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Taking Photos Into the Sun

Some people avoid taking photos into the sun. Granted, you never know quite what’s going to happen, but sometimes it’s interesting to try it just to see.

We climbed Kuju Mountain, a volcano in Southern Japan the other day, and this shot is an example of my rashness when it comes to taking photos into the sun. The sulfur vents happened to be in that direction, so I just pointed my camera and started shooting.

By some standards this picture is a disaster. The foreground is underexposed, and the sky overexposed, but personally I’m pleased with the result. The underexposure of the the forground makes it look harsh and moonlike, and serves to emphasize the wildly billowing steam from the Kuju sulfer vents, and the round white spot where the camera just couldn’t handle the intense sunlight helps to capture the brilliance of a sunny afternoon at high altitude.

These sulfur vents at Kuju are famous even in Japan. The sulfur comes out of holes in the volcano as super heated steam and forms intricate bright yellow stalactites at the vent openings. These are harvested, ground into powder and sold as bath salts, but it’s a dangerous job to get them, and strictly off limits to the public. One deep breath of the volcano steam could be fatal.

But I digress. We were talking about taking photos into the sun. Try it. You may be pleasantly surprised at the result.

Light and Darkness

I took this with a small pocket Casio. Not too clear, but it serves my purpose of a background for web page. The page has a Christian mission theme, and I wanted to capture the idea of the world being a very dark place, with the light of God’s love just beginning to light the darkne

ss. There is a huge idol in Kurume that’s the same height as the Statue of Liberty and its base combined. It represents the original pagan religion established by Nimrod toward the beginning of the world in defiance of the True God, and as such is a classic symbol of inner darkness, so I took that as the theme.

The actual conditions looked something like this. I liked the reflection of the late afternoon sun in the water. Sometimes its an advantage to have a small pocket camera instead of a big professional model. I’m using a Casio Exelim 7.2, which has a lot of features, including a huge selection of preset style options. I chose “sunset mode” to see what would happen.

Here’s the result I got. Not bad, but I wanted to emphasize the idea, so I moved the shutter speed setting over just a bit to get the darkened effect, then cropped it to bring the idol closer to the center, arriving at the version above. I’m happy with the top photo. The contrast between light and darkness is pronounced, and I have ample black space to add some text. I could use this for a banner or title for the page as well.

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Taking Pictures on Overcast Days

You’ve planned a photo shoot for weeks, only to find that you’ve hit on one of those dark and gloomy overcast days. Cloudy days can be a real problem to an outdoor photographer, but don’t despair. There are several things you can do to make the best of a cloudy days disaster.

* If you must go on that outing and shoot outdoor scenery, try to avoid shots that include the sky. You’ll find the colors of leaves, trees and rockseven richer and more vibrant in the diffused light on overdast days that in the direct sunlight.

* When taking pictures on overcast days pay extra attention to the colors, shapes and shadows in your compositions. Try some black and white visualization to force yourself to see shapes as well as tonality, or light contrast. The extra challenge overcast days offer can actually be a boost to your creativity.

* Diffused light is beautiful. People tend to look their best in diffused light, so cloudy days are a great opportunity to turn your camera away from that panoramic scene you were planning to shoot and point it at the people you are with. You will have ideal conditions to take portraits without the squinting you have to deal with on sunny days, and red-eye you have to deal with at night. If you tend to take a lot of portraits, you will find yourself looking forward to taking pictures on overcast days.

* If the conditions are very dark, remember to take a tripod. You’ll find you’re taking longer exposures than usual in the diffused light, and will tend to have trouble holding the camera still.

* One other option may be to set up a tiny table-top studio in the garage or the spare room and work with still lifes. That series of cloudy days could be a huge boost to your knowledge and skill in artificial lighting and reflexive surfaces.

Taking pictures on overcast days can be a challenge, but with a bit of practice and creative thinking you may find that you actually prefer them.

Manipulating Exposure Settings

The light sensors and exposure settings for a pocket camera or cell phone camera don’t give much freedom of expression. They are great for shooting real images, but are very limiting as far as manipulating exposure settings to create an art photo.

Here’s a really clever way my daughter, Elizabeth Laurel, found to get an effect for an art photo she wanted that seemed impossible with the limited equipment she had. I would never have thought of manipulating exposure settings in this way.

Elizabeth writes:

As an artist, I tend to want to make anything and everything into art, including the real-life photos that I take. I took a couple of art photos like this one with my cell phone camera a few years ago. There was a trend in fine art at the time, to use harsh color contrasts, with a lot of black and white. Shadows and silhouettes were often used to create a mood that couldn’t be grasped with the true depiction of an object.

For this picture I worked with my hands. Pointing my cell phone camera in the direction of the sun, I started with my hand cupped over the lens, then took my hand off and watched the screen for the second and a half or less that it took for the light to fade into the scene. I then pressed the trigger before the light completely enveloped the picture, all the while taking in to account the little less than a second pause between the time I pushed the trigger and the time the photo would actually take. This isn’t the most graceful way to take a picture but it’s very rewarding.

Thanks, Elizabeth for a great art photo taken with your cell phone camera, and a truly innovative method of manipulating exposure settings!