The Canon A610 does not actually have a backlight mode so what you’re going to want to do is set it up manually for this.

And first, let’s turn the camera on. And in this case, we’re going to use the program mode so, I’m going to change that to P. And that’s going to give me the amount of flexibility I need to set the camera properly.

Now, you’re going to want to use the function menu. Right here, you can see is the function button and you just press that and that brings up the function menu. I’m going to press the Down button to move this down to the metering options. You have three metering options. And I want to use the Spot metering options. What that’s going to do is allow me to properly expose just a very small area of the scene and not the entire area. And with backlight subjects, that’s exactly what you want. So, you can hit the Set button to set that.

And the other thing you can do—this is for basically when you don’t use a flash, the other option is to turn the flash on and just keep all the settings regular. To do that, you’re going to want to press the Up navigation button indicated by the flash icon there. Just press that and you can see now that’s auto and now that’s force-flash. And what you want is a force-flash no matter what because the camera is going to assume there is enough light.

You don’t want to do both the spot metering and the flash together. You either use the flash or the spot metering. In certain situations, using the flash is not going to work. And in certain situations, using the backlight is going to make the shutter speed too slow so you may not be able to hold the camera steady. So, you want to kind of play around with it and see which one works best for you.