Useful Photography Tip

Useful Photography Tip #63: How to Deal with Back Lighting

Chris Gampat
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08/03/2013
2 Mins read

Mary and Tommy Sutor's Wedding Batch 2 (44 of 149)ISO 2001-250 sec at f - 5.6

Back lighting is one of the toughest situations to expose for unless you really learn to study your camera’s metering. By definition, back lighting is when your primary light source is behind your subject. For example, in the above photo the sun is behind the little girl. If you went along with what your camera’s metering system says, it would render her and the other main details of the image as way too dark. And if you underexposed, then it would be extremely dark but you would get details in the sky.

So the answer is amazingly simple: overexpose by a stop. When you overexpose an image, you’re doing what we call, “Exposing for the shadows.” While your eyes can see the subject clearly, your camera can’t. Afraid of losing the sky detail? You can pull the highlights back in Adobe Lightroom quite easily.

When would this be useful? Let’s say you’re trying to shoot a cityscape with the sun behind it but your camera isn’t giving you the details in the city. Instead, it is turning the city into a silhouette. First off, take your camera off of auto mode and put it in either P, S, or A. Then crank up your exposure compensation by one stop. And voila you’ll have the photo. Shooting in manual? Expose your image to one stop brighter than what your camera is telling you is perfectly balanced.

Try it, and remember this for next time.

For more Useful Photography Tips, check out our entire list right here.



back light camera overexpose Photography setting underexpose
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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.