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would have been grossly exposed or the shadows
would have been filled with tons of digital noise—
depending on my exposure. Two, as you saw in
the cowboy set of pictures in the Introduction to
this book, lens flare would have been a serious
problem.
When shooting into the sun, as with all your pho-
tography, try not to look at the situation as a prob-
lem. Rather, see it as a challenge.
This photograph, which I took at a workshop that
I taught at the Ponderosa Ranch in Oregon, is one
of my favorite backlight images. The backlight
creates a mood and adds drama to the image. This
picture and the picture of the cowgirl shown at the
beginning of this lesson have something in com-
mon: the sun is not in the picture. I composed the
images in that manner for two good reasons. One,
the bright sun would have created an extremely
wide contrast range in the pictures, and the sun