Shoot perfect high key pictures in your home

This is the first in a series of articles on setting up your own home studio - we'll be looking at home to get great results without converting your entire house into a photo studio or spending big money on gear.

Walk past any <ahem> “High Street” photo studio (yeah, you know the ones I'm talking about) and the chances are you will see a lot of pictures with clean white background.  In the trade they are called “high key” - this simply means that the background is brighter than the subject.  These are very popular with people because they fit really well in modern homes.  It doesn't matter how your house is decorated, they are going to look great on the wall.  They are very popular with the photographers because

They look nothing like home snapshots

They are dead easy - once you have the equipment. 

Since most people don't have all the equipment they can pretty much charge you whatever they want for the pictures.

There are loads of articles on the web that will tell you all the equipment you can buy, how to set it up and how to get cool shots for only slightly more money than you could pay somebody else to take them.

Well, this is the home studio series so you've probably guessed we are doing this at home.  We're also going to use a bit less gear than the pros.  OK, a lot less.

How not to do it

First let's look at the classic mistake when trying to shoot picture like this.

That's a pure white wall behind the lily.  It looks grey in the picture.  That's because light falls off as distance increases.   I used enough flash to light the lily correctly but the wall is further away.  Because it's receiving less light than it needs for a correct exposure, it looks grey.

I could do two things to try to improve this.

Use more flash.  This will light the wall correctly but will cause over exposure on the lily.

Use my editor to adjust the curves of the picture.  With some images this can kind of work but it makes the subject very contrasty and loses a lot of detail - you could probably get away with this on bright flowers but try it with people's skin and it will look nasty.

How the pros do it

It doesn't matter how much light you chuck at the subject, if the background is further away then it's going to look grey or the subject will be burnt out.  The answer is simple - light them separately.  That's what I've done here.

Two lights light the background and two separate lights light the model.  Here's the equipment needed for that shot: Two strong light stands and a cross pole (aka “background support system”) - £75 but the one for this picture cost a LOT more A seamless white background - the new vinyl one from Lastolite would be great - £200 Four studio flash heads with stands - Elinchrom D-Lites would do the job and if you buy kits then you get nice softboxes too - £499 per kit, £998 A flashmeter (setting up 4 lights by eye is hard) - £90 A very big room to put it all in - of course I really just rented a studio and got all the other things “free”

Total cost maybe £1,400 in kit or £100 studio rental every time you want to do this.

Here's how we are going to do it

Our kit list

A spare bedroom - free

A window - comes with the bedroom

A curtain - found at most windows

A battery powered flashgun - between £250 and £30.  You DON'T need a complicated one for this - we're not going to connect it to the camera so it can be any brand, any age.  If possible then get one with a decent amount of power - GN 30 or so.  Go searching on the web and you should find a new Vivitar gun for under £50.  Second hand will cost you less.  Alternatively do what I did and use a (very expensive) flashgun I already owned.

A stand for the flashgun.  Here I used a cheap clip lock lighting stand - £30

Some way of triggering the flash - you can use a standard flash cable (you don't need the expensive dedicated ones).  Complete with a hotshoe adapter this will cost you less than £10.  I used Pocket Wizards simply because I have them - and I always trip over wires.

Now the chances are you already have some of that like the flash gun.  Chances are even better you can improvise and save some money.  If I hadn't had a light stand I would just have gaffa taped the flash to the weights machine in the picture (and no, they aren't my weights…).  Even if you buy everything brand new you will get change out of £100 - and that's less than hiring a studio for long enough to figure out a 4 light setup.  Cheaper than a flash meter.

Now for the science bit

Just buying cheap equipment doesn't get us away from the basic laws of optical physics.  If you want your background to appear brighter than your subject then it has to be brighter.

Since we are doing this with only one flashgun we are going to have to use available light for the background (yeah, the window) and flash for the foreground.  Here's an important rule of optical physics they probably didn't cover at school:

When shooting mixed light, shutter speed controls the background, aperture controls the foreground.

That's it, that's the whole trick.

First the background

I drew the curtain to create a softer light.  This reduced the light a lot.  It also didn't help that the window was north facing and the day was a little dull.  This would have been a great day to shoot soft available light portraits…

Stick the camera in manual.  Since we want to control the shutter and aperture ourselves it's the only way to fly.   The aperture isn't too important for now - open the lens wide to f5.6 or so.  Take a picture and look at it - keep decreasing the shutter speed until the background goes white.  If you have “blinkies” to show you the overexposed areas then the whole background is blinking.  Now increase the shutter speed until the background is just white.  Just before the blinkies stop blinking.  That's the background sorted.  Don't change the shutter speed regardless of any warning the camera gives.

If it's not very bright then you might need to push the ISO higher than you want to avoid the shutter going stupidly slow.  My room was pretty dark so I ended up at ISO 800, 0.6 seconds exposure.  The ISO isn't a problem but the shutter is slower than I would like - more of that later.

Now the foreground

Turn your flash on and set it to half power.  Rig up your trigger system, ask your “victim” to get comfortable in position.

Do not change the shutter speed.

Take a shot.  If your subject is too dark then open the lens up (smaller F number), increase the power of the light or move the light closer.  If they are too bright then close the lens down (larger F number), decrease the power or move the light further away.  If the subject is perfectly lit in the very first shot then immediately show them the camera and act like you knew this was going to be perfect all along.

Once you have your setting you can start taking pictures.  Move around, take different angles and focal lengths - get creative.  As long as you don't change the distance between your subject and the light all the pictures will be spot on.  You can change the angle of the light - which is the main reason why the light is on a stand in the first place.

Slow shutter speeds

Some people will have been pretty horrified by the numbers I gave above.  800 ISO for a portrait?  0.6 seconds hand held?

The room I was using was about the worst possible room for this - small and facing the wrong way, wrong time of day and I had about 15 minutes to set this up in the midst of doing a whole bunch of other stuff.  In your own house you can move things around, wait for the right time of day and practise with, say, a bunch of flowers so your model doesn't get bored. Anyway, the light was bad so I used the setting I had to.  ISO 800 isn't too bad for a portrait as long as it's correctly lit.  On the full res files a little noise reduction made these pictures look beautiful.

0.6 seconds is pretty slow to handhold a lens but here's the trick.  As long as the subject is totally illuminated by flash they will be sharp.  Ordinarily I'd work with the flash a stop or so less than the background.  As it was I wanted there to be a lot of flash in the picture to stop any apparent camera shake.  Flash was set at half power and was fairly close which at ISO 800 meant I had to use f/16 on the camera.  Remember that flash is lighting the subject and ambient is lighting the background.  Yep, the background is blurry but it's pure white so you'd never spot it.

Just ask your model not to move too much - you can get some strange results.

Now go have fun

Remember, it's your house, not a studio.  This means you can play.  Try something out, change it, go back to the first idea.  Since you're not watching the clock you can experiment.  You can also move things around and see what works.

I limited myself to one light but you could always add a second on the other side for a bit of fill.  Even better, use a reflector.  Continuing our theme, don't buy one of those fancy fold up jobs.  You won't need to transport it anywhere.  A piece of cardboard with some crinkled tin foil on it will work just as well.

If you want to go really mad then you could invest in some sheer panels for the window - use voile or an unpaterned net curtain to get the soft light without it going very dark.

But most of all have fun.  Once you have the basics, improvise.  It's not costing you anything and you might just get an image you want to hang over your sofa.  Or even better, post to the ThinkCamera galleries.

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