Alexandru Vita Photography

Shooting into the sun

Don’t you just love those images with bright sun in the frame, with intentional lens flare? Well I sure do. Hope you like some of my examples below:

I have always been fascinated of shooting pictures directly into the sun, of including burning light into the composition as a creative effect.

However, several things come to mind:

No more automatic exposure

The sun light is so powerful that it will completely mess-up the in-camera exposure. You can basically use the exposure compensation controls on your camera, or better yet, expose for your subject and switch to manual. The sunny highlights might become completely blown-out white, but at least the point of interest is properly exposed.

Harder automatic focusing

If shooting straight into the sun, you camera will surely have a hard time focusing on your foreground subjects. A simple trick you can use is to compose without the sun, focus and then recompose. Or better yet, use the palm of your hand to block the sun flare, to help your camera’s automatic focusing.

The importance of aperture

When dealing with flare, setting a wide aperture (f/2.8, f/3.5 etc) can sometimes create an unpleasant wash-out effect. You should reduce the aperture size to f/22 or lower if you can. The sun will now look like a star!

Avoid mid-day

Unless you’re shooting up at the sun (like through leaves in trees), you’re better off in the morning or evening, when the sun is lower on the horizon. That way you can place the sun easier behind your subjects, or you could also create some interesting silhouette effects. Keep the silhouettes as simple as possible, make them easy to understand.

Trial and error

Because of all the factors, it takes a lot a tests to get interesting results. And due to the nature of these shots, they don’t have to be very sharp or still, it’s ok. Take a lot of pictures and try to have fun with it, to experiment. You’ll surely get some nice images!

Have you got some images with sun flare or silhouettes?

Don’t forget to share you own images or thoughts by leaving a comment below.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2010 at 7:03 pm.
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