Hello blog readers!  Every now and then I get questions from clients or other photography enthusiasts how something is done and I thought it would be a great idea to share these tips with everyone.  I’m hoping to do these on a regular basis, and I may run out of ideas, so please send in your questions!

One questions I tend to get quite a lot, and chuckle a bit every time that I do is: “What is it you are doing in photoshop to get that bright halo around some of your subjects.”  I always chuckle because this effect requires no photoshopping at all!  I refer to this as “backlighting”, but you may also hear other photographers refer to it as rim lighting.  I am by no means a very good teacher, but i’ll explain how to do this as easily as possible.

Ok. So. The first step is to break one rule you have probably been told all your life – “Never shoot into the sun. Always make sure the sun is facing your subject.”  This rule definitely makes sense, but I rarely ever follow it.  I love sun, and I hate clouds. To use backlighting, the sun will need to be facing your lens and behind your subject. Crazy talk, I know.

Now. To make something clear. You don’t want to shoot directly into the sun. You’ll get some terrible sun flare and your photo will lack a lot of contrast and just look washed out.  Now, sun flare is awesome, and there are some kick-ass photographers that use sun flare in their images all the time that are mind blowing.

Alright.  Sun behind your subject? Check. The next part if the puzzle is your backround. You want to look for a backround that is darker – a wall, a tree line, a mountain, etc. If you use the sky as a backround it won’t work. The sky is very bright and your background will be overexposed completely. Even an overcast sky can be too bright!

**Tip** You CAN have the sky in the backround, but the backround behind your clients must be darker than the sky otherwise the backlighting wont show.

Here we have the lovely Breanne and Adrian. For the entire time I was photographing them I had no sunlight. It was an overcast day and just wasn’t the right conditions. However, the clouds suddenly opened up slightly allowing the sun to peek out giving me some tasty bright and diffused light.

So here we have the sun in front of my lens, and we have the brick wall as the backround.  In this photo you can notice that there is more light on the back of Adrian which shows the direction of the light. Even though the light is behind them, it is a little off to the side, allowind me to avoid any flare (although some flare might have looked really good here!).

**Tip** Using a lens hood is also a good idea to keep any extraneous light from hitting the lens. Also, using a long lens will also make the job easier. A longer lens will compress the backround to give you a helping hand.

Sunlight behind subject. Darker backround. On to your camera settings.

This tutorial is design around the use of an SLR camera, although backlighting is still achievable with a good point-and-shoot. A reasonable understanding of SLR basics is also a good idea. I suppose I should have dropped that bomb at the beginning huh?

Set your camera to aperture priority mode (Av on a Canon, not sure what it is on anything else). Set your aperture at the widest setting (lower number = wider aperture), and zoom your lens all the way in. This will blur your background as much as possible. For those who don’t know, Av mode lets you choose the aperture and the camera will figure out an  ideal shutter speed.

Now, frame your subject, focus on the eyes, and take a shot.  Take a look at the back of your camera to check the exposure. If the shot is to dark or too light you can adjust your exposure compensation and take the shot again.  You can also switch to Manual mode and adjust the shutter speed and the aperture yourself to correct the exposure.  Although I always use Manual mode, Av mode is the easiest to begin with as it will usually give you a good ball-park exposure and from there you can adjust your exposure to your liking.

That’s pretty much it! Obviously there are so many more finer details to get into, but they would just overcomplicate the tutorial.

Please feel free to post any comments or questions or e-mail me directly!