon, as mine is, there was bound to be a “huh?” or two.  So let me break it down a bit. 
When you pan you’re moving your camera in synchronicity with your subject as it moves parallel to you.  Still a little wordy huh? It’s not as complicated as it sounds.  Shake your head “no.” Go on and do it.  Now cut that in half and pretend like you’re moving you head along with a cheetah as is it flies by and you’ve got the idea. In order to pan successfully your camera has got to follow the subject’s movement and match it’s speed and direction as perfectly as possible.

What’s it for?

Proper panning implies motion. However, panning creates the feeling of motion and speed without blurring the subject as a slow shutter speed sans panning would tend to do.  Take for example the two images below.  The first is an example of panning.  Notice how the car is clear and crisp but the rest of the image is blurred to show the motion of the vehicle.  This effect was achieved by panning.

Now check out the second image.  This is an example of a slow shutter speed (which panning also requires by the way) without the panning of the camera.  Because the camera was held static, the moving object, in this case the train, depicts the motion while the area around it is static.

Is one image better than the other?  Maybe, maybe not, it’s certainly a matter of preference. Both static shots employing slow shutter speeds and panning images have their place and time and it’s up to you as the discerning photographer to decide which you’d like to employ in any given situation.

5 Tips for Successful Panning

1.  Panning requires a steady hand and a relatively slow shutter speed.
The actual shutter speed depends on the speed of the subject but generally it will be 1/200th or slower. 1/200th if your subject is really flying along, like a speeding car on a race track, and maybe as slow as 1/40th of a second if your subject is a runner on a track.
2.  Keep in mind that the faster your shutter speed is the easier it will be to keep your subject crisp.
Especially as you’re learning the art of panning, don’t slow your shutter down too much.  Just keep it slow enough to begin to show some motion.  As your confidence increases and you’ve got the hang of things, go ahead and slow your shutter more and more to show even further pronounced motion and thus separation of your speeding subject from the background.
3.  Make sure your subject remains in the same portion of the frame during the entire exposure:  this will ensure a crisp, sharp subject.
4. Remember that the faster your subject is moving the more difficult it will be to pan.
This point goes right along with number 3.  It’s harder to keep your subject in the same portion of the frame if it’s moving faster than you are able to.  So again, start with something a little slower and then progress from there.
5.  Have fun! and if at first you don’t succeed, give up for sure.  Wait, er, try try again.
Trick for beginners:

Image Credit: Natalie Norton

When I was trying to learn how to pan I sincerely found it difficult to match my speed to that of my subject.  I’d plant my feet firmly in the ground, pull my elbows in tightly to my sides to avoid camera shake, wait wait wait for my subject and then zoom right along with them.  I was having the most difficult time! I’d normally move faster than my subject ending up with an image that was nothing short of a blurry mess.  Then I had an idea.  I took my son with one hand, held my camera to my eye with the other, and spun him in a circle. 
WE WERE MOVING AT THE EXACT SAME SPEED BECAUSE WE WERE CONNECTED!  I felt like Albert Einstein! 
You don’t actually have to spin a child around one handed to achieve the same affect. . .   You could use a teddy bear, a milk jug, or jump on a merry-go-round (come on you know you want to).  Ayway, I found that it was a great way to get the hang of it and I haven’t had any problems since!
Happy shooting!