How to do high key lighting using natural light.

Introduction:

High key lighting is a highly versatile form of lighting and one of the fundamental building blocks in any pro photographer's bag of tricks.

What is it though? Simple - it's a very bright photography style where the background is usually pure white. There is low contrast and almost no dark areas in the image.

It's a great lighting style to use for commercial photography as it's bright, graphic and clean and fairly simple to achieve. It's used a lot in eCommerce as it's very clean and puts the emphasis on the products.

High key has a dark twin - low key lighting. Low key is exactly what it sounds like - dark and moody. The subject is surrounded by black or near black.

What you need:

1. A home made or professional scrim. What's a scrim? It's fabric to diffuse light attached to a frame. If you've got a small budget you can DIY one cheap with some plumbing tubes and cheap white nylon fabric. Learn how here: DIY scrim. You'll need a lighting stand to attach the scrim to, or a few willing friends to hold it.

2. A silver reflector. You can buy one pretty cheap on ebay or any photography equipment store. It doesn't need to be very big. Buy a reflective silver one, not the silver white type as you want a hardish light to reflect onto your subject.

3. A subject and someone to hold the reflector (or a reflector holder).

How to do the high key look:

It's really so simple. Set up your DIY scrim with the sun behind it. If you've got 2 friends to hold the scrim great, if not attach it to a light stand. Place your subject directly in front of the scrim.

Be careful! Don't reflect hard sunlight into your subject's eyes, you don't want to blind them.

The best way to do it is get your subject to turn their face to the left and bounce some light with the reflector into their right cheek. You can see in the photo above the highlight on his right cheek.

Make sure you expose for the subject. You can use spot metering to meter. Or if you use average metering you will need to compensate your exposure by 1+ stop.

Why? Because camera meters look at the scene as if it's average grey. Take a deep dive into the subject here: Photographing snow.

Ideally you want the sun directly behind the scrim. Why? So that the scrim is lit and blows out to pure white like the example image above. Don't worry if it's not completely pure white, it's easy these days to select a subject in Photoshop then make the background pure white.

You might need to experiment to get the right position where you are catching the sun, and reflecting it into the right spot on the subject's face. Keep moving the reflector back and forth until you see the bright reflection passing across the face of your subject. Again be careful not to reflect bright sunlight directly into your subject's eyes. Ain't nobody got time for that!

Now I know you want to know my settings. The image above was shot on a Canon 5D Mk iii. The lens I used was an EF 85mm f/1.8 USM. My ISO was 100 and aperture was f5.6 and shutter speed about 1/100th of a second.

And that's it. Now you have a new technique in your photographic bag of tricks. You can see some of my work over at Photoform*, go check it out! I'm based in Melbourne, Australia and photograph mainly headshots and personal branding photography but have worked in many photographic genres in my career.