This article originally appeared in issue OP261 of Outdoor Photography.
"Who's the bird with the long neck?"
Wildlife shots are ten a penny these days, so how do you make yours stand out from the herd? Well, one thing you can experiment with is low key portraits. All you need to do is underexpose the shot (either in camera or in Lightroom – see sections below), and you’ll create a whole new atmosphere, something that’s either moody, mysterious or threatening – whatever works best.
The first thing to say is that it’s always better to do things in camera rather than trying to ‘rescue’ a shot in Lightroom. The reason is simply that it saves time and improves the quality of the final image. It saves time because you don’t have to do as much work in Lightroom and also because you can check what you’re doing on the back of your camera, which means can see where you’re going wrong. If you rely on ‘fixing’ everything later, it’ll be too late to reshoot the images. The quality will also be affected because the more changes you make in Lightroom, the more likely you are to lose sharpness and end up with a lot of noise. There’s only so far you can push under- or overexposure, for instance – any more than three stops, and the file becomes pretty much unusable. You certainly wouldn’t want to try printing it out for an exhibition!
When you want to shoot a low-key portrait, the first thing you have to do is choose your subject and your background carefully. It’s no good taking pictures of kids playing on the beach in the sunshine! What you want is a scene that will lend itself to an underexposed look, with lots of shadows and a dark and preferably smooth background. In terms of wildlife, that might mean finding a leopard in the branches of a tree or a tiger in a water hole. Water is always good if it’s in the shadows, but it will also reflect any sunlight, so you have to watch out for that. No amount of underexposure can get rid of a ‘specular highlight’, so your only option would be to clone it out using the Spot Removal tool – and other wildlife photographers might frown on that!
If you’re really lucky, you might find a brightly lit animal in the shadows, in which case you can underexpose in camera and create a pure black background – which can be very dramatic (see lion image)! Another approach is to shoot into the sun to create rim lighting around your subject in an underexposed image – what I call a ‘sunny silhouette’ (see giraffe). You can do this at any time of day, but it might need quite a bit of work in Lightroom!
Your basic options in camera are to dial in a couple of stops of negative exposure compensation or go fully manual. Once you’ve taken your shots, they might need ‘tidying up’ in post-processing, but it helps if the original images are underexposed. Lightroom allows you to control the exposure directly in the histogram or in the Basic and Tone Curve panels of the Develop module, and you can even make local changes by using an Adjustment Brush. You can also add a vignette to darken the edges of your images using Post-Crop Vignetting or a Radial Filter.
It’s also worth mentioning that you can always try black and white. It’s sometimes easier to create a moody, low-key portrait without all the distractions of colour…
Here are a few sample images to let you see what’s possible.
"Tiger, tiger, burning bright…" (-1 EV)
I only underexposed this by one stop, so I had to add an extra 1.45 stops in the Basic panel of Lightroom and a further 0.75 stops with a Radial Filter, but I ‘lifted’ the relatively bright face of the tiger by pushing Highlights up to +100 and Whites up to +41. In the Tone Curve panel, I also brought down Darks to -5 and pushed up Lights to +21.
Bath Time (-2 EV)
Using two stops of negative exposure compensation meant I didn’t have to change Exposure in Lightroom’s Basic panel, but I did add a Radial Filter with the Exposure set to -4. I again ‘lifted’ the relatively bright face of the tiger by pushing Highlights up to +49 and Whites up to +50. In the Tone Curve panel, I also brought down Darks to -5 and pushed up Lights to +21.
He-Lion (0 EV)
The only thing ‘low-key’ about this portrait is the black background, which I achieved in camera by taking the shot when the lion was in deep shadow with only his face lit by the sun. I also had to add Post-Crop Vignetting of -100 to darken the shadows and push Highlights to +100 to brighten the lion.
"Who turned out the lights?" (-2 EV)
To create this ‘sunny silhouette’, I backlit my subject and underexposed in camera, but it was nowhere near enough, so I had to reduce Highlights and Blacks to -100 and ‘paint’ the background black using a few Adjustment Brushes with Exposure set to -4. I also increased Whites to +37 to bring out the rim lighting.
Gloom Wader (-1 EV)
I managed to do most of the work in camera for this shot, underexposing by one stop, but I wanted to bring out the contrast between the bright bird and the dark water a bit more, so I pushed Highlights up to +50 and pulled Blacks back to -50.
