8 Photography Tips for Shooting Against the Sun
Many times I have done wedding photography and portrait photography against the sun and depending on how you see this situation you can either get bad pictures or succeed and get creative pictures.
1. Use a lightmeter..
To get a sense of what exposure you will need to properly light your back lit subject
2. Use your on-camera flash
Pop that sucker and light up your model. You’ll at least get to see the person’s face.
3. Use an external flash (1, 2 or more..)
It will be a lot better than using your on-camera flash.. a lot more powerful too. But of course you’ll need something to trigger these, such as a pocket wizard.
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4. Use a smaller aperture
Try to reduce how much the sun fills your scene. With the use of the on camera flash you can most likely get a decent shot this way. It can also create a nice effect on the sun.
5. Use a reflector
Become friends with the sun and reflect it back to your subject. Gold can create a nice effect but you can also use white to minimize the blindness to your model.
6. Don’t backlight
Turn your model so that the sun does not become a backlight. Have the sun light up your subject from an angle.
7. Photoshop
Play around with different settings in Photoshop to make it a little brighter, such as using Curves and Levels.
8. Turn it into a silhouette
Silhouettes always turn out beautiful. This is where your subject is back lit and turns black in the foreground.
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I noticed that a lot of times shooting against the sun will result in a substantial amount of noise on DSLR - anyone knows of a way to fight that?
I tried doing shuts at ISO 100 f/7.8 1/320 and got way too much of the red noise.
@Arthur That’s a little weird. What kind of camera are you using? Do you shoot in aperture priority mode or is that manual?
I have found the same thing Arthur. But I find the noise shows up when I try to lighten the image in post.
Thanks for your input Erica. Do you both shoot in raw or jpg mode?
For the images I spoke about, they were in JPG. I am JUST about to make the transition to RAW.
I was shooting raw - the noise that i got resembled the type of noise that you get on high ISO in the dark. Except high ISO in the dark amplifies green, here the amplification was red.
@Rowell
I was getting noise on relatively cheap olympus c70z camera. I know optics were not the best and neither was the sensor ; nevertheless.
I locked the ISO and manually adjusted the aperture, the shutter speed was selected automatically.
You know, I can’t explain why that happened. Could it be bad pixels and not noise? Do you remember what your shutter speed and aperture was?