Posts Tagged ‘Back lighting’

This is a very common problem that almost everyone will come across. You take a photo of a scene with a nice sky, but the photo comes out with a white or very bright pale colored sky.

The issue here is that your eye has a much greater dynamic range than your camera. Dynamic range is the range of tones from dark to bright. Our eyes can see a wide range of tones, while a camera can only record a limited range. Any tones that exceed the top of that range come out as pure white, any below the bottom come out as pure black.

Thankfully, there are quite a few different things you can do to remedy this situation and capture a scene in which both the sky and foreground are properly exposed.

Lighting is obviously very important in photography. Without light, there'd be no photo. But what you may not realize is that the direction of the lighting plays a large role in the look of a photo.

There are three main directions of light that are purposefully used in photography - Front Lighting, Back Lighting, and Side Lighting. It is these that I want to take a look at in this article.

Taking photos shooting into the sun can be difficult due to the large difference in brightness between the sun and the rest of the image. However, don't let this put you off as you can get some great photos when shooting into the sun.

Obviously, when shooting into the sun you must be very careful, especially if you are using a telephoto lens. Don't look straight into the sun when photographing it, and generally try and keep to shooting later and earlier in the day when the sun's brightness isn't quite so intense as it can be during the day time.