Technique: Contrasty background, expose for the subject

As you know last week I was strolling around Ubud in Bali on a nice relaxing break with the fam-bam and the camera. As we navigated the monkey forest and dodged the vicious little things with my camera bag I noticed so many other tourists doing something or rather not doing something that I think I take for granted. Choosing the background of their subject. Yep, they were so fixated on the subject that they completely ignored what was going on in the background. It’s a pretty simple technique but the results can be massively different. I usually try to shoot on a longer lens for this kind of stuff which gives me a narrower field of view (less background in the shot). I then pivot around my subject until I find a really nice contrast of either luminance (brightness) or colour. It’s then super important to expose the shot for the subject, not the background. See the above images to compare