At the beginning of the photowalk today, I was asked to do a quick demonstration on how to back light somebody. So we grabbed Tiana, one of our awesome models, and I did a super quick demonstration on my take on backlighting. Since it was so super quick, and probably completely useless to all those around me, I figured I better follow it up with a little more meat . OK, so backlighting…

I’m not sure if there are any real rules out there, so I kind of just make them up as I go. I definitely rely on my LCD to tell me if I’m in the ball park on my exposures. When backlighting (at least the way I do it), your histogram is pretty useless. Depending on the time of day, you’re going to have a lot of blown highlights behind the subject. But who cares. It’s cool. Blowing crap out out is totally ok, as long as you do it intentionally…

So, what I do is put the subject between me and the sun (or other light source). Then, expose for the face (or slightly under). What will happen is the light will wrap around your subject and create a bit of a hazy look and effect on your photo. If you get too much haze, try stopping down your aperture (moving your aperture to a higher number) or shortening your focal length. Longer focal lengths will create more haze, shorter will give you less…I’m sure it’s due to the compression effect of longer focal lengths (and expansion of shorter focal lengths), but if anybody can explain it better, please feel free to chime in…but um, do it on my facebook page…blog comment spam was making me insane, so I shut them off .

Now example time:

This is the image I shot while with the group. The first is the image straight out of camera, the second is after I increased my “blacks” value in lightroom slightly to decrease the haze in the image…it was a bit too hazy for my taste. My camera settings for this image were:

ISO: 200
Shutter: 1/1000
Aperture: f2.8
Focal Length: 85mm