Against the light

With a point and shoot camera - which is what most people are using - it is not easy to take good photographs when the light is behind the subject. Yes, I know there are quite a lot of controls hidden in the menu of the camera - but how many people actually use the menus? I can answer that! Very, very few. So I am going to give  you a little hint on how to get a better result in strong light.
Our on-line group has "windows" as one of the topics this month and with that in mind I have taken a couple of shots.
For this I used my Samsung NV4, which is a very simple point and shoot camera. I took a photo out of the kitchen window with a vase of flowers on the table as my main subject.
Aiming to get the framing I wanted this is what I managed to get.

The camera has manage to get the view through the window perfectly! The flowers look terrible.
By aiming the camera down at the flowers - I held the camera high and tilted it down - I could half hold the shutter button to ensure the flowers were brighter, then I moved the camera down so that it was framed exactly as the first picture and this is the result.

Neither of these photographs have been manipulated in any way - and most people do not want to do complex photo editing. So depending on what you want to feature, the foreground subject or the background you need to tell the camera where you want the light sampled. It is sampled at the same time as the focus is set and the same way - by holding the button half pressed down.
Be sure that when you sample, as I did, by holding the camera with the subject out of position, that the camera is exactly the same distance away from where you move it to to finish taking the picture. If the distance changes then the shot will not be in focus.
Backlighting does make photography difficult and the best way to get good lighting on a subject is to have the camera between the light source and the subject but sometimes that is not possible. Always take more than one photograph in difficult lighting situations and do not delete your images until you have them on your computer so you can see them more clearly.
AJ      joanren@gmail.com