The perfect is the enemy of the good…!
Bat Signal
Sometimes as a photographer, you need to make a difficult decision: do you want to take a good shot or a great shot? There’s a big difference, and it affects your whole approach. Backlighting is a good example.
Traditionally, you’re taught to keep the light behind you to avoid shadows falling on your subject and get better colour saturation. However, there is another way. If you put the sun behind your subject, you can create silhouettes, rim lighting or ‘sunny silhouettes’—which are a combination of both.
If you set yourself up for one of these effects, it’s true that you’ll miss out on more ‘normal’ portraits, but who wants a record shot when you have the chance to set a personal best…?!
Let’s have a look at the three options in turn.
Silhouettes
Silhouettes might seem complicated to get right, but the problem has more to do with finding the right situation than the right exposure. The best time to try for a silhouette is at sunrise or sunset, but you need two things to be successful:
a clear plain sloping up towards the sun (to the east at sunrise or to the west at sunset)
one or two recognisable animals (such as giraffes or those with horns) on the horizon and no more than one tree or bush.
I spend a lot of time in Africa, and I’ve been on over 250 game drives since 2013, but I’ve only really been able to take advantage of those conditions once. I was on safari with Paul Goldstein at Kicheche Bush Camp in the Masai Mara, and we had the perfect set-up. It was coming up to sunset, and there were a few wildebeest on the horizon and a few nice clouds in the sky.
There weren’t any predators around, so we were able to lie down beside our safari truck to get a cleaner horizon and take as many shots as we wanted!
Miss Saigon
Once you’re in position, it’s relatively easy to expose for silhouettes as the camera does most of the work for you. Cameras are taught that the world reflects 18% of the light falling on it, so exposure meters try to make sure any pictures match that ratio.
In good lighting during the day, a typical landscape will look fine. At sunset, the meter still works because it tells the camera to darken the sky, which is much brighter than usual—especially if your shot includes the setting sun! That will also darken your subject dramatically, but that’s fine because you want it to be a silhouette.
It’s true that some people prefer the sky to be darker and redder, but that’s easily done by using a stop or two of negative exposure compensation. In the case of my wildebeest at sunset (above), I actually overexposed by 2/3 of a stop, so it pays to experiment.
Apart from that, the only thing to worry about was making sure that the animal, the sun and the clouds were all reasonably sharp. That meant increasing my aperture to f/16. The wildebeest was walking quite slowly, so I was able to reduce my shutter speed to 1/500 of a second, and I was on Auto ISO as usual, which ended up being 280.
One other thing to pay attention to is the position of the sun. If it’s in the frame, it should probably be in the middle—anything else just looks weird! If it’s not in the frame (either because it’s too high in the sky or it’s already dropped below the horizon), it’s a good idea to try to centre your composition on where the sun is. If you don’t, the sky will naturally be brighter on one side of the frame than the other, and, again, that just looks a bit strange.
Rim Lighting
If the sun is bright and behind your subject at just the right angle, you may be able to create rim lighting. This is just the glow of bright light around the animal that gives it a pleasing ‘halo’.
Again, the conditions are all-important. The sun has to be behind your subject, and it’s good to avoid distractions such as trees or other animals. In the case of this shot of a wildebeest on the horizon at sunset, I had to search for a long time to find the right place. I was at Klein’s Camp for a couple of months, but it was hard to find any spot to take sunset shots because the conservancy is located in a long, wide valley that runs north to south, surrounded by hills on either side that were off-limits to vehicles!
When I eventually happened upon a good spot, this was the only decent shot I managed to take. For this one, my aperture was f/8, my shutter speed was 1/1000 of a second, and the ISO was automatically set at 64.
Gnu Horizon
Of course, you don’t need your subject to be in silhouette to create rim lighting. You can also take a backlit shot earlier in the day when the light is stronger and/or coming slightly from the side. That means the body of your subject will still be bright enough to show some detail even though it has a distinctive halo around it.
I took this image of two chacma baboons on a termite mound in Botswana in October 2022. I’d just taken dozens (if not hundreds!) of pictures with the sun behind me, but as we drove off, I suddenly asked the driver to stop so that I could take a few backlit shots.
Social Climbing
The sun was at a slight angle, so the baboons weren’t silhouetted, but that was fine. My settings were as follows:
Aperture: f/4
Shutter speed: 1/1000 of a second
Auto ISO: 400
Exposure compensation: -1 EV
Sunny Silhouettes
The final option is to create what I call ‘sunny silhouettes’. This is when the background is black and the animal is black except for a thin rim of gold around the outside.
I first tried it out at a safari park near Santander in Spain called Cabárceno. I was photographing the giraffes, but I wasn’t getting any decent shots, so I decided to underexpose my images and use backlighting. These were my settings—and before you say anything, yes, I should’ve been at 1/400 rather than 1/4000 of a second!
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter speed: 1/4000 of a second
Auto ISO: 1100
Exposure compensation: -2 EV
After a LOT of work in Lightroom, this was the result.
"Who turned out the lights?"
Verdict
So there you have it. If you want to ‘stand out from the herd’, you might have to try backlighting—either silhouettes, rim lighting or sunny silhouettes. Yes, it’s a risk, and your shots will end up either being dreadful or great, but you only need one, as they say…
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