High Key and Low Key Photography

To begin with, what are low key and high key photography? Firstly, High key photography is a style of photography that uses unusually bright lighting to reduce or completely blow out dark shadows in the image. High key shots usually lack dark tones and the high key look is generally thought of as positive and upbeat.

Low key photographs are underlit images that feature dramatic contrast and dark colors.

The differences will be apparent as we progress through today’s photographs, beginning with three high key photographs that I took for sharing with a photography group in Canmore. For the past two (Covid) winters, we’ve photographed a variety of themes, often with different photographic styles. We share a few of our photos with the group for critique.

This first picture features a Mesquite tree, located across the driveway in front of our house. I’ve applied brightness to this picture heavily, leaving only sufficient traces of darks to define details of the tree. This is high key.

This is another high key photograph that I took on a field trip to Glenbow Provincial Park, near Cochrane, Alberta. It’s a winter scene that works particularly well as a high key photograph. On this very cold day, we needed a little “positive and upbeat”.

Although the majority of high key photos are produced in black and white, coloured photos can also be quite interesting. I took this high key, coloured picture of a window on the back of our house, with a reflection of our backyard.

Switching to low key images, I took the first two at night, in the front garden of our house. My task was aided by the landscape lighting. By carefully choosing the angle to shoot from, I was able to achieve a desired balance of light and shadow on my subjects. This picture features a grouping of three barrel cacti.

The American Agave, also known as the century plant is a beautiful one. It is a source of agave nectar, a syrupy sweetener. It is very popular as desert landscaping.

This is obviously an indoor shot, taken in the dining area of our home. The light sources are the fireplace and an art light above the painting. We had the painting done in 2014, as an anniversary gift for both of us. The bottle’s cork bears the inscription “Rolande and Peter, 45 years”.

With high and low key photography, I learned that I needed to rely much more on getting the correct exposures with the camera at the time of capture. I did relatively little editing on most of the pictures. To help achieve the desired exposure, I set my camera to the Monochrome Picture Style. The Monochrome Picture Style will provide a preview of the image in black and white while retaining all original colour information in the RAW file. Taking the picture in this mode, allowed me see how the picture would look in black and white and enabled me to concentrate entirely on its luminosity, the most vital characteristic of high and low key photography.

When the raw images are downloaded to the computer, they retain their colour information. This gave me the choice of developing the image in colour or converting it to black and white. As I indicated earlier, I needed very little editing if I got the luminosity right with the camera exposure.