Contre-jour

Contre-jour, French for "against daylight," is a way of photographing with the camera pointed toward the principal light source, so that the subject stands between the lens and the light. The term comes from painting, where an eighteenth-century dictionary described a counter-light as something that made a picture appear to disadvantage, and it entered English photographic vocabulary in the early 1920s. In the 1850s Gustave Le Gray photographed straight into the sun on the coasts of Normandy and the Mediterranean, partly to balance a bright sky and a darker sea on a single glass negative, and in some seascapes he used the same approach to produce a moonlit effect in daylight. Around 1900 Pictorialists treated backlight as a subject in its own right, as in Baron Adolf de Meyer's Glass and Shadows (1905), where glass objects lit from behind are softened by a scrim.

Light from behind the subject suppresses detail and color on the side facing the camera, raises contrast and shifts attention to outline, shape and line. Solid forms become dark masses edged with a bright rim that separates them from the background, while translucent subjects such as leaves, petals or fabric glow with transmitted light. Exposure is the central practical problem, since a meter reading dominated by the bright background underexposes the subject. Photographers either expose for the highlights and let the foreground fall into near or full silhouette, or open the shadows with a reflector or fill flash, often bracketing. Light striking the front element produces flare and ghosting, which lens hoods or shading suppress, although some photographers keep flare deliberately. In the glass-plate era, bright windows and skies also caused halation, as light reflected from the back of the plate spread around highlights, and manufacturers answered with backed and non-halation plates.

Silhouette is often treated as the extreme case of contre-jour, reached when the subject records as an unmodulated dark shape, although contre-jour also covers backlit images that keep detail in the subject. It differs from the back light used in Studio Lighting, which is added behind a sitter to outline the figure while a frontal key light remains the main source. In amateur photography, contre-jour became a recurring heading in camera magazines and a set theme of camera-club competitions.