Backlit Sun Flare Portrait BTS

BEHIND THE SCENES: We’re shooting in an open-air amphitheater on a hot, sunny Florida day. It’s later in the day, so the sun is lower in the sky, and I can get down low and try to position the sun directly behind my subject. What I’m trying to do is to get the edge of the sun to touch part of my subject to create a sun flare. When that happens, instead of the sun being just a giant nebulous ball of bright, you start to get little beams or sprites (I’m not sure what the official name is) coming off it, and it looks a lot more interesting.

CAMERA SETTINGS: For the final image on the facing page, I’m using a wide-angle lens because it’s much easier to get lens flare effects with a wide-angle lens than it is with a longer lens. I’m shooting with a 24–70mm f/2.8 lens at 24mm. This is my all-time least favorite lens (so much so that I sold this lens since this shot was taken), but it was the only wide-angle I had with me that day . . . so . . . ya know, “you dance with the one who brung ya” (or something like that). I’m at f/2.8 (I would have gotten a lot more sun rays if I had been at f/16), and I’m at 100 ISO. I’m shooting in aperture priority mode, so my camera set my shutter speed for me at 1/4000 of a second. My subject is backlit and she’s pretty much a silhouette, so I used exposure compensation to make the scene much brighter than my camera thought it should be. I increased it to +1.3 stops brighter, so my subject wouldn’t be a silhouette and I’d get that blown-out look in the image.