Shooting with the lens pointed into the light source (contre-jour), which produces backlighting of the subject is very effective when the light source is the bright sun. Contre-jour is an alternative to front lighting, which can be extremely contrasty (image above).
Today, during and afternoon soccer game, the bright sun produced a huge dynamic range, which was way beyond the capabilities of a DSLR. To experiment with different lighting, I shot half of the game with frontal lighting and the second half – with backlighting (image below). As expected, the latter images were generally more interesting. I particularly like the edge lighting effect, which is mostly noticeable along the hairlines of the players. By the way, a side note for image conscious soccer players – the photographic appeal of an action portrait is directly proportional to the length of the hairdo.
Shooting against the sun doesn’t solve the problem of the large dynamic range, it just distributes the light (or rather the shadow) uniformly across the subject. The contrast is reduced dramatically, but can be partially recovered in post-processing. Lack of contrast also makes the focus more difficult to achieve; I missed more shots due to autofocus failure than I expected. Overall, my preference for shooting sports in bright sunlight would still be centre-jour, even just for the aesthetics of the edge light.
