To have a better understanding of the camera settings talk about in this video, I recommend seeing of the better pictures part two, first.
Here’s a typical backlight situation. The subject is in front of a window with the bright background. As you can se, my subject is much too dark, and the background is very bright. Because this is a portrait, I made sure to use the camera’s aperture priority mode and set a nice wide aperture of F2.8, so at least the background would be blurred out, but that doesn’t fix the backlight problem. What’s clear is that I need to brighter up the subject. In this case, it’s not the background that I’m interested in, so how bright the background becomes is not that important. However, with that said if I can maintain a more natural looking background, it won’t become so distracting.
Ideally, I would have two options using the flash or using the spot meter. However, in some situations with some cameras using the flash won’t brighten the subject enough, and using the spot meter will require a tripod. So you may have to step out of the box a bit, but let’s cover the basics first.
Just using the flash may help. To use the flash I have to force it on. The auto flash setting won’t fire the flash because of the bright background. The flash lit up the subject, and kept background from becoming too bright because all the camera settings stayed the same. However, in this case I think the subject is too bright making him look a little flat. The flash is too strong because I’m so close.
Pocket cameras may not have the ability to lower the flash power, but most advance pointer shot cameras and the DS SLR can, so I lower the power of the flash. I can’t tell you how much to lower, or maybe increase in your situation because it really depends on the camera and distance from the subject.
Now I think it’s much better, but let’s see what comes out if I use the spot meter. The spot meter is something just about every camera should have. What it does is force the camera to look at a very small area in the picture in order to judge the right exposure. Using the spot meter means the subject will come out properly exposed so I don’t have to use the flash.
As you can see, the subject is much brighter than the first picture because now I’m exposing the picture based on him, but the background is much brighter too. Also, because I didn’t use the flash, the subject looks very natural whether that’s a good or bad thing it’s up to you to decide.
You’ll notice the shutter speed is much slower to add more light and brighten the subject. If the subject was any darker, I would have had to use a tripod because the shutter speed would have been too slow for me to hand hold the camera. Don’t be afraid to fill the frame with your subject. If I craft this image a bit, the background will be much less distracting, so in this case these were my options and both worked out just fine.
In some cases, the difference between the dark subject and the bright background maybe so big that even if the flash is used the background will still be too bright, in which case you can always shot a silhouette.
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