Low key

Low key

Let’s start with a definition: a low-key picture which has predominantly darker tones. It isn’t just underexposure: most successful high-key pictures have a few small areas of brightness – such as an outline of light around a dark body, or a streetlight in a night scene.

How to achieve it – because you are aiming to take a picture that is not, overall, an average tone, just following your camera’s meter won’t work. You need either to meter manually from individual parts of the scene, or to use negative exposure compensation to lower the exposure. Either way, it will be important to look at the results critically before taking a lot of pictures. Use a combination of how it looks on the camera’s screen, what the camera histogram says, and any exposure warnings that show on the screen – many cameras can show a flashing image where the over or underexposure is extreme.



On a really good day, you will find situations where natural light and shade will give you low-key results if you simply get the exposure right. As the light may often be genuinely dim, don’t be afraid to wind up the ISO setting: better noisy (‘grainy’ as we old film photographers say) than blurred.

Histogram – if you don’t use it, start looking at what it can do for you. It’s a graph showing the mix of tones, and the relative areas of each. A normal scene gives a histogram that looks like a wide bell resting on the bottom of the graph. An underexposed picture is skewed to the left hand side, and an overexposed image is skewed to the right. If the graph seems to be stacked up against one side or the other, the exposure is probably a long way from right, and the quality will be poor.

RAW files – if you shoot RAW files, you have much more scope for managing tones, and you can recover highlight or shadow detail to an extent that is simply not possible with JPGs. Most cameras come with free software for editing RAW files, and all the common editing software handles RAW files, though you may need a recent version if your camera is newer than the software.



Lens hoods – are a big help for this sort of work, as the lights will be close to being in frame, if not actually so. A clean lens with no filter, plus a good, deep lens hood will minimise the risk of flare reducing contrast in the picture, or even appearing as a bright streak across the frame. Even this isn’t always enough, and sheltering behind something so that light can’t strike the lens surface direct can help. So can holding a hand in the right place, or asking a colleague to hold a piece of card in the way of the light. All this needs to be done carefully, as the hand/card/other object will be very close to the edge of your frame. Of course, you may choose to make creative use of flare – it can be great fun!

Previsualisation – Ansel Adams, the American landscape photographer, suggested that you should always have the finished picture in mind when you take the shot. This allows you to make the right technical choices so that you don’t have to do loads of work later on to rescue a picture that isn’t working. This is especially important for low-key and high-key shots, where the histogram will definitely be bunched up at one side of the screen, rather than being an ideal bell curve.