How To Shoot High Key & Low Key Lighting

On this (rather old but still very relevant) Adorama video, Mark Wallace takes a look at two important types of photography – low key and high key.

Low key photography is typically dark with minimal lighting and rich in black tones and lots of shadow areas while a high key image is a bright, full of light and has mostly white tones.

Achieving these two distinct looks takes quite different ways of lighting as Wallace demonstrates in the studio. Low key is typically easier in terms of the amount of lights that you will need while high key will usually require more lighting for both the subject and the background.

Photographer Tony Northrup had already demonstrated how to create a high key image in a video tutorial we previously published here but this is the first time we also look at creating low key images.

You can find many more helpful photography tips and techniques on our Photography tips section here on LensVid. You can also check out more of Wallace tutorials here on LensVid.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.