Outdoor backlight portrait photography technology

Backlight, especially low-angle backlight at sunrise and sunset, often brings strong shadow contrast to the subject, but as long as it is used properly and combined with good composition, it can also get beautiful results. When shooting wide-angle scenery, macro and even portraits, you can use the backlight level to obtain different effects. The following are the techniques of outdoor backlight portrait photography, which I hope will help you:

1, under the condition that the foreground is not filled at all, a strong silhouette effect and a good rendering atmosphere can be obtained by metering the bright background.

2. You can get more details by filling the foreground with reflector or flash.

3. Backlight shooting can produce dazzling contour light around the object, which strongly outlines the appearance of the object.

Try to avoid direct sunlight at noon when shooting portraits. However, nothing is absolute. Sometimes, just when you think the sun is quite unsuitable for shooting and are ready to put away your camera, you can get some unexpected results.

5. Pay attention to the composition when the lens has severe halo, and adjust the lens position slightly to prevent the halo from covering the subject.

6. Clever use of flash in backlight.

In the case of strong backlight, skillfully using forced flash to fill the subject can make the subject of the photo look clear, well-defined and more fashionable. If the weather is fine, the reflected blue sky effect will be bluer, such as filling the light with a flash during the day and enlarging the aperture to blur the background. If the flash synchronization speed is low, you need to use a medium gray (ND) filter to dim the lens.

Backlight photos, using flashing lights at night, cleverly make the sunset just on the edge of the picture, forming a strong cold and warm effect with the blue background of the sky, making the theme prominent and hard light dazzling. After turning on the flash, pay attention to the unity of artificial light and natural light. Often the sunlight in the background will be warmer, and the light output by the flash will be colder, so try to reduce the flash value, or use auxiliary equipment such as soft mask and reflector.

7. Backlight shooting will affect the accuracy of autofocus, and you can focus accurately by manual method.

In terms of photometry, it is recommended to use spot photometry on the face and increase exposure at least once, because face photometry will not be very accurate when backlighting, especially when shooting portraits with strong backlighting!

If you want a photo to have a light spot, the lens must include the sun when you take a view. It will be difficult to concentrate at this time. Manual operation is a good choice at this time. We suggest that the aperture value should not be too large, so as not to burn the sensor when too much sunlight enters, which is not worth the candle! If you use a reflector to fill the light, don't let the light reflect from the bottom to your face, because the shadow formed by strong sunlight on your face will be ugly. The correct way is to lift the reflector and let the sun shine obliquely on your face. Don't doubt its feasibility, just try it!

8. Hair glow effect-When shooting the light behind the object, the best thing is that the object will be surrounded by a halo. When light penetrates any translucent object, it will illuminate this person or thing.

In this photo, the sun is behind the subject, and the model's hair is bathed by the sun. Using high-speed TTL flash to fill the shadow of the model's head, face and hair is mainly to expose the model's face normally, and the soft sunset light creates a golden atmosphere for the whole picture, which is an excellent portrait in sugar water!