shooting in backlight

kevinpw

So the sun is up, i have no shades, and i have no choice but to shoot a person with the sunlight directly behind her. What do I do in this situation? I don't want to shoot a sillhouette. I want to preserve her facial and clothing colors, but the sunlight is glaring all over the place.

thanks for the tips

TonyCooper

You haven't mentioned how you do your post-processing. If you use Photoshop or a similar program, you can make the figure a selection and adjust the shadows/highlights in the figure only without blowing out the background.

Elaine

Just to clarify...you're asking for help pre-shoot, right?

I'm not the best person to help with this, but it seems you have at least three or four choices:
1) expose for her face and overexpose the background (depending on what the background is, this may or may not work or look right)
2) expose for the background and fill in her face with flash and/or a reflector
3) see if there is something near you (like a building) that light can bounce off of and act as a giant reflector
4) make two exposures (one properly exposed background and one properly exposed subject) and put them together in photoshop

There is lots of beautiful backlight featured on Denise Bovee's blog. I don't know her shooting methods or processing techniques, but backlight can be a beautiful thing!

Good luck!

tijoseph

Elaine wrote:

Denise Bovee's blog.

Good luck!

Link is not working for me...

Elaine

tijoseph wrote:

Link is not working for me...

Hmmm...sorry about that. Perhaps this will work?

http://denisebovee.net/

kevinpw

Elaine wrote:

Just to clarify...you're asking for help pre-shoot, right?

I'm not the best person to help with this, but it seems you have at least three or four choices:
1) expose for her face and overexpose the background (depending on what the background is, this may or may not work or look right)
2) expose for the background and fill in her face with flash and/or a reflector
3) see if there is something near you (like a building) that light can bounce off of and act as a giant reflector
4) make two exposures (one properly exposed background and one properly exposed subject) and put them together in photoshop

There is lots of beautiful backlight featured on Denise Bovee's blog. I don't know her shooting methods or processing techniques, but backlight can be a beautiful thing!

Good luck!

thank you! i will keep these tips in mind. and to answer the first question, i do use Lightroom and Photoshop for post processing.

adbsgicom

There were some helpful tips and links provided in this thread.
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=144727