Video | Five Ideas For High-Key And Low-Key Studio Portraits

So why does everything have to be, well, so grey? What do you do if you want something bright and punchy or maybe you want to tap into your darker side? Well, in this latest ‘Five Ideas For…’ video we explore the extremes of studio portraits starting with bright, vibrant high-key imagery and then moving toward the darker low-key portraits. All done with minimal kit as long as you have a creative eye and an open mind. Beautiful images with the most basic equipment (well, OK, maybe a few gadgets later on…)

The video is about half an hour long with the usual outtakes at the end. It seems we laugh a lot when we’re recording these things!

Just a few of the images from the video:

Take care
Cheers
P.

Transcript:

Have you ever wanted some ideas for creating some beautiful high key and low key imagery? I’m Paul Wilkinson, an award-winning portrait photographer, and for the past 20 years my incredible team and I have run one of the UK’s most exclusive boutique studios just a spit in the throw from Oxford and London. I host the Mastering Portrait Photography podcast and I’m also the author of the best-selling book of exactly the same name. In this video we’re going to show you some ideas, some really simple ideas for creating punchy, high key, bright, vibrant images and on the other side of the line some really moody, romantic low key images all here in our studio. Hopefully at the end of the video you’ll feel inspired to drag out a light or two and go create some images all of your own. Please enjoy this video.

(Upbeat Music)

So what do we mean by high key and low key? Well, broadly speaking, a high key image is where the predomination of tones are bright, white, light, whatever words you want to use. Similarly or conversely, low key simply means dark and moody. So when we knew we were gonna do this video, Katie, Sarah and myself sat down and put together a quick mood board. Just a collection of images that we thought either we might try and replicate or we could be influenced by. Now it’s a great idea to do this on any shoot anyway. A lot of those shots were my own, some were from other photographers. I’m guessing by looking at them, some were probably generated by AI. But we just trolled the web and found some ideas that we thought would be interesting to experiment with. The great thing about a mood board is even if you don’t get to do everything that you find and frankly, we haven’t, is there’s always an opportunity at another date to go back, revisit the board and think, do…