{Photography Tip!} Use the Sun as a Backlight for romance and warmth!

Here is a blog post that's a little different from our usual posts. It is mainly intended to inspire other photographers (and everyday lovers of photography alike) to not be afraid to use whatever light is available to you at the moment, to its fullest! It takes practice, practice, practice to get it right, but you CAN achieve gorgeous, warm, artsy, romantic tones, if you only kept trying and experimenting!

The bright mid day sun, and the gorgeously warm sunset sun (essentially: a bright glowy light in the background of the subject), is capable of allowing us photographers to be more creative, to play with light, to soften the feel and look of an image, making it more romantic and interesting and fun to look at. Weather the final image is to be in color or black & white, the natural bright light behind the subject will stun!

I should mention that we set our cameras to be completely manual, meaning we set our own custom shutter speed and aperture and ISO, for every single shot we take. This allows us to get exactly the image we want out of a scene. If our cameras were set to fully automatic, it will most probably calculate (measure off of) the brightness of the background light, making the couple in the front disappear in the darkness of the shadows. Which is not what we look for. We want the couple to be enveloped in the warmth of the sunlight. We want to yellow orange glow of the sun to wrap itself around the subject of the image, as if blanketing them. The ultimate goal is to allow for the bright background to be as bright as possible, almost "blown out", the couple in the front to be soft and tinted in the light, and the whole image to be warm and romantic.


There is nothing wrong with "playing it safe" by using a flash to make sure the couple is always perfectly lit. In fact, having some of these "safe" kinds of images is a great addition to a whole series of images of the couple. However, the whole point of photography is to experiment, to go above and beyond what the human eye can see, to play with available light and to create/capture moods that will certainly escape in a blink of a naked eye.





Having a professional photographer who knows the ins and out of his/her equipment and who has the courage and imagination and artfulness to create something truly stunning and special and different, is what makes for an already perfect day (your wedding) even more memorable and immensely stunning!

Feel free to ask me any question you might have. We are always willing to talk about the technical aspect of things when it comes to photography. Even though we have been in the exclusive, full-time, business of wedding photography for 6 years, we are always eager to learn more! We LOVE what we do! :-)