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Shooting into the Sun

Sometimes a photographer needs to include the sun in the composition, such as in this image. A technique to help with mitigating the strong light and thus strong shadows and highlights when you include the sun and create a sun star (as illustrated in the photo above) you need to stop the aperture down to at least f16 or smaller. The sun star created by stopping down varies with lenses and so you need to experiment. Of course, in stopping down the aperture you also need to increase your shutter speed and perhaps also the ISO (more about the exposure triangle and backlit images in a later post).

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The Aesthetics of Backlight Photography

I’m new to blogging and thus I’m just finding my ‘feet’ here. This blog will be about photographing subjects that are backlit by some light source. For my images that light source 99% of the time is the beautiful sun. Photographing backlit subjects is certainly an interaction between the light source, the subject and supporting subjects, and the aesthetic of the photographer. Part of the aesthetic is the scene metering. I could do HDR, but I’d rather not because I don’t like sitting at the computer and fiddling around with multiple images and multiple layers in Photoshop (more about that topic in later posts). My camera (in this image it is the Canon 5D Mark IV) has a great dynamic range however, there are photographic techniques for mitigating the dynamic light range in the scene. This image of a saguaro cactus with the prolific growth of ‘arms’ is an example of using some of those techniques. OK, I better post this before something happens in computer/internet land and I lose my post. 

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And another beautiful backlit saguaro cactus. This one is also growing in the Sabino Canyon Park in Tucson, AZ.

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Can’t get enough of backlit saguaro cactus. This one lives in the Sabino Canyon Park, Tucson, AZ. The morning sun provides the glow on the cactus’ needles.