Day 2: Backlit

Seb

Seb

— 2 min read
Day 2: Backlit

I decided to cheat a bit and use the sun rather than messing about with lights indoors. Most of my time recently has been spent trying to get my workflow sorted rather than actually taking photos.

Yesterday I took the lazy route and sent the photos straight from my camera to my phone, letting it handle all the conversions. This time, I sat down at my PC and figured I’d go through them properly on a big screen (well… bigger than a phone anyway).

Naturally, this led me straight down a Lightroom rabbit hole. I do own it somewhere on a CD with a licence key, but finding that without standing up felt like too much effort. After a bit of digging, I looked into some recent open-source alternatives and landed on RawTherapee. Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised by how capable it is. It’s not as lightning-fast as FastRawViewer on my MacBook but then again, “Fast” isn’t in the name.

One of the first shots I took (after remembering to switch the ISO back to 100 from the previous night’s photos) ended up being a good candidate for RAW tinkering.

Group of yellow daffodils silhouetted against the sky, backlit by sunlight to highlight petal shapes and textures.
Multiple daffodils backlit

Editing RAW files is a whole different kettle of fish. You could easily create five completely different versions of the same photo just by changing the processing settings. This flower shot is one of my favourites, I managed to pull back a lot of colour that was lost in the JPEG, which looked much darker by comparison.

Close-up of a single yellow daffodil photographed from below, backlit against a bright sky with soft blue tones.
Single daffodil close-up

This is one of my favourites with the flower, managed to bring some colour back using raw as the JPG version was much darker.

Glass beer jug holding yellow daffodils placed on a silver barbecue lid, backlit by low winter sun in a garden.
The setup itself was nothing fancy: just the subject placed on the BBQ where the sun happened to be hitting nicely.
Silhouetted glass bottle photographed against a glowing sunset sky, with warm yellow and orange tones from creative white balance editing.
Nuclear backlit bottle

At some point I got a bit carried away with the RAW adjustments, especially white balance, and ended up with a version that looked like a small nuclear explosion.

Small glass bottle placed on a silver barbecue lid in a garden, positioned to catch strong backlighting from the sun.
Backlit bottle setup

For this shot, the subject was a miniature Isle of Wight Distillery Rock Sea Vodka bottle. Proof that you don’t need exotic gear or locations just a bit of light, a subject, and a willingness to poke around until something interesting happens.

Took about an hour or so from taking photos to writing this last sentence, hopefully next time I can get it done faster :) I'm sure there will be some days a phone photo will do, other days where I feel more creative.

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