Backlighting is the sin of posing the subject (usually one or more people) in front of the sky or a ski slope or a body of water so that the important foreground is much darker than the unimportant background.
When this happens, the tiny brain of the camcorder's auto exposure system detects the bright background and sets the exposure for it instead of for your subjects. They become inky silhouettes.
Before you can take steps to prevent backlighting, you have to notice that it's happening; so, for goodness sake, study the image in your viewfinder. If it does not clearly show detail in people's faces or other important foreground elements, you've got yourself a bad case of backlighting.
You can fix backlighting by enabling the backlight compensation circuitry in your camcorder, or by lightening the foreground with reflector fill. But these solutions can be chancy for Getting Starters:
- Most backlight controls are unable to gauge the difference between background and foreground, so the amount of compensation is seldom accurate.
- Reflectors demand a modest amount of practice to master--though they are really easy, cheap, and fun to use.
No, the simplest solution to backlighting is to move camcorder and subjects until the foreground of your shot is at least as bright as the background. To eliminate sky, start by shooting from a higher camera position. At the beach, simply turn away from the glare off the …
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