Low key

I am trying to take some pics of my grandson using low key. Is aperture value best with a soft light in darkness? Looking at youtube people seem to be able to do this in daylight? Are the images processed in Photoshop or something to get the total black background? How would fellow nikonites go about this? I have a 50mm autofocus lens. F1.8. Is this a good lens for low key? This is one of my weekend projects coming up. Thank you

It would more be your light source. Check out this video..
High Key & Low Key Lighting—AdoramaTV from Adorama Learning Center

And your almost always going to want to run RAW photos through lightroom/photoshop. JPEG, depending on the subject, the camera does a pretty decent job processing.

Low Key is showing your subject mostly in shadow, some fill is acceptable but mostly the silhouette (the lines of) is the interest of caputre.

What Bill said. It's more the light power/placement as supposed to the aperture.

Low Key is showing your subject mostly in shadow, some fill is acceptable but mostly the silhouette is the interest of caputre.

What they said . . . .


However, to get that solid black background you need to use a solid black backdrop with no flash/ambient light illuminating or spilling onto it. Keep your subject to background distance greater than normal. You can also make the background solid black with higher shutter speeds to cut out the ambient exposure and just expose what is lit by flash.

Also, you can shoot against a Green Screen (Chromakey) and replace the green with black in an image editing program.

Inverse square law. Put the light close to your subject, and move the subject away from the background. Light falls off rapidly.

I do this alot with no backdrop.

Shoot in manual mode. Set your shutter speed to your fastest sync speed for your camera (1/200, or 1/250). Then stop down your aperature until all you see is black on your lcd screen.
Keep the subject a reasonable distance from any background. Side lighting with flags (gobos) works well, as do snoots.
If you want to light from the front. Use the least amount of light as you can get away with. And keep the subject well away from a background.

Dimming the lights in the room helps. But is not always necessary.

A couple of examples in a very well lit room. With no backdrop.
Straight out of the camera. No post processing.

Indoors 1/250 at f11 usually gets me there. Just depends on the ambient light. You may have to get down to F16.

Close the curtains. lol

that's amazing. how I wish I could take pics like this.

You can.