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..
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