Shooting skills of portrait photography with sunset backlight

What are the shooting skills of sunset backlight portraits? When shooting in the sunset, sometimes because of the misjudgment of the automatic white balance of the digital camera, the photos taken lack a red light, which makes the atmosphere completely gone. Below, I have arranged the shooting skills of backlit portraits for everyone. Welcome to read the reference!

Shooting skill

About photometry: the bright part of the sky accounts for a huge proportion. If the camera is used for automatic metering, it will often lead to less violence and the overall picture will be dark. If the sun is strong, even if exposure compensation is used, the exposure of people may not be normal. At this time, it is recommended that you use manual exposure, that is, M file, and slowly adjust the shutter and aperture through the taken picture.

About focusing: Sometimes the sunset light is facing the lens or the picture is too dark to focus. You can try to bring a hood or look for a place with light on the edge of the character to focus, but you should appropriately narrow the aperture and increase the depth of field.

Looking at the picture above, the sky can keep the whole red block, and the details of the characters can also be perfectly preserved. The key is that there is a layer of fog in the distance, which weakens the light intensity, and at the same time, a large reflector of 1.8 meters is used to supplement the light of the characters.

Of course, there is a necessary post-stage, so I suggest you use RAW files when shooting to minimize the loss of image quality in the post-stage.

Clever use of reflector &; flashlight

The light of the sunset is already very red. If you use a golden surface to reflect light, the characters will look too red and unnatural. At this time, it is necessary to judge the overall environment. As shown below, the overall environment is neutral and the ground light is warmer. At this time, the author can effectively reflect the light, weaken the red light and get a pink skin color.

At that time, the sky was very bright, and the camera was facing the sun, using a shooting technique (glare). The photographer shot with Nikon's 50/ 1.8, turned on the built-in flash of the camera, polished the skin of the characters, and made the picture slightly Japanese.

The place and time are very important.

When the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, the venue must choose a place where the sun can shine on the ground at sunset without shelter.

If you want the warm sunshine to hit your subject's face, or maybe you want the sunshine to pass through your subject's hair, then when choosing a venue, you should choose an open place, and the light passing through the forest or park trees is also full of surprises.

The shooting time should be within one hour before sunset, which is the experience after countless shooting. At this time, it is easiest to shoot a wonderful backlight effect.

If you miss the best shooting time, the color temperature and angle of sunlight will be very different, and the probability of taking wonderful photos is relatively small.

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.

Spot metering shooting should be avoided? Big black face?

This kind of portrait of the sunset glow is mainly because the light between the object you are shooting and the background light source is relatively large. If you choose the evaluation photometry used for taking pictures at ordinary times, the characters will be completely black.

It comes down to the algorithm in the camera, because the evaluation of photometry will preset all the framing pictures as the basis of photometry. Due to the backlight environment, the light behind the portrait is stronger. After the average calculation, the camera will think that it is normal for the portrait to be dark. This is also a backlight environment, which one will shoot? Big black face? Reason.

At this time, we need to set the camera to spot metering. And face the light, and you can add some exposure compensation, because even face the light will not be very accurate, especially when shooting portraits with strong backlight.

If the shot person is fully exposed but the background is overexposed, we should consider using a reflector placed diagonally above the person to fill the face and reduce the light ratio between the background light and the face of the person.

In the details of the use of reflector, it is suggested that you use gold reflector to fill the light. Nowadays, most reflectors are X-in-one, which usually contains gold.

The golden reflector will add a touch of warm golden light to the model's face, which can perfectly blend with the sunshine in the sunset, and there will be no particularly large color temperature difference.

Cleverly hide the light source for focusing.

When backlighting, slight defocusing often occurs due to too strong light. At this time, you can open the live view, enlarge the picture, and twist the focus ring on the lens until the face of the person is clear.

Another simple trick is to turn on the light source first? Hide? Behind the model, there is no strong light interference in focusing now. After focusing, the shutter keeps half-pressed and slightly translates, and then the shutter is pressed after the light source is emitted, which not only ensures the accuracy of focusing, but also achieves the aesthetic effect of backlight.

What is the point of this little trick? Translation? Moreover, the shutter needs to be kept in a half-pressed state during translation, so the way of half-pressing is actually a bit similar to manually locking the focal length.

The focal plane will hardly change in the process of slight translation (pay attention to translation instead of moving back and forth, and the amplitude should not be too large), which ensures that the focusing is still accurate.

If you think the above method is troublesome, you can take a flashlight with you and use it to fill the light and focus on the model's face first.

Before shooting, when the camera is in focus accurately, turn off the flash. Although this method looks a bit low, it is still very practical to use it with point focusing.

Use sidelight to add color to the work.

In the backlight scene, the character's hair will be more obvious and beautiful, the edge line of the body will also be presented, and the whole character will become more three-dimensional.

The appearance of this side light will make the characters feel warm. This is also an important reason why many people in the field of photography like backlighting.

So how should this side light be shot? From the light level, this side light effect is more likely to appear in the side backlight. Is the side backlight around the camera 135? The light emitted from the back of the camera to the subject accounts for 1/3, and the backlight accounts for 2/3.

From the light ratio, the subject and background are both in the dark or 2/3 of the area is in the dark, so the light ratio between light and dark is large and the contrast is strong. Backlight will produce profile light for opaque objects.

In addition to pure beauty, side light can also emphasize the depth of space, explain the hierarchical relationship between distant objects, and add a bit of scene atmosphere to the whole work.

Generally speaking, the side light can not only hook the model with an intoxicating Phnom Penh, but also make the overall picture more textured and empty, so that the 2D plane picture has a 3D stereoscopic effect.

Be sure to shoot in RAW format.

I believe that most of the friends who will read this article are not professional photographers, so it is inevitable that there will be some situations in which the light ratio is not controlled accurately when shooting this kind of backlit portrait.

Although the early stage will be slightly insufficient because of the light conditions at that time and our own uncertainty, fortunately, in the current digital photography era, we will have a lot of room for adjustment in the later stage.

All this is attributed to RAW's unique storage algorithm, which allows photographers to make some lossless adjustments to the photos in the later stage to make them look more layered.

For example, in the early stage, because we didn't bring lighting accessories such as reflectors, although the background exposure was very accurate, the model's face in the photo looked very black. At this time, we can use the high tolerance of RAW format to brighten the dark areas of the picture and adjust the overall exposure to the normal state.

Photographers can also make photos look more dreamy and hazy through post-software and even adjust the color temperature of the whole picture to make the color of the work warmer. Therefore, I strongly recommend that you shoot in RAW format, which can provide greater flexibility compared with other image formats, so that photographers have greater flexibility in pre-shooting and post-production.

Finally, talk about the eternal theme in Sunset:? Silhouette?

In shooting, we usually use? All manual? Exposure mode, narrow the aperture and speed up the shutter. In order to make people look close to full black, the sky can only be colored. The minimum aperture of consumer digital cameras is often around F8-F 1 1. If the aperture is not small enough, it is sometimes necessary to add an aperture. Reducer? In order to make people look close to all black.

Shooting method

1. Find the backlight scene. The sunset is behind the portrait.

2. Adjust the shooting mode of the camera to? All manual? Mode.

3. First, set the aperture to the minimum and the shutter to the fastest, preview the shooting results from the LCD screen, and decide whether it is necessary to slightly increase the aperture.

4. If the character is not close to full black under the condition of minimum aperture and maximum shutter, add a reducing mirror and preview it.

?