“You can use backlight for so many different reasons, so many different styles,” says Lorene Desportes. “You can have the theatrical backlight, very obvious, not trying to be subtle. Then you can have the exterior backlight which you can’t really control, though the light quality is wonderful because it’s the sun. Then you have the beauty backlight which needs to be very subtle, but does something to separate the subject from the background.”
It perhaps took the 1950s work of John Alton to legitimise a kind of cinematography that prioritises shapes more than faces. That brand of hard-lit film noir has relaxed considerably during the intervening decades, but the idea of illuminating the far side of the subject has long remained a lighting fundamental.
Find out more - and check out our brand-new Focus On: Lighting Volume 2 guide - at the link in bio.
