So, backlighting, easy, right?

This week I am helping run the snack station at our parish’s vacation bible school. As usual it is the hot-est, humid-est week of the summer. Coming home Monday with the backlighting assignment still on my mind, I poured myself a big glass of ice water and was struck by how pretty the blue plastic looked. (With 7 kids around we don’t do glass glasses anymore — it took me several years too long to figure that out.)

I wasn’t happy with the backlit subjects I had shot so far, and I was looking to try again. I thought that the glass might be the basis for a cool shot. With the right colors and materials, the bright light shining through them from behind might just really add some flair.

I’m happy with this shot — but I don’t think I would use backlighting as the primary light again. I like the way it illuminated the color and separated some items from the darker background, but I don’t care as much for the way it made non-translucent items darker. I think I would have to figure out some ratio of back to front or back to side lighting and I’m still working on mastering one speedlight. Every time I pull out the second flash I end up bawling on the floor in frustration.

The Behind-the-Scene Shot

Here’s the behind the scene for this one. In order to get some light in the front, I pulled the shutter speed waaaaayy down to allow more ambient light in. Unfortunately the weather decided to be naughty and dark rain clouds rolled in right as I was setting up. Thankfully the tripod and reflectors (and let’s be honest, LightRoom and Nik) came to the rescue.

The runner-up

This one was very dramatic and I really loved that about it. But the backlighting was more top lighting.

Here’s the bts on that shot. (That’s not dust you see in the flash light — really, it’s not! Okay, maybe it is.)This time I left off the black backboard and just used the sync shutter speed to squelch the ambient light in the room and create the effect of a black background and the old inverse-square law of light stuff — not that I could have told you that before I started really delving into the flash stuff…physics of light from me! Who would’ve guessed! ; )