jeff tessier photography

With flare

Like other photographers who shoot a lot of architecture, I have a real love-hate thing going on with the sun. It gives me good shadows so I can convey depth, it helps me create contrast in certain textures, but just as often it will be firing into my eyes and blowing out the background sky or shining so intensely that I can't expose for both the sunlit and shadow sides of a building.  Well, this past week I got even and made the most of Phoebus' inconvenient positioning in two images that, I think, only really work because of the appearance of the sun in the frame, generally a no-no.  Both were found images - I walked onto the scene and found that I could shoot my subject while flaring the sun behind it - but in each case it took a lot of minute adjustments of exposure and, mainly, positioning to get it right.  And in each case the final image was made on a return trip the next day when I knew what I was aiming for and what worked and didn't work from the first attempts.  Images after the jump.