manual camera settings in evening light

Lovely evening lighting… especially summer light… how how i love you. :)

Here are my manual settings for this shot:
ISO –160 (evening, yes, but the sun is pretty bright still)
shutter speed – 1/320
aperture – 4.0 (two little people spaced a bit apart and I’m wanting to get them both pretty sharp in focus)
lens – 50mm 1.2L

If you look carefully at this shot you will notice that it is backlit by the sun. Meaning, the sun is behind the subjects. You have be careful about this. It adds a beautiful touch to an image (in my opinion) but you can’t have the sun coming too directly into the camera or there will be a lot of lens flare, creating those hexagonal shapes in your camera and on your image. For me, I use my subjects to kind of block the sun a bit until I like the way it looks. Sometimes they block most of the sun and other times, just a portion of it. It’s a preference thing really. Try it out. It needs to be when the sun is reaching close to the horizon, not quite dusk, but definitely getting close. :)