Against the light |
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 Hints and tips by Philip Grosset If you'd like to submit photos for criticism, click here. |
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| It's often best to have the sun behind us (an angle of about 45 degrees can produce pleasant modelling with light shadows on faces) - but there are times when it can be well worth experimenting with a more adventurous approach: |
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| Sunset behind Houghton Mill in Cambridgeshire in England. It wasn't really as dark as this! It is easy to take dramatic sunset pictures with an automatic camera, as the bright light from the sun causes the lens aperture to close down so that the scene comes out darker (like this one) than it really looked at the time. Watch out, though, as there may be nasty halo effects if you let the sun shine right into the lens! The duck in the right foreground adds some interest and depth to the picture. (There is more about sunsets at the foot of the Night Scenes page.) |
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| An imaginative view of an old tree by Tim Grosset. Another of those against-the-light shots that can often be worth trying. Here's an example of a starburst effect where the sun shone right into the lens- something it's usually better to avoid! It's almost impossible to anticipate how shots like this will turn out. You just have to rely on trial and error! |
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| If you are going to shoot directly into the sun, you'll need to shade the lens. Or at least find a few branches and twigs to reduce the glare. These submerged trees are near Hemingford Grey, not far from where I live at St Ives in Cambridgeshire. I've followed the usual advice and avoided having the horizon exactly halfway up the picture. This always seems a good idea - although some great painters, such as Canaletto, seem to have got away with ignoring it! |
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| Against-the-light shots of people can be very pleasing when the sun provides a halo effect around the head, especially when there is a dark background. But remember to use fill-in flash, as here, or the face will come out very dark - and be careful to shade the lens from the sun! The original picture is on the left, but, as our eyes read from left to right, it actually looks better when reversed, as on the right. With side lighting, a large white piece of cardboard (or even a sheet or newspaper) can be used as a reflector to lighten shadow areas. |
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| This extreme side lighting allows the bubbles to stand out clearly from the dark hedge in the background. In this case, no fill-in flash was used as it would have destroyed the coloring of the bubbles which was the main point of this award-winning photo. | ||||||||||||||||
| This was the original version of the above photo. I've included it here as an example of how a picture can be improved with a photo editing program like Photoshop. What really matters is the final result - not how you get it! | ||||||||||||||||
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