The rule of thumb is: shoot with the sun to your back. It’s a good rule. It means your subjects are well lit and your colours are more saturated. You don’t have weird lens flares or washed out subjects. And yet, sometimes, rules need to be broken. For one thing, if your shooting is determined by a few simple rules, one image will start to look like all your others. Here are a few shots I took into the sun just to change things up.
The first shot is kind of a cliché. It’s the steeple of the San Francisco de Asis Mission in Taos, New Mexico. I was going for all the flare I could get. (Tip: don’t use your view-finder when you point at the sun or your could damage your eyes. Set up your shot using the LCD screen.)
I took the next shot facing west from St. James Cemetery in the late afternoon. I held my hand above the lens hood. The shadow of my hand reduced the glare.
The other day, I stood under the awning of the new condo retrofit of what used to be Toronto’s Sears headquarters. A related rule is: don’t blow your highlights. But that’s hard if you shoot into the sun. Here, I’ve blown the highlights, but the highlights sit more or less where I want the eye to settle i.e. at the place where all the perspective lines meet near the man’s head.
I shot this last one on the foot bridge over Lower Jarvis beside the St. Lawrence Market. I used an overhead girder to shade the lens. The result is high contrast/desaturated as if I’ve applied some kind of special filter.
