Prairie Backlight

It is no secret that I adore backlit images. 'Backlit' refers to my subject being placed between my camera and the sun or my light source. This set up can cause some issues when metering your camera manually. The sensor can get thrown by the excessive amount of light hitting the sensor. Here are a few tips for making better backlit images. 

1. Shoot to crop out the sky. By eliminating the sun and very bright sky, you can help the sensor cope with all the light. Remember that one or more parts of an image can blow out when the sun is bright. You can meter for the sky (set your camera to expose for the sky), but the foreground will be very dark. If you expose for the ground, the sky will be blown out (lacking all detail--white). A longer lens can help you remove the sky by using compression. Compression is a characteristic of a longer lens that appears to bring the background toward the camera. The following image was taken with my FE 90mm f/2.8 Macro G OSS Lens. It is a macro lens that rendered the backlit weeds sharply while bringing the background forward as a frame. 

2. Remember the middle. Meter to the middle and direct your spot meter to an area of the frame where the brights and darks come together. This helps you to preserve the most of both the sky and the ground. I metered for the grass in the center of the frame below. I was able to open the shadows on the bottom and recover some of the sky at the top in Lightroom.  This leads me to the next tip....

3. Remember to shoot RAW! This will give you more data to extract details. The image will appear flat and lifeless, but you can bolster the colors and contrast in your post processing program.

4. Control haze and flare by shooting a few shots as you shift your position around your subject. The new dehaze slider in Lightroom/ACR  (under the Effects panel) is very helpful when flare is unavoidable. I personally love flare, but it is great to know there are tools to get rid of it, should I want to. :)

5. Use very shallow depth of field and wait until early evening to get soft and glowing backlit images. This image was shot at f 0.95 just before sunset. The shallow DOF mixed with the old lens from 1965 left me with a very pretty image that I love. Backlighting is always easier early in the morning or early in the evening. Avoid the mid-day sun!

These tips work indoors too! Here are a few examples. The exposures are less extreme for backlit images indoors. I like to meter for the wall near the window to try and get the best balance of light in the image. It is ok if the window blows out completely, if you want it too. Just be careful to avoid blowing out the details on the subject's skin.

AMAZING BW Creation with Lr CC Dehaze and Brush Tool

This was so exciting that I just had to share!


Dramatic BW with Dehaze and Brushwork from Caroline Jensen on Vimeo.

Behind the Scenes of 'Roaring Prairie'

I wanted to share a few behind the scenes images from the creation of my image, Roaring Prairie. The late afternoon was frigid and the wind was intense. Gusts of up to 30 miles an hour whipped through our hair, and we reluctantly found the winter coats again. It was earlier in the day than I had hoped for, but the temperature was going to continue to drop and rain was threatening, so we headed out.

My son, Tristan (15) manned the Sony a6000 and Zeiss 35mm lens. It was too windy for video, so I told him just to take images as I worked. Once we got going, I asked him to throw a winter coat up to Anni (my daugher and model) so that she could warm up between shots. She was barefoot on the rocks and said that the misty rain was turning to ice under her feet. Poor girl. Tristan then threw her some flip flops between shots. We only stayed out there about 15 minutes as we were all chilly. I used my new Vanguard VEO tripod so that I could bracket exposures for the final image.

This image encapsulates all that I feel about the prairie most of the year...cold, windy, and unforgiving. We found a small nest of birds tucked into the boulders. The mother seemed unphased by our presence. Perhaps, she knew we were too cold to care that they were there!

This is the storyboard of how the image came togther. I had initially intended it to be color, but I was in love with the simplicity of the black and white, so I went with that. The image contains two exposures, one for the sky and one for my subject. The color version is straight out of Lightroom using the new HDR merge feature. I may continue to edit this one in color and see where it takes me. 

I wanted to send a big shout out of thanks to my kids! It was cold and you were troopers! I also want to thank Sony and Vanguard USA for making products that make my visions come to life. :) 

Beautiful Light = One Click Edit

Beautiful light can strike when you least expect it! In this video,  I go over some thoughts on how to see and be ready for great light, and show how simple it is to process the images in black and white. I wanted to send thanks to the amazing Jessica Drossin for her actions that truly understand how color translates to monochrome. They are lovely actions! 

Beautiful Light in Odd Places from Caroline Jensen on Vimeo.