Contre-jour

September 12th, 2007 - 14:40 | 1 comment

Earlier this week I spotted this picture on the ‘geek’s Flickr stream, but, as ever when looking at photos by Proper Photographers, felt silly leaving a comment that’d boil down to ‘wow, this is great’, especially as it’s from someone’s wedding.

Aside from the beautiful moment, it’s a hell of a shot to pull off technically. Exposing for any of a dozen areas in that room would have resulted in lost detail. I guess knowledge and experience combine in the necessary split second, and I’m full of admiration. I confess I did unconsciously click ‘more properties’ to view the EXIF data. Oops
He’s now featured the shot on his wedding photography blog, so I’ll comment here. Wow. It is great.

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One Response to “Contre-jour”

1 PooterGeek Sep 12th, 2007 at 5:11 pm

Thank you.

Everyone was lovely and the day went smoothly, but that wedding was difficult, solely because of lighting. Very little of it took place outside and what did was under intense sunshine in a treeless part of central London—with no usable architectural shade. White human faces don’t look good in strong summer afternoon sunlight. Who wants to be photographed squinting while downward-cast shadows are pick out every wrinkle?

Indoors, the light was either low tungsten or stark sidelight so I used far more flash than I wanted to and the reception rooms were small so the results included a lot of stark shadows on walls, which I hate, even when I used bounce and/or a flash diffuser. This week I bought yet another diffuser in the hope of reducing this in future.

So it was nice to take advantage of one of the disadvantages when I could. That set includes a handful of backlit shots. When I got the one you link to, I’m pretty sure I took an exposure lock on a dark grey wall the same colour as those in the shot, but outside the frame-of-view. The wall in question was lit by daylight coming through open patio windows on the right-hand side of the room. I wanted the details of the Globe theatre to be visible, but I didn’t want all the colour from the balloon and the girl to be lost to silhouette. If I could do it again I might have let a little more light in, but otherwise I’m pleased. (If I can find the exact settings for that frame on the relevant databack I’ll post them here.)

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