Well hopefully you can clearly see
that I'm out here in the wonderful world
of nature in fact I'm in the Mount Adams
wilderness area of Washington State
and while I was photographing
these wonderful backlit flowers,
orange, purples and white.
I stumbled across a fair forest maiden.
She came down from this
once beautiful green forest
that suffered a huge forest fire
about a year ago and she's the keeper of the forest,
is what she told me,
so I said may I make your photograph please
and of course she said fine,
but she raised a good question.
It's a question I get often asked a lot
and that is real simple,
she said shouldn't I be facing the Sun
and I said absolutely not,
because I don't want you to squint
my fair maiden. Instead I want
the Sun at your back
and that's an important word to keep in mind
because when the Sun is at your subjects back
back, back, back, back, back,
what are we doing?
We must be shooting a back light
situation and we are, so this is a back
light situation, on purpose.
I want the fair maidens hair to be backlit
you can see clearly it's illuminated
all aglow.
Her white dress is somewhat translucent
as well. Clearly the flowers are also
backlit. What's key here is in this
lighting situation, is to get your meter
reading correct. Now we're going to be
using an aperture choice here of only
about f/11.
So at f/11 watch what I'm doing
I'm literally walking in with the camera,
in Manual Exposure Mode
and then taking a reading off of her face.
Okay real simple
and off of her face at f/11 take a
look it doesn't have to be in focus.
Her face does not have to be in focus
as you can clearly see here
as I'm going in here I just want to get a reflected
light metering and at f/11,
I'm getting a reading of a 1/160 of a second.
So I'm good to go.
So backing up I go
with that exposure all set
and I think we're all good
and ready to go.
Now I want to also stress compositionally
I'm not going to put the Sun in that photograph.
Go ahead my fair maiden
put those hands up to your face
and give me one of those fair maiden poses.
This should be wonderful
and take a look. Put my hand out.
I'm extending my hand out by the way,
I don't have my hood unfortunately, so
I'm making a lens-hood out of my hand
to block out some of that light
and take a look at that.
Clearly it's dreamlike, very fantasy like
in this lighting condition,
that we have here.
I could not be more happier
with this image.
Now best time to shoot a vertical
we already know the answer to that,
but let's go ahead and remind you again.
Yes it's right after the horizontal,
so I'm going to come in here
a little bit more with the flowers.
My fair maiden, please come this way
perfect, now I get a little bit better
light on the back of your hair actually.
This is even better and I'm going to
once again, this is autofocus.
I don't have the issue with lens flare now either
which is really nice,
so I got a tree shadow blocking for me,
here we go one, two, three.
Take a look at that,
take a look at that.
We got the vertical,
we got the horizontal
and yes there's still lots more to shoot
but I will do that after I close this video.
So let's review;
we're shooting a backlit scene here.
We're metering off the front of the
person's skin, for obvious reasons
because that's where we want our
exposure. We're not wanting to shoot a
silhouette here. So meter off of the
person's skin f/11 at 1/60 second,
in this case with 400 ISO
and everything else takes care of itself.
Yes we come back, recompose
and it helps to have a fair maiden of the forest,
who can strike a few wonderful poses.
Hey I hope you find this tip useful
as well as beneficial
and maybe it will help you in your
pursuit of photographic excellence
and until next time,
this is Bryan Peterson
reminding all of you,
You Keep Shooting.