Photography 101 - High Key Studio Lighting

So what's my favorite thing about High Key Studio Lighting? The results! They just look clean, happy and ultra good.

You see a lot of high key shots taken for fashion photography, shampoo and soap commercials, etc. It just makes your models look great and it's upbeat and makes you feel good. Is it as easy as low key? Pretty much. But it does require more lights (I shoot low key with one light... high key requires 3... atleast they way I do it).

So, here's what my set up consisted of:

1. White backdrop and floor drop

2. Two 500 watt tungsten Interfit EZ lights without the umbrellas.

3. One speedlight on my camera (I use the Nikon SB-900)

4. Beautiful models!

So, the objective here is to expose your background MORE than your main subject. So I set up my two 500 watt lights, right in front of my backdrop, pointing inwards so that they lit up the backdrop nicely. (it's important to note that you have to change the White Balance on your camera when shooting in a studio... I use Tungsten lights so I change the white balance to "incandescent" so that my photos are exposed properly)

I then put my models about 10 feet in front of the backdrop. And I stood at varying distances away from my models to test what distance would give me the best light. I was shooting at 400 ISO for some and 800 ISO for others, depending on how many models were in the shot and the look I was going for. I used my speedlight, pointed at the white ceiling with a white bounce card, as my main light on the models.

The only issue I had was my speedlight kept overheating. I've got to research what in the world to do about that, because I had to keep taking breaks to let the speedlight recover, but the girls were patient and the results were... well... pretty awesome.

To see more examples of High Key Studio Lit photos, you can check out our portfolio at http://www.trishbarkerphotography.com/.

Photography 101 - How to Color Only Portions of Your Photograph

I love black and white photography. But what I love more is black and white photography with an emphasis on a particular color element, like the one above. It just adds a little something and can really make a photograph pop. This is super easy to do and I'll tell you how. I use Photoshop CS3 for my photo editing.

Step One - choose a color photograph that you have. (The original photo has to be color and then it's converted to black and white.)

Step Two - open your color photograph in Photoshop

Step Three - make a copy of the background layer, so you've essentially got two layers of your color photograph. (Go to Layer > New > Layer from Background)

Step Four - convert the top layer to black and white. (Select top layer > Go to Image > Adjustments > Black and White > make adjustments as necessary until you're happy with how it looks)

Step Five - staying on the top layer that you've converted to black and white, choose the color element that you want to expose and simply erase away the black and white layer portion. This will expose the color behind and leave you with cool photos like these:



And there we have it. Pretty easy way to make your photos pop. You can see more examples of how I use this affect on photos by visiting www.TrishBarkerPhotography.com.

Have fun!