The Nostalgic Wonder of Backlit Images

I spent a whole bunch of years shooting backlight. Then I stopped shooting so much of it. I’m not sure why. I felt my portfolio was saturated with it. But frankly, it’s what I love to do the most. I love images that are backlit by the sun especially.

I love experimenting with the person I’m shooting, feathering the light, and I also love the myriad of happy accidents I get from shooting that way. It’s the most exciting thing for me to do with portraits.

I often say the reason I love backlit images is that I’m very much inspired by the photography from the 1970s. Which I am. But I’m not so sure now that the images back then were so very backlit. A lot were.

Not all. Whatever, images with backlight have this kind of nostalgic feel to them so possibly it’s that. When you are shooting backlight you have to be adept at shooting manually. Cameras are pretty much stupid.

If the scene is overly bright behind your subject the camera will darken the subject way too much. It overcompensates. You can kind of spot meter but I like to have full control over how my subject is lit.

I also love editing this kind of image. Pushing the contrast and the colors and bringing out all the little oddities of sunspots and flare that are thrown up. I’ve recently been working with Misa, a very talented musician.

For part of our shoot, I wanted to create a set of images that had her soaking wet through and backlit. The mix of the water and the sun is always going to throw up some wonderful imagery. I’ll be editing our images in full in a few day's time but in the meantime here are a few teasers.

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