by Joseph T. Sinclair
In another article, I warned that you should always take photos with the sun coming over your shoulder. Taking photos into the sun or into a source of light creates problems for taking a normal photo.
As we all know, however, there are exceptions to every rule. In this case, the exceptions you might want to consider to this rule are backlighting and silhouettes. Backlighting can create beautiful photographs, and silhouettes (when intended to be silhouettes) can be very attractive too.
Backlighting can be beautiful in certain situations, particularly when the sun is low in the sky early in the morning or late in the afternoon or early evening. If the sun passes through something translucent in such situations, it often makes the translucent substance glow, which can create spectacular photos.
For instance, foliage (leaves) tends to be translucent. If you have the sun streaming at you through trees or other vegetation in close proximity, you will often see a translucent glow. Even if the sun is low in the sky and is reflecting off foliage instead of passing through it, you can sometimes get an attractive glow too. When the sun is higher in the sky, you’ll get a normal photo shooting the same foliage.
The lesson to be learned here is that backlighting is normally undesirable and will not provides you with the photos that you seek to take. On the other hand, be aware that backlighting can provide you with photo opportunities in certain situations if you stay aware that backlighting occasionally creates attractive effects.
As I mentioned in the other blog about having the sun at your back, it is very difficult to get good photographs of people otherwise. Why? Because everything behind the people will be lit up with the backlighting (sun), and the faces and bodies of the people will be very dark. Shooting people into the sun is perhaps the most common mistake that novice photographers make.
But if you want to get silhouettes, shooting into the sun or another source of light is obviously the way to do it. The silhouettes might be of people, trees, vehicles, buildings, or animals. To shoot such silhouettes you need to have your light source (sun) be behind the subject you are shooting. Generally speaking, it’s best to shoot silhouettes when the sun is low in the sky early in the morning or late afternoon or early evening. Especially at dawn and sunset the sun becomes is weak and you get a nice glow in the sky. That glow can be used to create some silhouettes that when appearing together with the glow can make very attractive photos.
Another situation where backlighting works well is when you use it together with very strong front lighting. This works well indoors when you take pictures of people or objects. Just using lights from the front may not give you the best photograph you can get, and adding some backlighting or changing shooting positions to take advantage of backlighting can often make the photograph better.
Outdoors it’s a little different. Outdoors when the sun backlights your subject, it is very seldom that your subject will also be lighted from the front. Professional photographers use reflectors when they suit shoot subjects outdoors, such as models. To shoot just one model, they might use as many as five or six reflectors. Thus, the subject is backlit by the natural sunlight and lit from the front by a reflection of that sunlight.
Another way to get front light in an outdoor situation where your subject is backlit by the natural lighting is to use a flash. This is called a fill-in flash and works very effectively for normal cameras and normal flash units. The flash units on phone cameras, however, are extremely weak and will not be effective in this situation.
Using backlighting and using silhouettes are two techniques to avoid in normal shooting but to take advantage of in special situations. It’s just a matter of staying aware.