Gritty Sun Backlighting

It’s good to learn from your mistakes and I must admit I made a rookie mistake in all of today’s pictures. Its not backlighting the subject, which is quite intentional, or having huge sun spots, also intentional. It’s just a careless rookie mistake and you can see it in every one of today’s pictures… Wanna know what it is? Keep reading 🙂

I have a leave no trace photography policy that I did break a little bit in today’s shoot. By broke I mean I literally bork a small piece of a branch so I could shoot the sunlight through it. I stumbled upon this tree near the mall where I did the last shootabout. The location was pretty simple but I really wanted to play around with some more sun in the background work. I think it came out well except for one little thing…

I love the bean-pod in the picture but I also love the stick it’s on. The wood is all gnarled and knobby and I really like it. Makes for a little extra interesting texture. The sun flare was really cool here too. I don’t get how the sun can have those little rays covering up part of the bean pod when it’s on the other side of it. I might have to Google that one day. I thought about cropping this image but that would cover up my rookie mistake so I decided I wouldn’t… Anybody figure it out yet?

Yes, I did basically just set up the first shot with the second shot in the background. 🙂 Both of these work really well by themselves but when you take something cool and put it as a background of something else cool, it makes them both look even better. Like putting Chuck Norris in a Bruce Lee movie or putting whip cream on Hot Chocolate.

You know I like to do this 🙂 check out my friend Sally over at Lens and Pens

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Figure it out yet? The amateur mistake is I forgot to clean my equipment before I started shooting. Invest in some simple field cleaning told and use them, it will save you from a random spec showing up in the same place in every picture. It’s an easy fix in Photoshop but I wanted to share my mistake so you could learn from it. 🙂 Have a great week-start (as opposed to weekend) and God Bless, leave comments and email me if you’d like, arleyseth@gmail.com

If you have any interest in buying a cleaning kit, which I highly recommend you get if you don’t have one, here’s a good one made by Nikon. If you use this link you’ll also be helping support the blog so I appreciate that! –> Cleaning Kit on Amazon