Project 52: Self-Portraits: High Key

This week my Friday Finds theme is High Key. I’ve never attempted to shoot anything high key before and since I’m behind on my 52 Self Portraits, I thought it might be a good way to practice and experiment!

I tried going outside and using a blown-out sunny sky as a backdrop for my high key (a la my new Empire Avenue buddy Christopher), but no matter what I did, I could not get my shutter to CLICK a damn picture. I even took it off auto focus with no luck.

So I went into my kitchen, opened up all the blinds and stood in a corner where the light was bouncing around. I metered and tested my shots against the back of my hand. I overexposed until it looked nice and bright to me and the histogram was pushed to the right side with minimal clipping.

Believe me when I say there was no where near enough light needed in my kitchen to make a proper high key portrait! I turned to editing the Raw file in Adobe Camera Raw to pump up the exposure, brightness and fill a bit. In Photoshop I used MCP Actions’ Studio White Bright Spell to take the gradient shadow off the wall behind me. Other than that, I just clarified my eyes a bit by using the high pass filter trick and a layer mask only over my eyes and then sharpened the whole thing via MCP Actions’ High Definition Sharpening. I think the sharpening action is just the unsharpen mask over a duplicate layer, but I use it on just about all my photos in varying strengths to finish them.

In the end, I decided to convert the photos to black and white because I liked the simplicity of it and my red top spoils the high key mood. If you hover over the photos below or click through to the photo on Flickr you’ll be able to see the color versions.

I’m obsessed with square crops lately. Don’t be surprised if that’s an upcoming Friday Finds theme!

Lessons learned:

• My camera will not listen to me. Therefore I obviously need a new camera. (I’ll take every excuse I can get.)
• High key is great for portraits. My complexion has never looked better!
• The key to high key is LIGHT LIGHT LIGHT! (From multiple angles or diffused.)
• In the absence of the right amount of light, you can take what you get and use editing to push it the rest of the way.

I’m not really sure high key is my thing, but it’s something I’ll definitely think more about when deciding how to creatively set up my shots. If there’s a lot of diffused light, I will keep high key in mind as an option!