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Into the light
One of the most challenging and sometimes, most frustrating of photography is shooting into sunlight or
contre-jour, as it's known, which literally means 'against daylight'.
A simple word of warning before we start though. If you catch the sun directly in your lens whilst you're looking through the viewfinder you can cause damage to your eye. The Sun is our closest star and can cause damage just by looking at it normally, but by looking through a lens you are magnifying its effects. Just like if you were using a magnifying glass to start a fire.
It also used to be given as a warning that it could damage parts of the camera particularly with long exposures or if the mirror on an SLR was locked up leaving the sun burning away the fabric focal plane shutter. I don't know what it will do to digital sensors. So do be extremely careful as I did know someone who damaged their retina whilst gazing through a lens.
This picture from Simon Boone is a classic contre-jour shot. The Sun is behind the trees so no chance of causing any harm to the eye or camera. It's nice how the Sun's rays filter through all of the upper branches.
Notice how the brightness of the sunlight actually takes the edge off the tree as if the wood has withered away. At the very top the sky has become a lilac colour, I don't know why this happens and will be interested in any theories, but you will often find lilac creeping into a contre-jour shot. The whole balance of this picture is great and reminds me of my own woodland where I walk the dog every morning.
Painters normally find it difficult to replicate the effects of contre-jour, but one artist unafraid of this is Joe Francis Dowden (whose work I featured in part 4 also). He not only often includes the sun, he replicates its effects fantastically. This is one of his where the sun is just above the frame, but you see it reflected in the margin of the stream.
The way he captures the water and its movement is amazing. I know how he does the bushes and so forth, it's called the spatter technique where a loaded brush is flicked to create spots of paint. He masks off areas he doesn't want to paint and starting with light colours and working through to the darks he builds it up to create an energetic landscape. It's a messy process for me at least and when I've tried it in the past a swift ticking off usually follows from my wife.
For a picture to be considered contre-jour, you don't need to have the Sun in the frame of the shot. Hold your arms out and anywhere in front of you will do where it's rays will dance off certain objects or water and create all manner of different effects. Our member, Mark Andrews, created a truly wonderful shot of a steam engine on the Bluebell line.
He called it a “Chocolate Box shot” and true enough I can imagine this on the front of a box of those Sharp's Toffees you used to get given for a birthday present as a child. Well, perhaps if you're old enough to remember.
Look at the way the sunlight plays through the steam and reflects off the engine's boiler yet the Sun is off to the left of shot. It's a really good composition in many other respects. He's got a lamppost one third in from the left where the shadowed area starts cooling that part and the red buffer plate of the engine and warmth of the wooden coaches on the right steering your eyes across there.
Two things you can say about Mark's pictures, he's very good at taking animal shots even in the zoo, which can also be tricky, and he takes really beautiful pictures of steam locomotives. It's easy to see where his loves lie, but we'll see another of his pictures later.
One of our other members, Lesley Key, produced a photo in the gallery one day. I noticed it particularly because the water wasn't level (see comments in part 3), but the effect that she'd caught with a full contre-jour shot was very good indeed. She'd cut it down from a normal landscape format to a square format, but still left the important elements in it.
Once we'd levelled out the water it was a fine shot of the River Severn taken very early in the morning. The sun is quite weak at that time, but nevertheless, try not to take too many chances with it by deciding what you are taking first and looking through the camera as little as possible. There is just a tiny hint of lens flare coming off the sun, you see it in the centre of shot, but you will get this unless you buy very expensive multi-coated lenses.
Of course you can make use of lens flare and even exaggerate its effects. This picture was taken using a 'Pulsator' filter on my old Minolta SLR. I think it was only the third time I'd ever used it and no wonder, the effects aren't all that good and I doubt I'll ever use it again.
The picture is of a fountain in the Park Van Brussel opposite the Royal Palace. I liked the way the sun was shining through the water and pulled out the 'Pulsator' filter in the hope it would enhance the shot. Maybe not, eh?
Sunsets
One of the most popular type of contre-jour shots is the good old sunset, but all too often they are dull and uninteresting. What I mean by that is a lot of photographers see a nicely coloured sky, point the camera and take the picture. There's little in it and even the sky is devoid of any interesting cloud formations.
So what should you be looking to take? Maybe something like this one of Simon Boone's.
This is an absolute corker of a shot. You have the nice clouds in the distance and there is even detail in the fore and middle ground, but beyond even that, there are three further layers of hills fading into the distance. Now I know Harry Shepherd was with him at the same time and he took a similar picture, not quite as nice in my opinion and yet Harry has no need to prove to anyone that he is a skilled photographer.
What made the difference is that Simon used a 4X neutral density filter that allowed more detail of the ground to be recorded whilst cutting down the direct light of the sunset. It just led to a more evenly balanced picture so it might be worth having a 2X and/or 4X ND filter handy just in case. It looks like a very cold day and this is what Simon confirmed.
There's nothing wrong with just taking a picture of a sky. Constable used to grab a couple of canvases or some watercolour paper and nip out to do a bit of what he called 'skying'. However, if you want really attractive photographs it is better to ensure that you see a little more detail on the ground beneath the sky. This is another of Mark Edward's pictures, 'A Cornish Sunset'.
The sky is tremendous anyway, but the fact that it is partly reflected in the fairly calm water is a real bonus. The silhouetted rocks occupying the bottom right corner lend the scene some perspective and stop the eye from wandering off the picture completely.
He has got the horizon absolutely dead level, critical in this situation. I just find it all really enchanting and expect to see a galleon coming into view over that horizon at any moment.
I wouldn't want to put you off taking pictures of every possible sunset that you see, the more you take the more likely you're going to get one that is an absolute stunner. Just don't get carried away with the fact that because it looked nice to you at the time, the finished picture should look nice to everyone else. Do take pictures at every opportunity, after all, they only occupy a few bytes of information on a chip until you download them.
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