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Tricks to good Photos:Avoiding BackLight

26 November 2008 One Comment

Let us understand what backlight is first, you have a subject in the fore ground and there is a bright light source in the background this light source is called the backlight and the phenomenon that makes the subject look darker is usually referred to in the photography sphere as backlight. This article is meant for the crowd that is new to photography.

Why does the subject become darker when there is  backlight?

The light from the backlight is not falling on the subject, but it is very high in intensity. The photo sensitive material be it a film or a sensor, registers the highest amplitude of light that falls on it. So when you have a low intensity subject and a high intensity background the higher intensity from the background will be registered and the subjects details are lost.

How to get around it ?

There are different ways to get all the details of the subject when there is backlight. The four ways we are going to look into are

  1. Fill Flash
  2. Direction of Shooting
  3. Reflectors
  4. On Camera Backlight Compensation
Fill Flash:-
The reason we are getting a dark subject is because enough light is not falling on it. The easiest way to compensate for this lack of light is to use a flash. The inbuilt flash on most point and shoot cameras have an auto and a permanent on mode along with the no flash mode. When you are trying to shoot against a backlight switch the flash mode to permanent on mode. Depending on the power of the flash you can fill in near subject or subjects that are further away.
Direction Of Shooting :-
Another easy method is to change the angle the camera is making with the backlight. That is rather than shooting perpendicularly at the backlight keep an angle which will allow for some light to fall on the subject this can create beautiful pictures with some areas of the subject well light and others hidden.
This is great for portraits.
Reflectors:-
The light is coming from behind the subject which means that there is no or little light falling on the subject from the cameras angle. The backlight itself can be used to illuminate the subject by using reflectors. Defused reflectors or mirror like reflectors can be used. The advantage with this method is that the lighting will maintain its natural color. With flash or other artificial lighting the color of the light might not be the natural color, this methods takes care of that problem. This method can only be used with brighter backlights.
On Camera Backlight Compensation:-
Some of the new generation digital image processors found on the cameras are capable of analyzing the image to find super highlight areas and then digitally reduce the exposure for those pixels alone and to increase the exposure compensation at the darker areas. These are basically algorithms that balance the dark and light areas in the photographs. The quality of the results are not that great with a lot of introduced noise and other artifacts but the technique is handy when we run out of other options.
Next time make sure that you think about the backlight before you start shooting the nice sunset scene with your children in the foreground.

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One Comment »

  • photographyVoter.com said:

    Tricks to good Photos:Avoiding BackLight | RandomEquations…

    Let us understand what backlight is first, you have a subject in the fore ground and there is a bright light source in the background this light source is called the backlight and the phenomenon that makes the subject look darker is usually referred to…

    # 27 November 2008 at 11:54 am

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