Workshop: Backlit is beautiful
Sometimes, when I’m out on a shoot, the person I’m photographing will look back at the sun behind them, then turn back with terror in their eyes: “Hey I’m backlit. Isn’t this a bad thing?”
Maybe… but I love backlit photography. For me, it’s a way of creating striking silhouettes that capture the imagination; creating deep shadows that add shape to the composition; creating harder contrasts to isolate a subject…
Obviously, if you want silhouettes, don’t over-expose
The trick is to shoot manual and over-expose.
There’s no hard and fast rule to this – just over-expose until the subject looks like it’s properly exposed.
Don’t worry so much about the background being over-exposed. If you’re shooting in RAW, you can probably recover quite a lot of it anyway in post.
The over-exposed background isolates the subject pretty well, doesn’t it?
I also used to worry a lot about patchy over-exposure, but they’re actually brilliant for black-and-whites.
This works just as well as a black-and-white
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Love your photos!