Exposure Techniques for Backlit Subjects

If you’ve ever taken a picture of someone standing in the shade with the bright sunlight highlighting the scene behind them, you’ve probably been disappointed with the resulting photo. The background will be correctly exposed, but your subject will be too dark.

This happens because, when your camera is taking its automatic meter reading, it’s programmed to make the midtones of the photo 18% gray to avoid clipping the highlights in the scene.

In the photo to the right, I composed the scene and allowed the camera to automatically set the exposure. The camera sees this as a brightly-lit scene; as a result, the background is properly exposed but the scarecrow is a bit dark.

If no other light is available, you can try the technique in the shot below. I simply moved the camera forward until the subject filled the frame, then I took another meter reading. Keeping my aperture at f/8, I changed my exposure time from 1/20 sec to 1/5 sec. This shot brings up the exposure for the subject, but may cause the highlight of your background to be blown out.

We’ve now have multiple exposures of the same scene, which is called bracketing. At this point, it’d be easy to combine these two shots in Photoshop and use the properly-exposed background with the properly-exposed subject to end up with a photo with good exposure all around.

But let’s say you wanted to do it in-camera, meaning when you dump it down to your computer the shot’s done. Little to no post-processing needed. That’s where having a flash comes in handy.

For the last shot, I returned the camera to its initial exposure reading which gave me a well-exposed background. I setup my flash on a stand about 6 feet away and used my light meter to get a reading of f/8 for the flash (which was 1/4 power of the flash). My camera went click and we ended up with the following photo.

As you can see, the background has the same exposure that it did in the first picture. The scarecrow is exposed similarly to that in the second shot. Another benefit of the flash is that it brought out much more color and detail in the scarecrow, something that we might not have been able to achieve otherwise with this scene.

With the simple addition of a flash, we were able to save the time it would’ve taken us to combine the photos in Photoshop.

Further Reading

• Need a flash? Check out our tips on choosing a flash.