How to achieve this kind of pics?

I assume you're looking for the backlight effect?

Have you tried setting your camera to spot metering, and then meter for exposure on the doll's face only? Depending on the ambient light conditions, that ought to suffice to do the trick.

If ambient light isn't sufficient for that to work, you should try directing some "fill" light onto the doll's face, e.g. with a reflector or a flash (preferably with some type of diffuser on it).

Between these two methods, you should have everything you need, methinks.

 

Raw photo wise, what The Dragon said.

Now, for people like me who do not own DSLR's and thus have less options to fiddle with, the same effect can be achieved via image editing (a.k.a. Photoshop ^_^)

The trick lies in a little something called Curves.


Here's a photo I took, which is the usual and default result of shooting "against the light". The Curves dialog box shows the color information of the picture (that light gray graph thingy shows the frequency of dark colors from the left side all the way to the frequency of light colors on the right side). The main tool is that black diagonal line running from the bottom left to top right.


The goal is to "push up" the dark colors so the dark objects will look brighter and not swallowed by the backlight. This requires playing with the "rubberband" to achieve something like this:


As the controller operates on a curved formula, "side effects" of pushing up the colors include the bleeding out of already bright elements (like the window spilling out more white light than the original, or the white blanket losing most of its details).

For further styling, you can control the individual Curves for the Red, Green, and Blue channels. Just click on the Channels dropdown (with RGB written) and select the color you wish to tweak.

Most image editing software have this curve feature and the idea is pretty much the same. Hope that helps! ^_^

 

I do believe that your camera does have the principal feature required. You'll find it described in the chapter "Advanced Shooting" in your manual — page 86 in the French version, I think ("mesure spot," in French).

Let us know how you fare!

 

What is happening is that your camera is getting distracted by all that background light and exposing for that, leaving the less well-lit doll underexposed. So, what you can also try is to overexpose the photo, by compensating up by a couple of stops. It will bleach out the bright background, which is a nice effect, and bring your doll out of the gloom.

 

Good for you, Myra! I take it then that spot metering did the trick?

 

In that case, I'd say it is in all likelihood primarily the fill light you are looking for — and in the case of your sample photos, a very even fill light.

To achieve this, you need a very large light source, such as a large white surface to place in front of the subject to reflect available light at it, or a large softbox or other large diffusor of some sort.

 

It sounds as though we have been misunderstanding you, then. What you want to achieve is lens flare. This is when light from the light source hits the sensor directly, causing a light fog. In most situations, you would want to avoid it, but I can see how it could be used for artistic effect.

To get this, you need to have your light shining directly at the lens whilst keeping it out of the field of view (or you will get starbursts and other sorts of interference). Experiment to see what you get.

And on a note of netiquette, it is good practice to thank your contributors periodically. The Dragon in particular has spent a lot of thought offering useful advice in your thread. It would be polite to thank him for the time he has taken to do this. Keeps things nice.

Anyway, good luck and do show us the results.

ETA: I had a quick hunt around for tutorials and, predictably, most tell you how to avoid lens flare. I found one with a few, very basic tips (nothing that we haven't covered here already, though) but the comments and examples at the end are worth looking at. http://digital-photography-school.com/5-tips-for-achieving-artistic-lens-flare-how-to

 

Like what The Dragon said,
it looks like you just need a reflector to bounce the lighting back into your dolls face.