How to shoot backlit wildlife photography

Backlight tends to look wrong until it works. Point the camera towards the sun and the first few shots often come back with a dark animal, low contrast and more flare than you wanted.

17 August 20269 minute read

Backlighting again but for certain species during golden hour it just works!

With the sun behind you everything is easier. The animal is lit, the meter agrees with you and autofocus locks on first time. Backlight gives all of that up, and in return you get a bright edge along fur, feathers, breath, dust or mist. On the right morning that one line of light can make an ordinary animal in an ordinary field look far better than clean front-lit detail would.

Backlit wildlife photography: quick starting point

Expose for the animal rather than the sky behind it. On exposure compensation, +1 to +2 stops is the starting range, and manual exposure is even better once the subject is in steady light, as it stops the camera changing the exposure every time the background gets brighter or darker. Put the sun just off to one side, or hide it behind the animal or a tree when the flare gets too much. The rim light is the bit to protect, and everything else in the shot can give a little.

What backlight gives you

Rim light

Fur and feathers catch a bright edge that lifts the subject off the background, and it's the main reason to shoot into the sun at all. An animal with a rim of light stands out even at thumbnail size, whereas the same animal in flat front light blends into whatever is behind it. There's no adding that edge in the edit if the light wasn't there.

Translucency

Ears, wings, thin grass and anything else the light can pass through will glow. Ears are the most reliable. An animal facing away from the sun with light coming through its ears gives you two small bright shapes in an otherwise dark shot, and they'll grab attention before anything else does.

Atmosphere

Mist, breath, dust and spray are close to invisible in front light and obvious in backlight. Same air, same morning, completely different shot. Breath only shows up when there's light behind it, so it's worth getting out on the cold mornings for that alone (a flask is optional, but strongly recommended).

A coot in black and white with its wings raised, surrounded by backlit spray and droplets against a dark background. — A coot kicking up spray at 1/2000s, f/2.8 and ISO 160, added to the Black & White Wildlife Mission. The photographer says the shot was almost monochromatic with the backlighting. A fast shutter speed like this freezes the spray into separate droplets, so crank it up when the water is the point.

Simpler backgrounds

A background that falls dark, or blows out bright, turns from a mess of twigs into a plain area of tone. The light tidies up the composition without you having to walk anywhere. A backlit shot can work in a cluttered spot where a front-lit one wouldn't stand a chance.

A red fox standing on grass and looking to one side, lit from behind by low afternoon sun that catches the edges of its ears and fur, against a soft green and golden background thrown out of focus. — Very late afternoon sun behind a red fox, at f/2.8 on a 300mm, so the background goes to a soft blur. A plain background like this is what lets the light on the edges of its ears and fur stand out.

Expose for the animal

Point a camera at a bright sky with a small dark animal in front of it and the meter will average the whole scene and pull the exposure down. The animal turns into a silhouette. If that's what you wanted, great, a clean silhouette can be a lovely shot. If it isn't, you need to take the decision away from the camera, and there are three ways to do it.

A great spotted woodpecker in silhouette on a thick bare branch against an orange sunrise sky. — A great spotted woodpecker against the sunrise at 1/1000s, f/6.3 and ISO 800 on a 600mm. When the sky is the bright part of the scene, this is the kind of silhouette you'll get, so if you like the look, let it happen.

Exposure compensation

+1 to +2 stops, then watch the highlights. It's the quickest of the three and the least consistent. The camera is still metering the scene and you're only offsetting what it decides, so as soon as the background changes, the exposure moves with it.

Spot metering

Metering off the animal itself works well while it's holding still. It gets awkward once the animal moves quickly across changing backgrounds, as you're now trying to keep a small metering circle and your focus point on a moving target at the same time. That's a lot to ask of one thumb.

Manual exposure

Meter the subject once in the light it's standing in, set it, and then forget about exposure and concentrate on the animal. The background will blow out or go black depending on which way it falls, and that's the look you're after. It's best to default to manual whenever the subject stays in one patch of light, and fall back on exposure compensation for an animal that keeps walking between sun and shade.