"Come on in. The water's lovely..." (0 EV)
This hippo had such a threatening stare that I thought it would work better as an underexposed black and white shot, so I changed the Treatment and set Exposure to -3.2, pulling down Highlights to -63 and Blacks to -19 while pushing up Shadows to +44 and Whites to +44.
How do I do it in camera?
You have two options when deliberately underexposing in camera:
Manual shooting mode (without Auto ISO)
Negative exposure compensation
In Manual mode, you simply set the shutter speed, aperture and ISO, and the camera’s built-in exposure meter will tell you if the resulting image is likely to be well exposed, overexposed or underexposed. As you change either the shutter speed, the aperture or the ISO, you’ll see the needle on the dial move left or right, showing how underexposed or overexposed the shot will be. Every shot is different, but you have to be brave. Don’t just play around with a third of a stop. That won’t change much. You have to use one, two or even three stops to make any appreciable difference to the image. And don’t worry about losing detail in the shadows. Modern DSLRs are very good at capturing detail in darker areas, so feel free to experiment. If the worst comes to the worst, black clipping is much better than white clipping, so you’ll probably be able to get away with it.
Test shots and bracketing can help you get the exposure right. Knowing how many stops to underexpose is tricky without being able to see the results, so by all means take a few shots at different exposure values and check them on the back of your camera. If you want a ‘belt and braces’ approach, you can use bracketing. Most DSLRs have a bracketing button, and it will generally allow you to choose how many pictures you take and at what exposure interval – either three, five, seven or nine images separated by a third of a stop, a half stop or a whole stop, for example. Generally, the first images you take will be the underexposed ones, the middle image the properly exposed one and the last ones the overexposed ones, but you can change the order if you wish.
How do I do it in post-processing?
Whatever editing or post-processing software you use, it’ll probably have a few different tools to help you achieve the right low-key look. I personally use Lightroom, so I’ll concentrate on those options. In the Basic panel of the Develop module, you have a number of sliders that will influence the exposure:
Exposure
Contrast
Highlights
Shadows
Whites
Blacks
These are all global adjustments, but you can also find exactly the same sliders if you use a local Adjustment Brush (hotkey: K) to work on particular areas of the shot, such as the head of the animal. If the shot has already been underexposed in camera, then your job will be a bit easier, but you can always start from scratch.
The first thing to do is probably to take down the exposure by one, two or even three stops, but the trick is to create ‘separation’ between the animal and the background. It’s no good simply making the whole image pitch black because then you wouldn’t even see the subject! What you have to do instead is to find the differences in tone between the subject and the background and exaggerate them. For instance, for my shot of a great egret wading through darker water, I had to increase the Highlights and reduce the Blacks in order to make it stand out from its surroundings.
The reason why that works is because each of the five sliders for Blacks, Shadows, Exposure, Highlights and Whites controls a separate section of the tonal range. You can see this on the histogram, which is simply a frequency chart of all the pixels in the image, sorted from black (on the left) to white (on the right), with separate versions for the primary colours red, green and blue. In fact, if you hover over the histogram, you’ll see which tonal ranges belong to which sliders. On the extreme left, you have Blacks, and then you get Shadows, Exposure, Highlights and finally Whites. You can actually change the values of any of these directly in the histogram by clicking and dragging across it. Try it and see. You’ll find that as you click and drag a particular range, the relevant slider will change in the Basic panel. You can also do all this within the Tone Curve panel by clicking and dragging the line at any point. If you want a bit more structure to it, you can click the thumbnail in the bottom right-hand corner of the panel, which will give you a similar set of options to the Basic panel or histogram – except with different names! Hence, Shadows is roughly equivalent to Blacks, Darks to Shadows, Lights to Highlights and Highlights to Whites. Just be aware that any change to one slider, section of the histogram or tone curve will affect all the other tonal ranges. For example, clicking and dragging Shadows left or right in the histogram will also slightly alter the Blacks, Highlights and Whites.
If you want to create an image with a black background, it can help to add a vignette. There are two ways you can do it. The first is Post-Crop Vignetting in the Effects panel. Just push the slider to the left or enter a negative value (up to -100). You can fine-tune the vignette by changing the Midpoint, Roundness, Feather and Highlights sliders. Alternatively, you can add a Radial Filter (hotkey: Shift + M), which can even extend outside the image if you want more delicate feathering with a greater unaffected area in the middle, but you can always ‘paint away’ areas of the filter by clicking on the Brush tool and pressing the Alt or Option key during each stroke.
Finally, you can easily change a colour image to monochrome in the Develop module by clicking Black and White next to the Treatment label at the top of the Basic panel.
If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.
If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.