It's no secret that one of my favorite ways to shoot is backlit when the sun is low... oh that hazy beautiful light! One thing that really frustrated me as a mom trying to take photos of my kids (before I learned my camera) was not getting what I expected from each shot. One of these things would be taking a photo backlit, and getting a silhouette rather than detail in my child's face. So, I thought I would share a little tip if you are having some frustrations. Have you ever went to grab a photo of your child in front of a window (with their back to it) and gotten the window perfectly exposed but your child is so dark the photo is wasted? Now I love silhouettes when that is what you're going for ;) What's happening is your camera is making it's best guess at what exposure you would like for the image, and since most likely the majority of the scene when backlit is very bright, it will expose for that while leaving your child's face underexposed. Your camera is probably in evaluation/matrix metering mode, which is fine normally (or if you know how to apply compensation for backlit scenes). In backlit situations I would switch your camera to "spot" meter mode (check your camera's manual on how to do this). The camera will then be determining the exposure by a very narrow angle so if you point it at the child's skin you should get a nice exposure. While you might lose (blow out) some of the background detail, this really doesn't bother me since what I'm concerned with is the expression that is happening :)
In the photos above, I metered for my baby's face in manual mode, set my exposure, and waited for him to continue his game of "where are you? surprise!" from behind the curtain. The detail of our yard out the window, the grass, the patio table... are all completely lost. The camera does not have the dynamic range to capture all the exposures, the range is just too wide. But that wasn't the foucs of this image and it actually creates quite a clean backdrop. Now hopefully you can get more of what you want out of your backlit images :)
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