Back Lighting - A tip from Alan Thornton

Alan Thornton has been a regular instructor with the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops for the last 4 years, and we are thrilled to have him give us great tips on lighting! He will be joining us this summer with his workshop "Lighting Portraits on Location" June 10 - 16, 2007

Not all of us have the time or resources to make a great portrait that is carefully lit with strobes, portable flashes, reflector cards or generators. Now, those things are a lot of fun and a must for every job I go out on, but sometimes you can find the right light to get the same effect if you just know where to look, and how to use it. Backlighting is one of the most simple and readily available light.

You can create portraits with a bit more impact if you are able to position the sun or another available light source, behind the person, preferably later or early in the day. This creates an edge of light around the person, a glow that helps define their shape and form. It also helps to provide more depth to the scene they are in. The trick is exposure! You will need to have your camera in Manual Mode to determine exactly what the exposure value should be for the persons face. This is typically high contrast lighting scheme due to the bright light coming at your camera around the person, and then the darker shade that is on the face, which can fool your camera in Auto Mode.

The hair and shoulders will have edge light, but the light on the face should be soft and even. The trick is to either zoom in or walk in close so that you only frame the face in the viewfinder, and then take an exposure reading. Once you know what f/stop and corresponding shutter speed your camera now says is properly exposed, (the mid-point on the scale you see in the viewfinder) then set the lens to that, back up and re-compose and create a portrait! Depending on your weather conditions and time of day, you can get an edgy ‘rim lit’ portrait with a lot of contrast, or a nice gentle and gradual light change from a slightly cloudy day. Watch how much sky you have in your composition and other bright objects that maybe reflecting into your lens, and the occasional passer by that is a little too curious! Great luck to you!

Alan M. Thornton has been an advertising, editorial, and fine-art photographer for 15 years, working with such clients as Hewlett Packard, Land Rover, Nike, and TV Guide, and producing for photographers including Joyce Tenneson, Greg Myhra, Jimmy Williams, and Pete Stone.

In his fine-art and travel documentary work, Alan's most recent project took him to southeastern Turkey, where he spent the summer of 2005 exploring the mountainous regions and making large-format black-and-white portraits of the nomadic Kurdish people who live there. This is Alan's fourth year teaching at The Workshops. His Web site address is www.amtproductions.com.

© Alan Thornton

For more information on this workshop or others please visit www.santafeworkshops.com

Living Photography: A Personal Statement from Harold Davis

The Santa Fe Photographic Workshops welcomes Harold Davis to Santa Fe this summer. We are thrilled to have him, and even more honored to have him take time to write a brief piece for our blog. We look forward to meeting this photographer and see where he leads us.

Living Photography: A Personal Statement from Harold Davis
For me, photography is life and life is photography. You can’t separate who you are from the photos you make. Every good photo shows something of the spirit and soul of its creator.

It’s called digital photography for a reason. Digital photography is a new medium. The craft of digital photography combines the craft of photography with the discipline of software. Digital photographers can spend more time with the computer than with cameras. And digital cameras are special-purpose computers with a lens and a scanner attached.

A pixel is but a pixel: meaning that if the final digital image works it doesn’t matter how we get there. A digital image can be created using one part digital capture and one part digital painting in Photoshop.

My workshop Digital Workflow: From the Field to Flickr explains these aspects of the technical craft of digital photography in the context of my work. But the workshop is not about me as much as it is about the participants in the workshop, who’ll each leave the workshop with their own personalized digital workflow.

Technique without soul and vision is nothing, so my real goal in my workshop is to help each participant understand what photography means in their own life. We’ll explore photography together as a journey, not a destination, and accept a happy, busy, creative, and fun week together as a quest. This is a visual, philosophic, and sentimental quest. The results may not be what you expect, but I can guarantee adventures along the way.

Image copywrite © Harold Davis


Harold Davis writes the popular Photoblog 2.0. His most recent book is The Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite and the High Sierra. He will be teaching Digital Workflow: From the Field to Flickr from July 7-14 at the Santa Fe Workshops.