Photography school: Contre-jour
July 23rd, 2007 Posted in Photography School, All
In a recent post, I only mentioned this way of taking pictures by “Against daylight“ method popularly known as Contre-jour. The main condition to achieve this is to have a direct source of light, whether it is a sun or other artificial way of lightning and without any of those it isn’t possible to make these photos. Pointing a camera directly to the source of light, camera with program mode usually goes “mad” and on a display you don’t see much because those conditions aren’t defined in camera’s memory so the shutter speed is shortened to minimum and the aperture is closed to maximum so it is adjusted to take a
good picture only of blue sky no matter if there is any object between camera and the source of light. In other words, the lighting instrument and the viewer are facing towards each other, with the subject in between. The object looses all the details and becomes black as night and that is our main aim. Water girl, same as the Sunset girl, are taken with Olympus C-8080, and manual adjustments by which the shutter speed is set to 1/4000 sec, and the aperture set to f/8. I’m sure that even with a program mode you could achieve almost same result. I hope you wont be lazy, so go out and put your cameras to the test!
3 Responses to “Photography school: Contre-jour”
By David on Sep 15, 2007
Can my camera be damaged by pointing it at the sun and taking a picture? I have a Nikon D-70 and it is an expensive camera. I don’t want to mess it up. Do you always use a filter when taking pictures like these?
By admin on Sep 18, 2007
Well, for a start, I haven’t used any filter, but UV (ultraviolet) filter would make a little bit of difference in positive way so if you have it or can have it, don’t miss to use it. In era of film cameras, too long exposure when pointing to the sun can cause nothing but blank shot. Since digital cameras are making pictures using binary system with ones and zeros, there shouldn’t be any doubt that sunlight can make any damage to your camera. You can see that shots I made were whit shooter speed of 1/2000 sec. and up because only that way you can see the sun the way it is. With shutter speed longer than that, you can usually get an empty white shot. SO, DON’T BE AFRAID!
By David on Oct 6, 2007
Thank you. I appreciate it.