low key portraits

Elaine66

Senior Member
i have been nominated to take some portraits of my new grandchild and parents, i would like to make some low key ones. any suggestions would be gratefully received. I also would like to know the best black and white settings. thank you in advance.
 

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
There are folks here who will give you better portrait advice than I ever could, but for Black and White, my advice is always to make a good color photograph first, and then worry about converting. The simple act of desaturating a color image is not always the best method for converting. I love using Nik Software's Silver Efex Pro 2 to do my conversions as they give you ultimate flexibility in B&W manipulation. You can download a 15 day free trial when you're ready to use it. Another method is to stack layers in Photoshop (or Elements) and manipulate the Tint & Hue in a layer behind the Saturation layer (with saturation set to -100%) to act as a color filter would while shooting in Black & White.
 

Marcel

Happily retired
Staff member
Super Mod
In order to achieve low key portraits, you have to start with the right lighting. You can play all you want with post processing (easy enough to go to B&W from Raw), but if you don't have the right lighting from the start, you will struggle, really struggle.

Profiles with back light could be a starting point. With just the right fill-in.

Do a practice run and go from there.

Please share your findings with us.
 

DTigga

New member
I did a low-key photo shoot for our Movember campaign at work. The shots were the first I posted here:

http://nikonites.com/project-365-daily-photos/9728-dts-365-daily-pics.html

It was the first time I had done any low-key photos but by the end of the shoot, I was happy with the result.

The best results were when I used a semi-dark room with minimal ambient light. You want to give your subject some distance from a background in order to black out the background.
I used a remote speedlight with a D800 but i'm not sure if you can use remote flash on the D5100 so you will need a different light source coming in from the side. Experiment with the angle and height of the light until you get the desired result.

As the others mentioned above, it all comes down to the light.
 
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