Hey photographers! Thank you so much for joining me today and welcome to the next video about light. Today we're going to discus backlight, why I love using it, and how to make things a little bit easier when you're shooting with backlight. I'm Fraidy Shimon from Peppermint Photography and The Editing Bootcamp. Today's video on backlighting is part four in our mini series about light and part of a greater series Shoot To Edit.
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All right, let's jump straight into it. So what is backlighting? Backlight is when the light comes from behind your subject and it's shining towards the camera. When you shoot with backlight that creates a really beautiful halo around the subject. It's usually the easiest to see in the hair, or if you have a fuzzy sweater or something that's going to pick up the light, that's where it's easy to see. What you want to make sure that you're doing when you shooting with backlight is to reflect sunlight back onto the faces. Or use ambient light, that's just there. So you have to know how to find the right spot that has light coming from the back, but also enough open space in front of your subject so that their faces aren't dark. There's an easy reflector that you can get on Amazon. It's a 5 in 1 reflector and you can just use that to reflect some light back onto your subject.
So some examples of backlight are over here. You can see how the light is coming from behind her, and it's just hitting her right in her hair. There is a reflector shooting some light back onto her face, and it's just such a beautiful image. Here's another example. In this case, the window was the light source and it was also the background. So it's a basic window, covered with the shear curtain, the light is coming through the window and look at how beautiful it lights up this image. Here's one more example of backlight. The light is coming from the back and you can see it creates a outline all around the family. So all these are great examples of backlighting.
Now let's talk about shooting into the light and focusing, helping your camera focus and reducing lens flare and haze. Let me just show you light haze happens when you're shooting into the light. Sometimes if there's too much light coming into your lens its going to blur out their faces like this or like this. So what happens when you want the image to be sharp instead of this one, having something like this image. If your lens came with a lens hood, you might want to use that lens hood. What it does is it blocks out some of the light, so it can't totally reach your lens and this way your camera will focus better and you won't have that light haze. The other option would be, if you don't have a lens hood, or you're kind of lazy to put it on, what you can do is, as you're shooting, block the light with your hand or with a hat or with anything else that's available. You could block out some of that light from reaching your lens and then focus. If you do want some extra light to leak in, but you want to make sure that your camera is focusing well, an easy way to do this would be to block the light, focus, hold down the shutter button, then remove your hand. So the lights can reach the lens and then shoot. That'll give you an image where you do have some light leak and you do have some haze in it, but it's tack sharp and it's focused perfectly on the eyes.
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