Photography 101 - Low Key Studio Lighting

So I've finally set up my home studio to find out that... lighting is a bitch! Actually, that's how I felt about it for the first couple of hours when NONE of the results were what I wanted. Then I decided to... gasp... read the manuals on my new lights. Amazing... there were some major things (that I'll share in a minute) that made all the difference. Then it was just a matter of playing around to get the angles and moods that I wanted.

In studio photography lighting, there's two schools; High Key and Low Key. Both make an intensive use of contrast, but in different ways. High key is usually considered happy and clean (very bright, often on white backgrounds). Being that my subject (and free model) was a teenager, I figured low-key photography (darker, moodier) would be best fitting.... ha ha.

I also found lighting for low-key was a lot easier, being that I only needed one light. So here's what I used:

1. 1 Black Background and floor drop

2. 1 Interfit EZ-Lite with Umbrella (60 watt tungsten bulb)

3. 1 Surprisingly smily teenager

The first thing you should do when you start shooting in a studio, is to change the white balance for your camera. Most cameras are set to outdoor, or sun light shooting. Since I was shooting with Tungsten light, I changed the white balance on my camera to Incandescent (though, some cameras have a Tungsten setting that would have been appropriate). This keeps your shots from all coming out orange, which is what I was dealing with for a while before I read my manual and changed the white balance to the appropriate studio lighting setting.

The second thing to do is to play around with the ISO. I was shooting some at ISO 400 and some at ISO 800. Any lower and I was suffering from blurriness. I like to shoot candid... so I needed to increase the ISO so that I could still capture those moments with the moodier, darker lighting.

Then, position your subject about 10 feet from the backdrop, and then your light fairly close to your subject. I placed my light about 45 degrees to the right of my subject, with it positioned high above her. This makes for more natural looking lighting.

Then I just played around with the angle of the light, moving it slightly to see what affect it had on the way the light and shadow played on the subject. And just kept shooting. And here's a couple of examples what I came up with:

So, next we'll explore High Key studio lighting, which takes a bit more patience, and definitely more lights. For more examples of Low Key, High Key and Natural light photos, check out our website at http://www.trishbarkerphotography.com/.