A bird of prey soaring against a pale blue sky, wings spread, with the feather pattern on its underside clearly visible. — Mike Davies said he'd always struggled with the backlighting of birds in the sky. This one, at 1/1250s, f/7.1 and ISO 200 on a 500mm, has detail right through the underside, which is what you get when you set the exposure for the bird and let the sky look after itself.

Trying to hold full detail in the animal and in a very bright background at the same time usually gives you something worse than either. The highlights come back dull, the animal comes back dull, and the rim light is the first thing to go. Decide which part of the shot matters most, and it's almost always the animal.

Where should the sun be?

Straight behind the subject gives you the strongest rim and the most flare. Slightly off to one side is usually easier, as you keep most of the bright edge and pick up a bit of shape across the body, so the animal looks solid rather than just an outline. When the sun itself is the problem, hide it behind the subject, behind a tree or just outside the shot. Often it's only two steps sideways between a washed-out shot and a clean one. Never look at the sun itself through an optical viewfinder, least of all on a long lens, as it can damage your eyes.

A black-winged stilt standing in shallow water glowing orange in low sun, with a tree soft in the background. — A black-winged stilt in low golden light at 1/1000 and f/5.6, with the ISO only at 320. Strong low sun gives you plenty of light to work with, so you can keep the shutter speed up and the noise down.

Flare: control it rather than removing it all

A little flare adds atmosphere. A lot of it puts a wash of low-contrast grey across the whole shot, and once it's in the file it's very hard to get rid of. Four things help:

use the lens hood
keep the front element clean
shade the lens with your hand (as long as your hand stays out of the shot)
take off a cheap protective filter if it's causing ghosting

Backlight is very good at finding smears, dust and every extra piece of glass in front of the sensor. A protective filter that's never caused a problem in front light can happily produce a row of ghosts the moment you point it at the sun, so check it before you spend the drive home wondering what's wrong with your camera.

Autofocus may need more help

The lit side of a backlit animal is the side facing away from you, so the front of it has less contrast, and autofocus likes contrast. Point it at the rim, as the bright edge is usually the highest-contrast part of the subject. A smaller focus area also stops the camera jumping to the much brighter background behind. You'll still miss some, and a backlit bird in flight is the hardest version of all this, so photographing birds in flight goes further into the autofocus setup.

Don't edit all the darkness away

It's tempting to keep lifting the shadows on a backlit file until the animal looks normally exposed. Try not to. Every stop you lift takes some of the separation with it, and the 'correct' version tends to look ordinary next to the one you started with. Lift what you need and leave the rest dark.

Heavy Dehaze does the same damage from a different direction. It adds contrast, which feels like an improvement, but it eats into the soft edge of the rim and the mist or dust that made the shot worth taking. Judge it on the outline rather than the whole image, and flick between the before and after to check. The finished version always looks fine when it's the only one in front of you.

Let the background go

If the background is properly exposed in a backlit shot, the animal is underexposed. Pick the animal, expose for it, and accept that the sky behind is going to be white. Trying to save both usually ends in a flat grey shot of neither.

The easiest way to practise it

Go out when the sun is low and stand on the 'wrong' side of the subject on purpose (the timing is the same window golden hour landscape photography covers). Start slightly off to one side rather than straight into the sun, and pick your side before you get close rather than walking round an animal to put the sun behind it. Find something with fur, feathers, grass or mist around it, expose for the animal, and see what comes back. The first few shots will probably be wrong, and it's much better to find that out on a practice morning than at the one moment it mattered.

Wildlife Golden Hour on Kōlab has plenty of shots taken in this light. The most useful ones to look at have the Shot Recipe showing. That gives you the settings behind the exposure, and you can't tell those from the finished shot.

Shoot itWildlife

Wildlife Golden Hour

Low sun, long lenses, and a lot of rim light. Free to join.

The sun sits at that angle for most of a short winter day, which makes it a great time for winter wildlife photography in the UK. In June you'd be waiting until nine at night for the same light.