Photography Tips – Backlight: shooting into the light (Pt 2)
let's consider what's going on here for
a minute shall we, the boats certainly in the video camera look mostly silhouetted against all these sparkles on the water which is being caused by the Sun which
is directedly smack in front of us, and its ricocheting off the water and
coming back toward us. in the foreground we've got these little dingy things going on they can't get
much more sort of straight into the sun than we are here but look at these dingy things, for a moment if you just put the camera so you're looking across the top of these two Jayne, when you're looking across the top for
these dingys like this there aren't really any shadows are there? this kinda flat yeah he just got us ago
got yellow we yellow we yellowing going on everywhere
Jane just turns around and I will walk round behind her and we do the same shot going the other way now you've got textures haven't you. because now you can see there's a shadow, it's going on in here.
There's a little one happening here, that's running all the way down there are little tiny shadows like that one and that one and the same on this one. It's giving the shapes of these boats texture which is
completely missing when we're looking in the other
direction with the Sun and that is what works so well with shooting against the
light. So, on around here let's take the picture. I'm just gonna lower myself down a little bit so that I've got these little dingy board things I don't know what they're called in the foreground we've got the light on the water, we've got the blue sky we're just gonna squeeze that shot of and that's absolutely splendid.
Lovely and the backlight the the shooting against the light is
putting that highlight on the water it's giving all those textures and shapes if we did this in the morning when the
Sun was coming the opposite way all those shadows would be missing just like you saw a moment ago. so let's have a go at taking a picture of a thing shall we? we've done landscapes let's go find a thing. Yeah what a beautiful thing she is too, it's lovely mate, it's an old thing just like the wife i'll tell her that in a minute thanks for lending it to us. This nice man called Paul is going to let us borrow his beautiful beautiful triumph as you know i'm a bit of a biker myself, so I love it.
We set out here because although the light isn't directly behind it, the light right behind where you are, so if you look at where the shadows are going you can see Jayne's shadow but look we got shadows here which are just sort of coming this way so even though it's not fully back lit it's still backlit to an extent and
because there's a bit of light sort of coming this way we do. little sparkles of the
crime and all that kinda stuff and she's gonna lovely we have put it
here on purpose because I really like the background.
We've got the key, we've got you know hengerspry head and all that sort of stuff going on over there long lens I'm gonna use a long lens cuz
I want to exclude most to this and just so i'm gonna shoot it with a long lens, i'm gonna use a long lens because I wanna exclude most of this to keep it fairly tight. Background, bike and a bit of separation blur, but it's light we're thinking about here really. We've got beautiful light going on but to shoot this with a long lens I've gotta go all the way over there and start shooting from over there, i'll see you in a minute Paul.
Thanks mate. Right there are just so many bikes out here at the moment it's brilliant. So I've got my lens long at 200 millimeters can you hear me alright Jayne over the Harley's, all right I got a nod. Okay so i'm just gonna go a bit lower and just shoot that bike in this fantastic evening light, and my using my long lens and a wide aperture I can separate it from the background, that mean I can make the background a bit blurry. but what's most important is the majority of the light is behind the bike. and it brings up all those little sparkles and stuff like that. and it's not like that that have a great
great looking to me that night if we got the light, i'll go this side so you've got light on my face square onto the side of it, it's not gonna look quite so brilliant let's just do it quickly and then you can compare the two Paul has kindly said he doesn't mind me moving it, I used to have one of these but it wasn't anything like as pretty as this one.
This one is a honey let's just turn
around like that so we've now got the light straight onto the side and I'll just take a shot going the other way I'll use the same sort of lens and it'll look nice but personally I think I'm gonna prefer
the one with the backlight, let's just shoot that one. yeah if we flick between the two, personally I much prefer the earlier
shot. with the light coming in behind it so
get out there and go and play with it something to remember if you're shooting
against the light sometimes your cameras light meter may get a little bit confused and create a
silhouette might the picture too dark to always have a look at the histogram
and increase the exposure a bit if it does look too dark gum watch our exposure films to find
about how to do that we need to do is just a little bit more
light in so that the backlit thing in person all place that you're
photographing has got sufficient light to record
nicely on the sensor I hope you enjoy it and I'll catch you later
