Day 20: Exploring backlight

At this stage I've tried a number of different light sources, from on-camera speed lights, fill and backlights, natural hard and soft lights, and I played around with some strobe and laser lights as well.

I'm still an amateur photographer, so making use of different sources of lights effectively has been a struggle of mine. For this challenge, I wanted to make use of the sun as the main backlight.

But the problem is that I live in London. The sun hardly shines bright, whilst finding a sunset spot to make effective use of the sun as a backlight is nearly impossible.

Once again, I had to be creative. However, the answer was right in front of me when I woke up this morning.

There is one single source of natural light in our living room, making it the ideal backlight for portrait photography.

Using backlights as your only source of light means that you will either overexpose the background to bring up the highlights of your subject or underexpose your subject to bring up the details of your background, creating heavy shadows.

I love this idea and I like the aesthetic of this particular type of photography. So I opted in for the later directing my model (my wife once again to the rescue) to make use of her hands to show movement and convey a mood.

I kept my ISO to the lowest setting my camera handles (100), opened my apperture to f/1.8 and dropped my shutter speed to 1:25. I also played around with my exposure in the settings to create a mystic atmosphere by bringing up colder tones in my shadows.