Lens Flare is your friend. Point your camera in the direction of the sun and see what happens.

Sharon and I were out on a portrait shoot this evening. When we arrived home the sun was setting at the end of our street casting long shadows and awesome bright sun streaks along the pavement and down the street. We took the opportunity to take a few portraits against the fence outside our house.

The images are taken using a 5D with the Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens at ISO400, f/4, 1/80th. Post production has been used to crisp up the images and darken the blacks. I also de-saturated the images for that faux-vintage fashion magazine look. Without the fine tuning the flare can make the images look a little too washed out.

If you are going to try and create images like these of your own you will have to shoot on manual. Bright back lighting like this will cause automatic modes such as Av or Tv will be quite ineffective – typically leading to underexposed images. Put it in manual and push the exposure and allow the sun and bright parts of the image to blow out.

On Sharon’s blog you can see an image that she took of me.