I don’t take low-key lighting pictures often. Don’t ask me why, I just don’t know. But sometimes, I can’t resist to take such pictures. I personally believe that low-key lighting photography can have a particularly strong effect for certain type of portraits. I like to use low-key lighting especially in those portraits where a person’s personality and background are enhanced by a tool/instrument/object within a picture that is associated either with a personality, a hobby, background or an occupation. Those of you experienced with low-key lighting will realize that it might be hard to use such type of lighting both for a person and an object within a frame. I understand that some of you might not be familiar with low-key lighting, so what is it?

Low-key lighting is a style of lighting in photography and can be seen as an opposite to high-key lighting. Low-key lighting provides higher contrast to a picture and the controlling color of a picture is black. Low-key lighting provides an opportunity to highlight only the contours of a subject or an object and to use fill light or a reflector to illuminate shadow areas in order to control the contrast.

I met with some of my university friends for a small reunion in November 2009. I hadn’t seen one of them, Anna, for a long time because she spent considerable amount of time in Alaska in the past few years. During one of the conversations, I heard that Anna plays a guitar and without much hesitation, I grabbed a guitar from a corner and I handed it over to her.

The result are those low-key lighting portrait pictures, which create mystery and at the same time focus light on particular subject within a picture – in this case a musician and her instrument. I didn’t use a reflector for these pictures, just SB-900 SpeedLight.