I wrote a blog recently about dealing with tricky situations and the rules to follow. Now, I follow the rules and I love a set of rules but there are lots of things cameras don’t like and one of those is dealing with a backlit situation. When taking photographs of people ideally you should have light coming in at them not from behind them as you want their faces correctly exposed but with city landscapes some of the prints I’ve made have been heavily backlit.

The two photographs above are heavily backlit and the camera was basically pointed at the sun. When a camera is pointed at the sun it takes a meter reading and it it gives you a setting based on huge amounts of light hitting the sensor or film in behind the shutter. You’ll either you want a silhouette like the image on the left above the foreground correctly exposed and the sky burnt out like the photograph in the right above.

I love the way a backlit image can be turned into a silhouette. The print above is a panoramic print of The Houses of Parliament in London. I waited for the sun to be perfectly positioned behind Big Ben before I took the shot on my own manual setting. You can see this print in the London panoramics gallery.

One of my favourite panoramic prints above is a backlit composition. I use this on my website and my blogs a lot. It’s my favourite because I’ve managed to get the foreground perfectly exposed and the starburst effect of the sun. I used slide film on for this print. Film is particularly sensitive to overexposure and I have had many instances over the years where this ‘reciprocity effect’ has ruined a well thought out plan for a photograph. Anyway this print has been a huge success and it sits in my house as well as few banks and reception areas around the UK.