Don’t Be Afraid of Backlighting

I wrote about backlighting photography before here and would like to emphasize again to encourage you all not to be afraid of backlighting scene when taking a picture as it can really give you a lovely image. Do you agree?

When I first learned photography 10 years ago, I read and was told that I should position the subject or look for a subject where the main source of lighting is from behind me so the subject is nicely lit. It’s definitely true and I still practice that a lot in many situations. But, I would like to encourage you all to also shoot a backlit subject like the above. The key to a successful backlighting photography is to balance the exposure between the bright background and the subject. You can easily use flash for this, but if you are like me who prefer to keep the flash at home, you can still do that. The foreground subject won’t be perfectly / uniformly exposed, but that’s perfectly fine to me. The overall image may lose some contrast, but to me that’s perfectly fine too. After all, I know it’s a backlit subject and I want to show that in the final result as I don’t want to lose the mood. So, check your exposure metering for the background and the foreground and compare the two. Settle for somewhere in between. You don’t want your foreground to be too dark.

If you are shooting in aperture priority or shutter priority mode, dial the exposure compensation to +1/3 or more depending on how bright the background is. Dial more for brighter background. Notice that the logic is the opposite, but that’s how the camera works. Its metering system can easily be fooled by the bright background and hence telling its metering system that the subject is very bright and thus compensating the exposure by underexposing the overall image. That’s how you get dark photo when shooting a scene with bright background.

So go out and look for some backlit subjects to practice. Hope this is useful. 🙂

The photo above was taken in Singapore’s Chinatown before the Chinese New Year in 2009. It’s a lovely place to visit if you want to shoot photos that say “Chinese New Year”.