Backlighting with a dark background

What makes this portrait work in my opinion is the contrast between the smoke and the dark background. The sky was bright behind this Burmese woman -- that provided the backlighting -- and I worked to eliminate it from the composition or else it would have been very distracting. I used a 400mm focal length specifically because of its narrow angle of view. This lens also made the background completely out of focus. Any definition in the distant trees would also have been distracting. My settings were 1/400, f/5.6, and 400 ISO. I used aperture priority and, as usual for all my outdoor shooting, daylight white balance.